From Big Leagues to Little League: How Pocket Radar Made Speed Data Mainstream

Athletic Intelligence Episode 4 Transcript

From Big Leagues to Little League: How Pocket Radar Made Speed Data Mainstream

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[00:00] Steve Goody: The most common call is a worried parent calling up going, I think the radar gun is broken. It just says they're throwing this number and it can't possibly be true. And the reality is that every parent, I did this with my daughter as well, you remember that best, best, best measurable number. In your brain, your kid does that.

What Is Pocket Radar — and Why It Matters for Youth Sports

[00:20] Narration: That's Steve Goody, CEO of Pocket Radar, who produces handheld speed tracking tools that deliver accurate velocity data in real time. Designed to be simple, portable, and affordable. Pocket radar is part of a growing wave of sports tech that's helping democratize access to information. 

[00:39] Steve Goody: That's just objective information and what I love about it over time, that makes coaches actually check themselves.

[00:46] Steve Goody: So if you're a dedicated coach, you care about your kids, you wanna make them better, and you would be just as disappointed as the parent and the kid if you weren't improving them. If you've got ethics, you're gonna go, whoa, I've worked for a month and I've seen no measurable evidence that they're getting better.

How Objective Data Creates Accountability for Coaches

[01:02] Steve Goody: Then hopefully the coach will go. I need some help to figure out what do I need different to help coach them better? So if everybody wins with a true objective data. 

[01:11] Narration: In this episode, Steve joins Aman Loomba, Game Changer's SVP of Product and Anna Nickel, Senior Marketing Manager, who brings a rich background both on the field as a softball player and in the dugout as a youth and collegiate coach to talk about what it really means to democratize access to data and tech in youth sports.

[01:30] Narration: Steve shares a story behind Pocket Radar, how objective feedback can help players and families navigate the highs and lows of the gam,e and why making tools that are easy to use is key to helping more athletes grow on and off the field.

[01:49] Narration: This is Athletic Intelligence from Game Changer. A show where we go deep inside the world of baseball and softball, uncovering the tech that's shaping the game.

From Bookworm to Baseball Tech Founder: Meet Steve Goody

[02:02] Narration: Most of the guests we've heard from this season have spent years competing at the highest levels of their sport. Their time on the field shaped the tools they went on to build. Steve's path was a little different. 

[02:14] Steve Goody: I was the guy that played little league one season, sat on the bench, struck out every time at bat.

[02:19] Steve Goody: Like no, I was the nerdy bookworm that was studying math and circuits and I was the non-athletic person. So it's, there's a big irony in this, but there's also an incredible, um, it's been incredibly fun to end up doing this because it is in a positive way, completely turned upside down my perception of those athletes I knew when I was younger.

[02:39] Steve Goody: It's like some of the most amazing people I've met in this journey have been athletes and leaders and coaches. It's incredible. 

[02:46] Aman Loomba: Tell us more about how your perceptions of the people in the, in the world of sport have changed. 

[02:51] Steve Goody: When I was young and I couldn't play those sports, I, you know, I, I was envious of them and, and a lot of them when they were younger and immature were sort of.

[02:58] Steve Goody: The people I feared to be, quite  frankly, in those younger years, you know, the whole proverbial jocks versus the nerds thing, you know? And I didn't know any better. So I left with sort of a negative opinion of athletes out of high school. But then as I started to do this company and started to meet all these amazing people, and specifically, I ended up meeting  elite people first because

[03:20] Steve Goody: we seeded our units into championship coaches, MLB, the top of the top of the top. And then very quickly I started to learn delightfully that honestly, these were some of the most amazing human beings I'd ever met. You don't win championships unless you're a true leader of people and you gotta be smart and strategic in your thinking.

[03:39] Steve Goody: So it was like every attribute that one might aspire to. I was starting to meet in these amazing athletes and coaches and managers. That's probably one of the biggest gifts I got out of this is we're retooling entirely how I think of athletics. And I wish I could go back in time and participate myself more.

[03:55] Steve Goody: It's something that would've worked for me to find something. 'cause uh, it's an amazing thing and I got to watch my daughter do it with, uh, she was an elite runner, you know, I got to see a little sample of what it looks like, you know, done right as well. But she was in high school, so that was cool. 

