Event Management, Social & Ticketing Platform for Sports Thread
Overview
About Sports Thread
Sports Thread is a leading youth sports SaaS platform with an audience of over 2 million people. It operates as a network to connect athletes with recruiters while simultaneously providing solutions to automate the logistics of hosting sporting events. The company runs over 1,000 events per year and works with over 200 brands and partner clients. A recognized leader in its field, Sports Thread was named a “Top 3 Tech Startup – Denver Tech Center” by Crunchbase and the Tech Tribune and has been recognized as a “Top Technology Company” by Intercon.
Our goals were to become a market leader by getting hundreds of clients to use our Software-as-a-Service and advertising network and millions of people to use our consumer software (apps and websites). Through Saritasa’s partnership with us and excellent development we have achieved those goals.
Most importantly, the people at Saritasa truly care about their clients. Our company is constantly impressed and thankful for how clear it is that everyone in the Saritasa organization from leadership, to project mangers, to marketing/design staff to engineers are clearly invested in our success and are willing to go above and beyond to get us there.
Sean LearyFounder & CEO of Sports Thread
Their Challenge
Out of the nearly 8 million high school student-athletes, only approximately 6% of end up competing in the National Collegiate Athlete Association (NCAA). Fewer receive financial aid based on their athletics – only about 2%. Given how competitive both the recruitment and scholarship processes are, student-athletes struggle to find ways to stand out from the crowd.
Sean Leary, a former Division 1 college pitcher, understood the difficulties of the recruitment process from first-hand experience. He envisioned a platform similar to LinkedIn, geared toward student-athletes, to connect them with coaches. As a student-athlete still in college at the time, he had the idea, but not the technical knowledge to execute his vision.
Our Solution
Saritasa started work on Sports Thread in 2014, building out the wireframes for what would evolve into the first social networking and Software as a Service platform for the youth sports market. Since then, the app has seen tremendous success, ranking within the Top 200 apps in the App Store for over 18 consecutive months and serving more than one million individuals in the youth athletic community annually. Sean Leary has received recognition in USA Today as a “Top 10 Most Innovative Entrepreneur 2021,” a testament to his vision and the platform’s impact.
Since then, our team has continued to support Sports Thread as the platform grows and evolves. Today, Sports Thread is a true all-in-one solution for the sports market, combining powerful social networking features with ticketing, CRM, marketing, and AI tools into a single, comprehensive platform.
Our Approach
What Saritasa Did
All-in-One Sports Technology Platform
Sports Thread is an all-in-one software solution that goes far beyond simple ticketing. The platform offers a full suite of tools designed to increase revenue, cut costs, empower staff, and enhance the event attendee experience. By integrating features such as CRM, marketing, and robust data collection capabilities, the platform provides unmatched operational efficiency. This comprehensive approach empowers event organizers and sports organizations to manage their entire operation from a single, unified platform, ultimately driving business growth and improving the overall quality of their events.
Multiple Use Cases
Student-athletes share important information about their track records on their profiles, making it easy for coaches to find new recruits. Student-athletes can communicate directly with coaches to get noticed. Coaches can scout new potential recruits by viewing highlight reels and stats. Parents can even create accounts to follow their child’s posts, keep track of games and scores, and get notifications from coaches about upcoming games.
SaaS Suite for Tournaments
Sports Thread is a full-suite SaaS solution for tournaments, offering registration, payment processing, scheduling, scoring, and communication directly to participants within the app. Event organizers can create and set up schedules, as well as notify coaches and parents of game time or location changes.
Age Verification Tool
The Sports Thread Play Safe feature provides automated age verification to ensure fair play in youth sports tournaments. This tool eliminates the need for manual checks of birth certificates, saving event organizers valuable time and providing a seamless, secure process for verifying participants’ ages. This ensures every game is fair and competitive.
Mobile App Development
The platform was built natively for both iOS and Android devices, using Swift and Kotlin, respectively, to ensure a fast, reliable, and smooth user experience across the board. The platform is also accessible on web browsers, providing a unified experience for athletes, parents, and coaches regardless of how they choose to access the service.
AI-Powered Customer Service Assistant
We designed and built a sophisticated AI-powered customer service assistant capable of handling the majority of high-volume, low-complexity inquiries, integrated directly into Sports Thread’s database. This intelligent bot provides instant support for a range of issues, including duplicate account resolution, lost ticket recovery, QR code access, and event-specific questions. By automating these tasks, the bot reduces the time it takes to address customer queries by 83%, allowing the Sport Thread team to focus on more critical, high-touch cases. The assistant also includes an intelligent escalation feature, which forwards complex or sensitive issues to a human representative, ensuring no user is left without a solution.
