A Baltimore technology company that has chronicled and provided box scores for Maryland's high school sports for roughly a decade is looking to take its service nationwide in an effort to fill the void created by a decline in coverage from traditional newspapers.
County Sports Zone, a website that launched in 2012 and posts Maryland high school sports box scores and other information, has launched a new fundraising round to raise $4 million to support a nationwide expansion. The company successfully raised $1 million in 2022 and has launched a pilot in Tennessee to test the model outside of Maryland, with plans to expand to Texas next.
County Sports Zone is taking over what used to be the role of a local newspaper by providing scores, articles, videos and other sports content. The company relies on a network of hundreds of high school athletic directors and coaches to post the scores two hours after each game. Users can also post scores, articles or videos of the games. The content is used to create a newsfeed similar to a social media application like Instagram, where unpaid users provide the bulk of the site's content.
“The [Baltimore] Sun papers used to have beat reporters that covered these games,” Executive Chairman John Steuart said. “There just aren’t resources for that now that everything has moved online. Most other areas of news have found coverage online, but local sports has not.”
To fill that gap of online sports, CEO Sam Hopkins emphasized the importance of having human writers to build community and ensure reliable information. Several newspaper companies, such as Gannett, have experimented with using artificial intelligence to write about sports games to cut costs while still having a wide amount of coverage. However, Gannett's A.I. generated content was filled with errors, forcing the company to pause the project.
“A.I. is capable of doing some amazing things,” Hopkins said. “But you can do a lot more with a community who cares.”
The County Sports Zone website receives 8 million page views a yearthrough its content in Maryland, Steuart said. Steuart acquired the business in 2019 to spearhead the national expansion.
The company is trying to add other features outside of the core mission of tracking games to “gamify” the experience for high school sports fans through a partnership with AngelFire Games. The website includes a "pick 'em" game where users guess which high school team will win a game. The online users compete for bragging rights to have the highest score on the website. Although the activity may resemble sports betting apps like FanDuel where users predict the winner of a sports game, there is no money involved. Steuart compared the pick 'em game to how platforms like Duolingo use scores to create a social experience for people to compete with each other and learn more about a subject.
"It's something social," Steuart said. "It stimulates the rivalries between schools and teams. I don't think that's a good thing to take into the world of gambling."