[04:10] Aman Loomba: You got to see her participate as a dad at an elite level in a youth sport. That's cool.

[04:14] Steve Goody: Yeah, so that was fantastic. You know, seeing her at state championships and coming in, you know, on the podium and these kinds of things were just, I got to experience that side of it through her. So I got to see the parent side of the whole thing too, which is another gift of course. And added to it, added to this experience I shared earlier about, you know, the people I didn't know that I was meeting.

[04:34] Anna Nickel: Steve, I need to know how you ended up in sports tech with your background in not enjoying the sports world and having a pers a negative perception of sports people. What even drew you to the space? 

From Corporate Engineer to Startup Visionary

[04:47] Steve Goody: So I'm an engineer, double e electrical engineer. You know, my whole life I've, you know, been building things and then, uh, as I

[04:55] Steve Goody: went through the corporate world and had every adventure possible from Fortune 500 big companies like Hewlett Packard and Cisco to a decade of startups, you know, venture backed, startups, got to sample. Every little nook and cranny of the technology world got to participate primarily in the technical domain

[05:11] Steve Goody: until this company I had two engineering friends and acquaintances I'd worked with through the startups, one of 'em, and then I met the other one. So us three engineers had a, uh, common background of the older days of Hewlett Packard, the seventies and the eighties and nineties. That culture was something that I didn't know what I had in my hand at the time, but the three of us looked backwards and said, wow.

[05:31] Steve Goody: That's going away. Can we do a company and try to resurrect some of those good things we had where people collaborate, build things?

[05:42] Narration: So Steve and his engineer buddies from Hewlett Packard started taking things apart and putting it back together again, hoping they might build the next big thing. 

The Municipal Radar Gun That Sparked a Revolution

[05:51] Steve Goody: So we tinkered with toys, uh, medical devices, gadgets, and ended up stumbling into radar guns because my partner was driving home one day and saw a dad with two kids throwing a baseball in front of one of those trailer radar signs that they drag out to the street when there are speeders.

[06:15] Steve Goody: And they were measuring their, their velocity. 

[06:20] Aman Loomba: Wait, they were pirating this, they were using the sign to

[06:21] Steve Goody: They were pirating the municipal radar.

[06:22] Aman Loomba: That’s amazing.

[06:23] Steve Goody: So we were talking about that over lunch or something. We said, you know, the radar gun has not been reinvented in 50 years. It's technology that came out of the fifties and before actually.

[06:34] Steve Goody: So we said if we could completely re-engineer radar guns and make them a consumer level product. So we were three engineers trying to say, could we crack this impossible puzzle? To make a radar gun that ran it on two AAA batteries, fits in your pocket, costs a fifth of what a standard gun, and be as good in that accuracy and specifications as these high-end guns.

Democratizing Pro-Level Tech for All Athletes

[06:59] Steve Goody: Our mission is to democratize high performance technology that otherwise is inaccessible so that the most number of people can benefit from the most advanced sports technology. 

[07:09] Narration: With bold ambitions to reach as many people as possible. Steve and his team took their product to the biggest stage they could find, hoping that visibility might be enough.

[07:22] Steve Goody: And we learned some painful lessons on the way about, you know, how to survive in the sports technology industry. You know, we introduced the product at the Consumer Electronic Show in 2010. I had the fun of showing Al Roker how to use the product. He demoed it live on the air. With two kids throwing baseballs and Al was measuring their speeds and we 

[07:45] Aman Loomba: Did it work? 

[07:46] Steve Goody: It worked great. 

[07:46] Aman Loomba: Oh, beautiful.

[07:47] Steve Goody: It worked great and we sold nothing. Even though we had 200 million media impressions, we sold nothing and that was a big lesson.

[08:00] Narration: Turns out, Al Roker and Good Morning America weren't exactly the target audience. What they needed was for coaches to hold the product in their hands to feel how it worked and to see what it could do on the field. In 2010, Steve got connected with a friend at a baseball publication who introduced him to Andy Lopez, a College World Series champion and coach at the University of Arizona, who would later be inducted into the ABCA Hall of Fame.

Winning Over D1 Coaches, One Throw at a Time

[08:29] Narration: Hey, Steve. Why don't you come down and show Andy what it's all about. 

[08:32] Narration: If Andy saw value in it, that would be the kind of validation Pocket Radar actually needed. 

