HOW WE GOT HERE

A COACH COULDN'T EXPLAIN FOOTWORK.

In 2013, a sixth-grade football coach in Shreveport, Louisiana was struggling to teach a footwork drill. Telling the kids what to do wasn't working. So he had video rolling on the next rep. The kids saw it. They got it.

That night the question was simple. Why aren't high schools doing this to make adjustments and corrections in game?

The answer at the time: NFHS rules didn't allow in-game video replay at the high school level. Or so everyone thought. When the rules got pulled up, it turned out they had quietly changed a few months earlier. In-game replay was now allowed for high school football, and nobody had built for it yet.

"YOU'RE ONTO SOMETHING. PURSUE IT."

The coach was Keith Simpson. Coaching kids is how he spent his evenings. His day job was running software products, including a mobile live-streaming app his team had built before tools like Meerkat and Periscope existed. What started as a footwork fix was starting to look like something bigger.

After a few weeks of testing with his sixth graders, we had enough confidence in the technology to reach out to a couple of coaches whose teams were playing each other. The first was Coach Larry at Captain Shreve High School, one of Keith's former coaches. The second was Coach McClain at Southwood High School, who Keith had played with and against in youth and high school ball.

McClain was not able to test that week. But Coach Larry let us come out and run the system during a game. Afterward, Larry pulled Keith aside and told him he was onto something. He should pursue it.

What Coach Larry didn't mention at the time? The initial app was so rough that his defensive coordinator broke the iPad out of frustration.

That encouragement was all the team needed. We decided to build from the ground up for the 2014 season.

EVERY STATE ASSOCIATION TO SIGN OFF. FIRST TO MARKET.

By spring of 2014, SkyCoach already had customers lined up. Brandon George architected the platform from the ground up. A decade later, SkyCoach still runs in venues like AT&T Stadium and the Superdome where other systems regularly fail. Heather Hennings was instrumental in getting the word out about the new rule and earning the trust of some of the most respected coaches in high school football. In the early years, it wasn't enough for programs to know in-game replay was allowed. They needed to see the coaches they respected actually using it.

We contacted every state association to get in writing that the rules had truly changed and that it was okay to sell to their members. Coaches weren't going to take our word for it. They needed to hear it from their own state association. That kind of proof could only come from one place, and we had to go get it, one state at a time. Being based in Louisiana made it even more ironic. The LHSAA initially said no, they weren't moving forward with replay.

So our first customers weren't in Louisiana. They were in Oklahoma and Arkansas. By summer of 2014, the LHSAA came around, changed their position, and gave the green light to sell within the state.

FROM THE SIDELINE TO THE LEAGUE.

In 2015, we introduced the no-internet kit, a dedicated wireless network that eliminated the need for stadium WiFi. It's still a core differentiator today, and it's the reason SkyCoach works in venues where other systems fail.

In 2016, SkyCoach spun off from Synapse Development Group as its own company. That same year, the CFL chose SkyCoach for in-game video for their coaches and players. Every CFL team still uses it today.

In 2020, we introduced specialized hardware that eliminated the need for computers entirely. In 2022, we worked with Sideline Power and conferences like the KJCCC and MIAA to change how officials replay works across the NCAA. By 2023, the NCAA changed the rule for all levels, opening up instant replay to teams that couldn't afford it in the past.

NEW RULES. SAME JOB.

When the NCAA changed the officials replay rule, we were right back in the education business. Coaches, athletic directors, and conference staff needed to be walked through what the change actually meant, what was now allowed, and how to do it right. We'd done that work once already at the high school level a decade earlier. It turned out we were the ones most qualified to do it again.

A year later, the NCAA changed the rules to allow coaches to watch video on the sideline, similar to the way high school coaches had been doing it since 2014. That created a new wrinkle. The market now had two related but different things to understand. Officials replay and in-game coach replay were both "sideline video," but they weren't the same product, they didn't follow the same rules, and they weren't used the same way. We took on that education work too.

It's the part of the business that doesn't get much attention. But it's how we've kept customers confident in what they're doing on Friday night and Saturday afternoon.