Eric Wubbena with the Baseball Bluebook interviews ChangeUp co-founder Drew Tripp at the 2022 American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA) national convention.
Eric Wubbena
Eric Wubbena with the Baseball Bluebook coming live to you from Chicago at the 2022 ABCA convention. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Drew Tripp.
Drew Tripp
Yes, I’m with ChangeUp.
Eric Wubbena
It’s going to be an exciting conversation. I’d like to give yourself an opportunity to introduce yourself. I like the story. So give us a little background of where you came from and what you’re doing today.
Drew Tripp
Sure. Born and raised in the Boston area, a Red Sox fan. By trade, my background is software and professional services consulting. I’ve always had a passion for ways to combine what I’ve learned in my professional life with what I grew up in. I grew up in a household of athletics. My father was a longtime high school athletic director and football coach. I lived and breathed that world and had been passionate about it since when I was running around as a little kid following him from game to game.
So that’s my background. I have coached youth athletics, always at the recreational or Little League levels. I never would have considered myself a hardcore coach, but I know the game and just love being around it.
Eric Wubbena
Yeah. Understanding what ChangeUp does, it’s one of those things that is kind of smoldering in the background of the issue with pitch counts and managing these players. Especially when players are no longer on just one team throughout the summer. They’re on travel ball. They’re on other associations. There’s all these other things that they’re doing. And one of the things that we have to do is we have to manage pitch count, make sure these kids are healthy, and not take advantage of them.
It’s a real challenge and it’s been going on for a long, long time. So it’s a great blend – the passion for baseball and the software side. So just go into how that happened. How did you get to where you are right now?
Drew Tripp
This was probably 2012. Ten years or so ago I was coaching my son’s Little League team and my partner, Jeremy Coffey, was coaching his son’s Little League team. We were in the same community and both boys were playing on the same travel team. And I learned very quickly the problem you were just alluding to: that so many kids these days are playing on multiple baseball teams. And it’s great, but they’re just playing a lot. The younger kids that can throw strikes tend to step on the mountain quite a bit.
I saw a pretty big gap in information sharing between the travel ball coaching circuit and the Little League coaching circuit or the recreational coaching circuit. Kids would run from game to game changing uniforms in the car and mom and dad would fly in on two wheels to get them to their next game on time for a different team. And coaches wouldn’t know that someone had just thrown for another team, and that’s where the idea of ChangeUp was born.
ChangeUp is a way to track all the pitching activity that someone’s doing – not necessarily to adhere to pitch count rules, even though that is something we do, but to make sure that kids are not being overthrown. And ChangeUp provides information sharing across all coaches and leagues.
Eric Wubbena
Is ChangeUp an app that the coaches are responsible for updating this information on? Or is it really the parents’ and players’ responsibility for making sure that they’ve kept their information up to date?
Drew Tripp
Great question. It’s both. We work with a lot of baseball programs. Coaches, leagues, travel ball programs themselves – if they’re on the platform, it’s a coach or a player who’s not playing that day that’s using the ChangeUp app to track pitching. But we don’t have ChangeUp in the hands of every program out there. So for the kid that is on multiple teams where one is using ChangeUp and one is not, parents and players themselves can log what we would just refer to as “side sessions,” which could be a game or a bullpen session, to make sure that data gets in there.
Then we look holistically across all the pitching sessions that someone may have been involved in to determine availability based on applicable pitch count rules. So it doesn’t look at just a game someone pitched in a particular to see when they can throw next. It looks at all games that someone’s pitched to see: “Okay. Should we be adjusting this player’s status to ‘resting’ or ‘available'”
Eric Wubbena
It sounds like it could be a challenge because I would imagine that every coach wants to pitch their best pitcher, right?
Drew Tripp
Yes.
Eric Wubbena
And all of a sudden they realize that those players aren’t available for that particular time. How are you seeing the self-policing? What is the response you’re having from coaches that may not have used ChangeUp, but perhaps have players that are actually utilizing your application?
Drew Tripp
As soon as we start to talk about what ChangeUp does, baseball coaches get it right away and they understand the value of it. Not everyone wants to use technology in the dugout, and I completely understand that. The value is understood. But the applicability to every single team really depends on the coach’s comfort level with introducing technology.
Eric Wubbena
One of the points that you made is the understanding that people need to use technology, and actually embrace it, and actually utilize it. We see that all the time. Coaches say: “We have to do this. We have to do this. We have to do this.” And then when it comes down to doing it, they don’t really do it. And all of a sudden, now they’re in a pinch because they have issues with the pitch count.
And pitch count isn’t the only thing. There’s a lot of different tools they need. It’s roster management, it’s stats updating. There are a lot of the things coaches need to make sure their kids are doing. And it’s a little overwhelming.
I don’t know if people understand. Most of our audience is baseball people anyway, and they probably do understand. And hopefully when people are listening, they see this and think: “That’s exactly us. That’s a problem that I’m having.” At the end of the day, these coaches don’t want to injure their players. They want to win. But they also know that they need to play the game right. I think that’s what ChangeUp brings to the table.
What are some of the things that ChangeUp is doing to help with the overall adoption of your mobile app, and what pushback are you getting?