[08:38] Steve Goody: So I flew to Arizona, walked onto a practice field at D1 School. Andy was there, nice guy, great coach, and is one of those leaders I refer to.

[08:46] Steve Goody: Andy is one of those, one of those guys. So he had soccer guns there. His school had purchased a while back, so you know he had several thousand dollars and he was. He was guarding them and protecting them. 'cause kids would drop them and the school would be out a couple thousand bucks. They were like golden assets you kept in the closet or you'd go to use them and find out you forgot to charge the battery.

[09:05] Steve Goody: So, you know, I got to see firsthand how he used radar. And my favorite demo was holding this little $199 radar gun up side by side to one of his best radar guns with a pitcher throwing, and these numbers are matching. And he's just looking at me, just going, are you kidding me? How is this possible? I kept getting that with every D1 coach, MLB people, and like, well, in a year we're just gonna blow this up.

[09:28] Steve Goody: This is amazing. It's gonna be bigger than we ever thought. It took six years. To even get to anything approaching breakeven and that we were not a big company. Breakeven was easy. So that was another big lesson is what it means to market and to go to market with a product. Even though you have evangelists that love what you've built, that doesn't mean you're gonna sell it overnight.

Six Years to Breakeven: Lessons in Sports Tech Hardware

[09:51] Steve Goody: It's not a piece of software you download. You have to put it in channels, you have to sell it, you have to find partners. So. That was another big chapter of learning about how you launch a piece of sports technology hardware. Lots of lessons learned, fortunately, positively learned, and mistakes were learned from, and then they weren't the end of things.

[10:09] Steve Goody: There were some definite gut check moments in that adventure. 

[10:13] Aman Loomba: Steve, you, you said you started out talking to more elite level teams. Is that just because they were available to you through your network, or did you initially think your market was gonna be there? 

[10:25] Steve Goody: We imagined that if we went there and started at the top, we would trickle down.

[10:31] Steve Goody: We correctly assume that if you had something more affordable, people that watch the elite, even though we started to learn that radar guns aren't used at low amateur levels, they're used by the serious amateurs and serious programs, whether that be a training academy, a high school, but it's a very small minority that were sophisticated enough that the amateur ranks to realize even what to do with a reading from a radar gun.

[10:58] Steve Goody: We thought we gotta start elite. Because we'll get validation and credibility from MLB. So we started building that network with the elite people and then they love the product. And we, we, our marketing was done guerilla style by giving away. I think we gave away several thousands of radar guns to seed them into these people that are elite.

Softball Leads the Way: How Women’s Programs Drove Adoption

[11:18] Steve Goody: And then down market later colleges were the center of it. Women's softball was the ignition point because, um, Teresa Wilson, who used to work for Mike Candrea back in the day, she got ahold of one of the early models and she was an evangelist. She sat at tryouts and other games and other campuses and would use this thing and everybody's like, what's that?

[11:43] Steve Goody: And they would be all, have their big other radar guns out and she would pass it around and, and women's softball's fantastic 'cause it's more of a fast adopting community. So you know, it's networking and relationship based really. And it's really quick. So she spread it around all the D1 schools and I think within half a year to a year, every D1 college used our product.

[12:05] Narration: They started with women's softball and baseball followed. Soon they were thinking even bigger, expanding beyond the diamond, thinking about how to bring their tech to more sports and more players. 

Pocket Radar Goes Multi-Sport, but Diamond Sports Still Dominate

[12:16] Steve Goody: We did every sport we could think of football, and we have users in all sports, but 95% of it is diamond sports today.

[12:24] Steve Goody: But you have people that, like Tom Brady, Drew Brees, Patrick Mahomes, they're on social media, you know, using our product for quarterback throwing speeds for, so anybody that cares about velocity, that wants convenience Shohei Ohtani before every outing he uses our gun to warm up, and every time he goes in the mound when he's pitching.

[12:43] Steve Goody: Rehab. So over the years, you know that endorsement from the top eventually allowed it to trickle down into the market. Competitive athletes, coaches, and stakeholders started to discover that, oh, we need to have these, because we do use data to train with.

[13:02] Narration: Big name endorsements like Ohtani and Mahomes can go a long way, but they aren't necessarily what makes a tool stick. It's coaches like Anna who spend the most time with tools like this and can truly make the most of them. When a tool is simple and easy to use, it gives coaches more space to focus on what matters most.

