Sharon Rogers Moore started Sportscale Systems in a high school locker room. Now, it’s taking on investor bets and scaling up – all in preparation to disrupt the college and high school sports market.
Moore, an athletic trainer and faculty member in East Carolina University’s athletic training education program, tells Triangle Inno how it happened, and what’s next.
It started in 2011. Moore had secured a grant with Pitt County Schools to oversee its athletic trainer program. One day she was watching the standard weigh in, weigh out process – where high school football players lined up. Their numbers would be recorded to track their hydration – something that’s pretty standard, but time consuming as athlete after athlete steps up to the scale.
“Here’s this long line of people and an Excel spreadsheet is more efficient than a clipboard, but it’s still far more inefficient than something automated,” she remembers thinking. “I was like, there has got to be a quicker way.”
But there wasn’t.
Researching what was out there – or really what wasn’t out there – got her entrepreneurial wheels turning. And, thanks to a colleague in the engineering program, in 2015 “we had the patent for the invention.”
The Sportscale System automates the process for repetitive weight collection that's routine in many sports.
The first prototype was cobbled together in an engineer’s garage – and it worked.
“We’ve been prototyping and building ever since,” Moore said.
Initially, it was bootstrapped. Moore estimates she funneled about $50,000 in savings into the project between inception and 2020, when she received her first outside equity, a $500,000 seed round. If she completes this latest round of funding, it will add in another $500,000.
And she’s well on her way, as ECU’s Pirate Entrepreneurship Fund announced this week it had committed $250,000 in equity to the company.
But it hasn’t been a straight line.
Right after the term sheets were signed in 2020, the pandemic hit. Initially, Moore thought she was lucky. Isolation came at a time where she had already approved the specs and signed the contracts for who would build the app and the hardware. When the checks came, all Moore had to do was give her contracted team the green light – and they could get to work, albeit remotely.
But as the pandemic wore on, the challenges heightened. A year into the pandemic when the product was ready to be tested in the market, Sportscale’s primary customer base – school sports – was still in a state of uncertainty.
When Moore was able to find some schools to test the product, supply chain interruptions threatened the concept. When it was ready to start building, two of the primary components of the product suddenly had extensive lead times – one over a year. Moore took a chance and stuck with the components and got lucky when the year turned into just five months.
The firm had a soft launch in a handful of schools in nine states earlier this year, but had limited inventory.
“Our volume is what this investment is intended to fund,” Moore said. “It’s so we can build in volume and ship upon order instead of order, build, then ship.”