Tyrre Burks played college and professional football for about six years, bouncing around from NFL tryouts to Europe to the Canadian Football League. After pulling his hamstring in the CFL, he realized how difficult it was for him to communicate with each of his coaches and trainers about how he was getting to practice and what his responsibilities needed to be.
After heading back the the U.S. during a bye week to visit his family, Burks decided he would quit playing football and instead build a platform for athletes to stay better connected with their athletic staff.
"I called my agent and told him that I wanted to work on this idea, and he went ballistic," Burks said. "He's like, ‘yeah you’re 24, in the best shape of your life, and you want to go start this idea.’ And I told him what my idea was, and he was my first investor. Wrote me a check for $80k."
Burks also put in a little more than $80,000 of his own money and launched Chicago-based Team Interval, an online platform where everyone on a team--from coaches to players to administration to parents--can view information. There's mass messaging, team calendars, file sharing, film revue and injury reports that are easily available for an entire organization. The product is targeted mainly for high school athletic programs, Burks said, but the company has deals with several small colleges and is about to ink a deal with a U.S. Olympic team, which Burks expects to announce next week.
"Team Interval is basically a communication system that allows everyone in the entire sports organization to communicate," he said. "When I first thought of the idea I was only really focusing on coaches, players, and trainers. And then what I ended up learning is that everyone in the entire sports organization needs to be able to communicate. Everyone from the administration ... and at the high school level even the parents. It's a huge burden on parents in terms of keeping them in the loop on what's happening with their kids."
One of the most impressive features of Team Interval, and one that hits home with parents, is its injury reporting tool. Burks cited a national study of 4 million high school athletes that found only 18 percent of all injuries are documented. Team Interval provides a platform that archives all athletes' injures from the moment they step on the field freshman year to their very last game on senior night.
"What we’ve done is build an interactive injury reporting system that basically is a visual time capsule of all the injuries an athlete has," he said. "As the injury reports are being documented, they actually know which injuries are recurring injuries, where they show up on their body, and each injury report is associated with a specific time.
"[Athletes] can see what their body looks like over time, and parents are notified on each injury."
The calendar feature also keeps everyone in the organization up to date if the time or location of a practice is changed, and it also incorporates Google Maps to help everyone find away games. Burks hopes in three years to have Team Interval in 3,000 high schools across the country and wants to continue improving the content for sports teams to further separate himself from competitors in the market like Hudl, which has a similar platform but focuses more in video. Burks said he thinks Team Interval is the right product for a market that is often overlooked.
"We’re in the market that everyone ignores because they feel that the market’s not big enough and that high schools don’t have any capital. There are over 37,000 high schools in the United States that have a true need and a really strong pain point for the solution that we’re providing. So we’re in a real sweet spot, and we’re right on the verge of really taking this thing and blowing it out of the water."