[13:21] Narration: They can spend less time second guessing, more time building trust with their players and have something objective to lean on when performance gets emotional. 

Why Coaches Love Pocket Radar: Simple, Fast, Accurate

[13:32] Anna Nickel: When I think of Pocket Radar. It's so straightforward. There is one button you push, the radar pops up. There's just no extra, right? It's so sleek.

[13:41] Anna Nickel: It's fits in your pocket. 

[12: 42] Steve Goody: Thank you.

[13:41] Anna Nickel: I don't have to care. Like carrying around a radar gun, like it's so large, it almost feels a little silly. Like, are you gonna put that in your backpack? The answer is yes. Coaches, were literally putting them in their backpack to have it in my back pocket, in my pocket, pull it out at a game.

[13:57] Anna Nickel: As a coach who. I don't always necessarily care about the number. I care about consistency. I care about change. I care about not being biased. Right? Right. Because as a human with eyeballs, we are so subject to being like, wow, that girl is moving really quickly. Therefore, my eye sees the ball move quicker than it is.

[14:16] Anna Nickel: It's not. So sometimes the game can fool you, even as a coach watching lots. So it allows you as an elite coach or as a recruiter, when I'm watching a pitcher, I can take a radar speed and go. Oh wow. She's actually throwing harder than I thought she was, or she's not throwing as hard as I thought she was, or her change of speed isn't big enough.

[14:36] Anna Nickel: It allows me to put some very finite response that I can give to someone else, and then they can validate that after. Right? So it allows us something repeatable and. So as a pitching coach, the girls I coach are pitchers, you know, varying ages. Their dad will text me, Hey, her speeds are really up, are really down, are this or that, and like it helps me then train them because dad can say objectively, her speeds are down.

[15:02] Anna Nickel: We believe something mechanically is wrong. We believe she's sick, we believe she's injured. And it immediately helps that elite athlete kind of remove some of the emotion from a struggling period. I imagine that you have endless stories of parents, coaches, and people telling you about the use of their radar and how it's really helped their athletes.

[15:22] Steve Goody: You've touched on four or five really fascinating areas that I've learned a lot over the years, sort of unexpected, you know, learning. I'll say right away the number one support call we get is a worried parent calling up going, I think the radar gun is broken because my child is slow and it just says they're throwing, you know, this number and it can't possibly be true.

[15:45] Steve Goody: And the reality is that every parent, I did this with my daughter as well, you remember that best, best, best measurable number and in your brain, your kid does that. Yep. So that one anomalous moment, which is usually about a three- to five-miles-an-hour, velocity higher, almost always. So when they get the truth, they can't handle the truth.

[16:08] Steve Goody: It's that reality, and it has a really positive effect. If you can then embrace that, pay attention to that number. The things you mentioned, there's multiple reasons, right? One is. Am I getting injured? Uh, the fall off of a fast fall velocity is a way better indicator than say, pitch count for a kid in a game, right?

Forget Pitch Count: Velocity Drop Is a Better Injury Indicator

[16:25] Steve Goody: Something's going on. Even if they're not hurting, you know, fatigue that translates to lower velocity, you know, can be precursor to injury. So there's interesting things around that. 

[16:36] Aman Loomba: Can we get into that? I think that's a really interesting topic because pitch counting is something that we are very intimately involved with because we track that stat and pitch counting is the way

[16:46] Aman Loomba: that most leagues try to regulate or encourage, I guess, arm safety among young pitchers. I hear you saying. Counting is not the right way to do it. What we should be doing is looking for evidence that things are going wrong, and if you're not, is that what you're saying? 

[17:00] Steve Goody: I'm saying we could do better.

[17:02] Steve Goody: Pitch count is great as a proxy for safety, but you know, the kid went out and wrestled with their sibling the other night and started to a semi tear in a ligament. You know, the pitch count doesn't tell you anything about that. After 20 pitches, they're gonna tear a bicep tendon because they did something silly the night before.

[17:19] Steve Goody: Pitch count doesn't tell you anything about that. 

[17:21] Aman Loomba: Yeah.

