Silicon Valley Sports Tech Company Aims To Level Playing Field

REDWOOD CITY, CA — A Redwood City-based sports technology company seeks to equalize the world of recruiting by using artificial intelligence and deep learning software.

DarkHorse, which plans to unveil its platform on May 1, aims to offer young athletes a transformative tool to help them get to the next level.

“What we’ve been after is to build the world’s first affordable sports technology,” said Billy Brush, DarkHorse’s founder and CEO.

The platform will be free to use; to access analytics, users will have to sign up for a subscription at a cost of no more than $22 a month.

Those who rank and recruit youth players do so based more on personal opinion than accurate, hard data, said Brush, a former software engineer for the Department of Defense and soccer coach.

“If I were to ask you, ‘Who is the top 16-year-old striker in the world?’ there would be several different answers,” Brush told Patch. “But no one would have any data to back it up.”

Brush is hoping to change that. DarkHorse, which Brush called the "Zillow for athletes," is currently in beta testing with about 1,600 users and several local soccer clubs, including the men’s team at the University of California, Berkeley. By using video footage from a game and wearable trackers on players, DarkHorse’s machine learning system tracks specific data points for each player, such as shots, passes, average speed and distance run. Its analytics methodology provides predictive forecasting for each player.

"To be able to track that data automatically instead of having to do it in a manual sense, it’s a big boost in terms of efficiency and productivity," said Anders Perez, the executive director at Juventus Academy Silicon Valley, a Redwood City-based youth soccer club that is beta testing the technology.

College recruiting plays a big role in youth soccer, but there are not enough scouts and few spots on clubs, limiting the amount of attention a specific player might receive. A scout who just watches 20 minutes of a game, or a college coach who shows up to one practice, might only view a glimmer of a player’s potential or catch a talented player on a bad night.

DarkHorse’s technology, which Silicon Valley engineers developed with input from advisers such as U.S. Soccer’s Didier Chamberon, aims to provide accurate data that coaches or scouts can access with the touch of a button.

“The kid that we’re trying to help out at DarkHorse is the kid that doesn’t have the resources or exposure to college coaches,” said Ramiro Arredondo, the head coach of the girls team at Sacred Heart Prep in Atherton and DarkHorse’s director of sales. “Through our platform, they will be able to send out highlight videos to college coaches and say, ‘Hey, I played three games; here are my highlights.’"

Arredondo told Patch that he’s used other services in the past, but “what separates DarkHorse is when you add computer vision, and then you add a wearable, tracking device,” it combines to create a more accurate reading.

Seth Alberico, who coached at the Mountain View Los Altos Soccer Club for 18 years, said that in the past, parents or an outside service would record the game but then would have to go through and splice the video for each player. His team is among the clubs using DarkHorse’s technology in beta testing mode.

“If I click on a player, it goes right to that player’s individual shots on goal,” Alberico told Patch. “I don’t have to go through video and check when that player took those shots. I can quickly and easily sift through the information and get to what I need right away.”

Kevin Grimes, the men’s soccer coach at Cal, said in a statement that there is inconsistency in the sports technology market with accuracy, and DarkHorse is trying to improve that.

“That could be a difference maker with the competition that is out there,” said Grimes, who has led Cal for more than two decades.

The use of artificial intelligence in sports is part of the "coming of age of computer vision," according to Pieter Abbeel, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. Abbeel, who is also the co-director of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, said that recent advancements in the field have allowed computer vision such as DarkHorse's to be able to recognize patterns and then document certain actions such as saves, steals and shots. (Abbeel is not affiliated with the company.)

"You can’t keep track of everything happening on a field," Abbeel told Patch. "You’d need a whole team of scouts. All of a sudden, all you need is a camera that can track all the events happening, often beyond the level of detail that a scout would. In my mind, it opens up the opportunity to go much deeper and get the strength of each player."

DarkHorse is only one of several platforms trying to leverage the technology: Brush mentioned competitors such as Veo, Trace, Playermaker, Catapult and Hudl.

DarkHorse’s objective as it launches is to create relationships at the local level and ensure that its technology is accurate, Arredondo said. For now, DarkHorse is not “looking to battle the big dogs,” he added.

Brush said that he hopes that DarkHorse’s technology uses a business-to-consumer model and can offer a worldwide platform that will allow players to compare themselves across a field of tens of thousands or even millions of athletes around the world.

“We need to start competing at the world level against each other,” Brush said. “It opens up all of these players around the world who wouldn’t have an opportunity. It gives them access to compete against others who come from wealth.”

When Abbeel first started in artificial intelligence 20 years ago, the field was just a research discipline. "Today, you see research results turn into practice every day, and that’s just super exciting," Abbeel said.