While sports is slowly returning to its former glory in what we hope to be the tail end of the COVID pandemic, some innovations spurred by the unprecedented times are likely here to stay. Historically, the recruiting process in sports was fairly standard, usually consisting of a recruiter or scout traveling to games around the country and reporting the talent they saw to the next in line. This practice was somewhat revolutionized by the mass availability of video cameras and the internet as it allowed players to mend together highlight reels and send them to coaches or post them on the web, but most programs still preferred employing the “boots on the ground” method before they made their final decisions on the player. Well, as predicted in a previous insight, it appears the pandemic with its associated NCAA dead period may have driven the next revolution in the process. 

Rapsodo, a company with a history of providing players and coaches with valuable data and metrics to improve performance, has just released a brand new technology it hopes will fill this void caused by the pandemic and be a valuable tool to recruiters after. The technology, named RapScore, is a standardized method of scoring the performance of baseball and softball players using metrics determined by Rapsodo. This standardized score, and associated ranking of players in Rapsodo’s National Database, provides scouts with unprecedented access to information regarding a player’s performance. The software works by comparing the metrics obtained from Rapsodo’s image analytics and radar technology for the player being rated with the ideal values of those metrics, as determined by Rapsodo.

Notably, Rapsodo did not quite make the cut of being mentioned in the previous insight predicting this up-and-coming revolution in the field. This was because Rapsodo has a surprisingly limited number of patents in the Sports Analytics Patent Forecast, being assigned only eight (8) patents and having two (2) published applications. Instead, companies like Trackman and Blast Motion were mentioned as they possess much larger portfolios in the Image & Video Analytics and Physiological Analytics categories, technology categories best-tailored towards the new “socially-distanced” recruiting. Even more surprisingly, none of Rapsodo’s patents are tailored towards the technology recently released by Rapsodo, only the technology used to gather the data to make it a possibility.

While it is possible that Rapsodo’s RapScore technology is covered in a recently or almost granted, fast-tracked patent accompanied by a non-publication request to prevent the application from publishing, the lack of a patent protecting the technology and larger portfolios of competitors make you wonder just how long it will take for similar technology to be released by Trackman and/or Blast Motion. However, this recent development shows that companies, both large and small, in the space are seeing the holes left by the pandemic and looking to capitalize on these openings. Stay updated on the ever-changing Sports Analytics sector by getting our Patent Forecast® for Sports Analytics.