[17:21] Steve Goody: It's based on the assumption that kid's healthy and didn't do anything foolish. So you add velocity to that. And I think as we all probably understand, as data becomes more prevalent, more, more surrounding every athlete, we can use data mining, AI, and other solutions to get health insights.

[17:38] Steve Goody: There's so much and fantastic sports tech coming out that not only is about ball flight metrics, but about the human body and the kinematics of the human body. Well, you marry up that with some of the machine learning and AI models along with ball metrics. You can start doing a very, very rich story about injury prevention.

[17:59] Narration: Radar can do more than measure what's happening on the surface. It can offer clues, sometimes subtle, sometimes surprising, that can offer deeper insights into overall health. 

Walking Gait Concussion Detection: The Future of Radar

[18:10] Steve Goody: We had a group of scientists come to us one time and they were using radar returns from someone's walking gait. Turns out there's a way to look at the radar signatures of somebody walking toward a radar gun and with like a 90% confidence, you can tell whether they have had a concussion or not.

[18:26] Steve Goody: Even if they don't show symptoms.

[18: 27] Anna Nickel: Wow. 

[18:27] Steve Goody: Because there were causes, micro changes in their gait timing. I think there's a rich future. And using sensing data mining, AI, ML, altogether. To just keep bringing more and more of what we're all after in the market is, you know, democratize all of that so that there's safety, there's monitoring, there's, uh, all the insights you get for, uh, player development, coaching, recruiting, you name it.

[18:51] Aman Loomba: Steve, do you think all of these democratized enhancements to the game and, and the way the athletes play the game, are they all destined to trickle down from the pros? 

[19:02] Steve Goody: After 15 years of selling the product, one of the big takeaways in watching many companies come and go, if I had to summarize it in one sentence, is because their founders believed a hundred percent that if I serve the elite at the top and they love the product, it will trickle down and I'll sell hundreds of thousands, millions of units.

[19:22] Steve Goody: That is a, an inaccurate and totally false statement. The big surprise for me was that down market they were not embracing this stuff, even when it was free, even when they got perfect education. And then I walked away finally after years, honestly, going, wait a minute. We can't change the way they think.

[19:43] Steve Goody: We have to build something that matches the way they think. That sounds sort of obvious, but the trickle down concept is such a powerful one 'cause it works in so many other, some other cases. But when you're making an instrument that measures analytical data, physics data, you've just narrowed yourself into a very elite kind of person.

[20:05] Steve Goody: So nowadays. Yeah, we will serve that market all day long, top to bottom, right, and that's a part of the market. It's the heart of the most competitive part of the market. Gotta have it. Check the box.

[20:21] Narration: At the pro level systems like Statcast, track nearly everything: pitch velocity, ball movement, even how a player runs down the line. Now, younger or amateur players might not need that much data. But having just a piece of it, something to show progress, flag fatigue, or backup a coaching decision can make a big difference.

Why Every Player Deserves Their Own “Statcast”

[20:43] Narration: And that's exactly the question. Steve and his team started asking, 

[20:47] Steve Goody: Why can't the masses have effectively their own Statcast? 

[20:51] Narration: With that question as the North Star, Pocket Radar has leaned into partnerships, including with GameChanger syncing pitch speeds with in-game events automatically. GameChanger now goes a step further, turning those velocities into usable stats, capturing and showcasing average velocity in real time.

[21:10] Narration: It brings real-time feedback to the field in a way that's simple, accessible, and built for the everyday coach. 

GameChanger Integration Makes Data Instantly Actionable

[21:19] Steve Goody: If you're serious, look at all that data insight you get from your profile. Your game clips, your streams, or if you just wanna have fun and you go, wow, I hit that guy that was throwing, you know, he is throwing 80 miles an hour and I hit off that guy.

[21:30] Steve Goody: I've never hit off that guy, mom, grandma, look at this. That's just enjoyment and game experience. That's how you deploy technology that will go down market big. That's why I'm so excited about working with you guys personally, is because. I think you already understand that. That's why GameChanger’s used everywhere.

[21:47] Steve Goody: Because you knew and learned for years that scoring is fundamental. You don't have to teach somebody, they need to score the game. You walked into the environment and say, I got a better mousetrap. You're using paper, and that's simple oversimplifying what you've done, you've gone way beyond that. But there's a piece of magic insight in that.

[22:04] Steve Goody: And if every sports tech founder would just sort of pause for a minute and go. Wait a minute, do they really need that sensor to measure X, Y, Z from this? You know, and it, you'll find out if you're honest with yourself that the elite person might say, absolutely want that. But if you get honest feedback down below and not just them telling you what you want to hear, if, if it, I know a lot of cases where they buy some of that tech and then I interview these people.

[22:25] Steve Goody: What did you do with that sensor after you bought it? Well, I tried it out for a day and then I just had a question mark over my head that says, I don't know how to integrate this into what I want to do in my practices or my development. I, I don't know what to do. And if you think you're gonna educate the world and tell they're gonna change those brains, you know, you better have a deep, deep budget in a lot of patience.

[22:46] Steve Goody: You know? 'cause with time I think it will change, but it's watching the sea rise, you know?

[22:57] Narration: It can feel like the game is flooded with data. At the pro level, more and more decisions are being driven by numbers. With tech used to squeeze out every marginal gain possible. But in youth sports, that kind of thinking can be tricky. Kids look up to the big leaguers copying not just how they swing and throw, but what they value, which raises a big question that Aman dives into.

[23:20] Aman Loomba: Will the use of data to win games fundamentally, which is why the elite teams are using these products, will that come eventually to the youth sports teams or is that never, you know, the average Little League team?

[23:33] Steve Goody:  I believe it absolutely will, but it has to enter that market and take that market through a much more organic, intuitive method.

Hiding the Numbers, Showing the Insights

[23:40] Steve Goody: And I think AI and ML is gonna accelerate it because you're gonna put this, be able to put this artificial human layer on top of it. In fact, I tell people all the time. If you're talking to an amateur athlete and you show a screen full of numbers, you're gonna fail. You gotta hide the numbers and put something in front of it like a

[23:57] Steve Goody: an AI agent, say an agentic system that says, Hey, nevermind the numbers kid. You need to pull your back foot back, you know, six inches and load up differently. And I'll watch the numbers for you. Don't worry about those numbers. You know, the key numbers that were for recruitment. Of course they want to know those, right?

[24:13] Steve Goody: But that's the problem most sports technology companies makes. They think that analytical thinking is a natural thing that will trigger down market. You need to put a different, I'll call it a different UX for the down market thing, driven by the same engines. That we build together those engines, you already know this, and what you do with streaming, for example, is that.

[24:32] Steve Goody: That's about. Sure. A lot of people wanna look at those streams for very important reasons that are about being competitive. Think about recruitment. But there's plenty of people that will watch those streams 'cause you know, dad can't make it to the game. He wants to see the game or grandma. So it's about connection, family, you know, connected to the athletes, the stakeholders, the people around them.

[24:49] Steve Goody: I think we can take all of our technology and lean heavily that way, as well as serving the elite markets. We're doing both, you know, and we're doing it through partnerships extensively because we all should stay in our, our own lanes at what we do best, do what we do best in joint forces in my opinion. 

Feedback That Feeds Confidence, Not Comparison

[25:07] Anna Nickel: I agree, Steve, you, you all really do serve the viewer of it and the athlete who's actually playing.

[25:13] Anna Nickel: And to me that's the part that you do so well is you are giving that athlete feedback. There is nothing more interesting to an athlete than feedback that they can actually absorb. And I don't know if this is how you would frame it in your brain, but what I hear you saying is it's gamification, it's making practices more interesting.

[25:33] Anna Nickel: It's contextualizing success. As a coach, I might not know if something is good at the youth level. I might have no idea. If this athlete is actually the hardest hitter, and is that why they're my best hitter? Whereas if I have some velocity behind it, I can say, oh, I am noticing that these five athletes have excellent exit velocity.

[25:47] Steve Goody: Yeah, 

[25:48] Anna Nickel: But only two of them are my best hitters. And it gives me some context. 

[24:52] Steve Goody: That's right. 

[25:53] Anna Nickel: To help development. And if I'm an athlete at practice and for coaches out there who have tried to run a practice with a bunch of nine-year-olds, they get distracted so quickly. And so that gamification piece, how do we keep kids interested and playing and moving in the right direction and at GameChanger

[26:14] Anna Nickel: We, yes, we 150 stats. There's so many stats, they're very overwhelming. There's probably one that's really beneficial to that kid and they wanna see it improve, but they just wanna know that they improved. If I'm a parent and I say, Hey, this season. You had a great season, great job. Like that's really all they wanna hear.

[26:31] Anna Nickel: They wanna know that they're having fun and doing good, and this is a way to give them feedback without you as the adult having to oversell them that that was good, and say, Hey, look at the number. You tell me, is that higher or lower for you? And then you can personalize it to them. It's about their journey.

[26:46] Anna Nickel: It's not about comparing yourself, it's about growing. And this gives you a very straightforward way to do that in a practice setting. 

[26:53] Narration: That kind of feedback loop, the connection between data and real tangible progress is where insights turn into action. Over the years, Steve's heard no shortage of stories about how people are putting that into practice.

From Insight to Action: When Radar Data Drives Development

[27:08] Steve Goody: The ones that I love are the ones that use information to help people know. Like you said, the parent comes in, here's where your kids started. We assess them with these measurables and then they worked with us for, you know, every month we'll show you your report. Look at their exit velocity is getting better so they're hitting more powerfully, or their pitching velocity is getting better, or their off-speed pitch pitch differential is now more in control compared to their fastball.

[27:29] Steve Goody: It's about control command. So data is a wonderful thing for coaches and there's no more argument. It's just objective information and what I love about it. Over time, that makes coaches actually check themselves. So if you're a dedicated coach, you care about your kids, you know you wanna make them better, and you would be just as disappointed as the parent and the kid if you weren't improving them.

[27:51] Steve Goody: If you've got ethics, you know you're gonna go, whoa, I've worked for a month and I've seen no measurable evidence that they're getting better. Then hopefully the coach will go, I need some help to figure out what do I need different to help coach them better. So everybody wins with a true objective data.

[28:06] Steve Goody: I think the more we can tune into, wait a minute, like how do they wanna work? How do they wanna experience the game? How do they wanna do their practice? And really trying to bend our technology to fit what they need or what they enjoy. And make it more pleasant, easy to use.

[28:28] Aman Loomba: Looking forward into the future, are there any big technical advancements that you're excited about? Either things you can talk about that are coming from Pocket Radar or just stuff you see widely in the industry? 

Pocket Radar’s Next Big Leap

[28:40] Steve Goody: The industry's running really fast toward more measurements, more technology to do measurements.

[28:45] Steve Goody: We're an innovation company. We wanna do that democratization. So what's next? Well, more measurables and more places. The things people wanna see, whether it's in-game or in practice in a tunnel. So what we showed at ABCA was taking our current radar product, the Smart Coach Radar that everybody uses, and your iPhone, that was a hitting solution we demonstrated.

[29:04] Steve Goody: It's measuring the same thing you see in tunnels with 3D. You know, it's showing a spray chart, showing the launch angle, the spray angle, calculated distance. You know, like many of the other systems you've seen that can do that in a tunnel in golf are called launch monitors, where you hit the ball and you see what would've happened on the fairway.

[29:20] Steve Goody: Same thing if we've all seen these systems well. We showed that because now people that own our product and they have an iPhone, we're gonna think about how to get them the most affordable version of that. Think of it now, the 3D world. So this is where we're headed. And once again, the mission, democratization, ease of use, supportability, convenience, that's where we're headed.

[29:43] Steve Goody: And actually, I want to think ahead in the future to be more proactive with our break partners and go look at, let's think of ourselves as the same company on the same mission, and start thinking like product managers together. Okay, our customers need what from us collectively. And we, in fact, we're an engineering company in our heart and souls, so we want to keep innovating and doing the same thing we did with the original project.

[30:04] Steve Goody: I think there's gonna be a circle of winners, I think GameChanger and, and and DSG is positioned to be top of the mountain.

Data That Serves Coaches, Players, and Families

[30:16] Narration: For coaches and players at every level, having access to simple, objective data can make all the difference. They offer clarity in the moment and perspective over time. Tools like Pocket Radar put that clarity in reach, helping coaches make more informed decisions, give more confident feedback, and track development in a way that sticks.

[30:37] Narration: And for players, it helps take the emotion out of the moment so they can focus on the game. This has been Athletic Intelligence from Game Changer. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow, rate, and share it. I hope you'll join us next time as we uncover the tech that's shaping the game.