Drew Tripp
We really value relationships like this and talking with other people in the industry. We’re a small company. We’re a startup. We’re going into season three. We have great adoption up in the New England area where we’re based. We’re based out of Boston. We have great relationships in the state of California with the California Interscholastic Federation, the state of Nevada. We’ve got teams in Florida using it. So word-of-mouth is certainly working. But strategic relationships and partnerships are really what are going to help drive recognition and adoption.
Eric Wubbena
Talk about being a start up. What are some of the challenges? You’ve got this very niche product. But everybody needs it. It’s unique. What are some of the challenges that ChangeUp is going through in building a business from the ground up – from an idea?
Drew Tripp
Outreach and brand recognition. There are great solutions out there already. Everyone’s heard of GameChanger. GameChanger is a great product, and so many teams are using it. And that’s one of the biggest challenges we face is teams will say, “Well, we already use GameChanger. And I don’t want to have to use something else to track this information.” Great. We completely understand. I was using GameChanger myself when I was coaching Little League. However, we’ve built the ChangeUp platform with integration in mind.
ChangeUp is completely API driven on modern technologies. We don’t care if we’re the tool that’s being used to input the data, or if you use GameChanger and the data is pushed into the ChangeUp system. We want to make sure that we’re keeping track of pitching performance and that kids are getting appropriate rest.
So we’re happy to play in the sandbox with anybody and serve as a compliance engine to make sure that kids are getting proper rest. And I’m speaking a lot about the youth realm, but there’s a lot of functionality in ChangeUp that goes up into the collegiate level, too. So it’s not just the youth baseball.
Eric Wubbena
So you’re in Boston. I like your story. I want to go back to being raised by athletic director at high schools. Those are fun stories. I started earlier telling you about my brother-in-law who came up through baseball, was a baseball coach, was athletic director and baseball coach. And I’m watching my nieces. They’re a little older now, but they were the exact person that you were, it sounds like when you were a kid. Going to the games, didn’t matter what the game was, because dad has got to be there to be the monitor or whatever it is for those games.
From those early experiences, what did it do for you as an individual as you got older? Was it the drive behind the passion that you have today?
Drew Tripp
It did so many things for me. Most importantly, it established a level of integrity in me when it comes to athletics. My dad was on a pedestal to me. But he did things the right way. Player safety was always a top concern. It wasn’t necessarily about winning the way he drove his programs. It was integrity, and he held every athlete in our school system to that same level and same standard. I think that’s what I took away the most.
There’s a feeling of comfort to me in just being around the game. I mentioned to you earlier, just walking on the trade show floor here. I get this natural buzz or energy. My kids make fun of me. My wife makes fun of me for it. But I just love it. I could walk around and just look at sports gear all day. But I would say it’s the integrity thing and doing things the right way.
One of the things that we take a lot of pride in as a company and me personally is helping enhance the experience of not only just players, but coaches, fans, whoever is involved in an athletic setting to make sure that they’re getting the optimum experience possible.
Eric Wubbena
I really like that. We all have dreams of being in baseball professionally, and I think the definition changes as you get older because you’re professionally in baseball. When you’re a kid, that meant something different than it does today.
Drew Tripp
I’d be wearing that hat [Eric Wobbena’s Yankees Hat].
Eric Wubbena
It’s so funny because baseball is that way. It’s almost pulled us all back. I was out of it for 20 some years, doing the old corporate grind and watching the game. And baseball gives us such an opportunity to be part of the game in so many different aspects of the game. And I love it, because like you said, when I walk onto the floor as well, it’s like, my God, look at all this stuff. It is like a kid in a candy store. It’s like, what is that? And it’s unique because baseball has all these gadget-type devices as well. Nothing wrong with them. Every one of them has a different place and somebody benefited from it. But the options are massive.
But I do like ChangeUp because of that focus of integrity from when you were younger, that your dad brought, that’s what ChangeUp is. You’re a business. But your compliance is about integrity, and it’s actually putting some accountability around that integrity.
Do you really have integrity in the game? You should be using ChangeUp because you don’t want these kids to actually blow out their arm or do something. I think that’s pretty cool to see not only from the business aspect, but from what you’re actually trying to accomplish.
So kudos to you, I think it’s really cool. It’s fun to listen and to watch how and why people do the things that they do.
Eric Wubbena
So what are your goals and objectives? What will your 2022 look like? What are some things that you are excited about?
Drew Tripp
We’re working on some great new features to the platform. We’re building a pitch charting feature now. So in addition to just tracking pitch counts, we’re going to open up the data that we’re collecting and is available to players and coaches alike from a complete player profile standpoint. And we’re talking about profiles regarding theoretically every single pitching session that someone throws, from the time they first hit recreational or Little League ball up until the time they’re wrapping up their high school career and maybe moving on to college.
All that data regarding every pitching session stays on the ChangeUp platform and is associated with that individual player.
And we’re expanding that data set tremendously to incorporate type of pitch and location. I’ve got some partnerships with some key technology partners in the space to incorporate velocity. And there’s all kinds of things that we’re working on.
Eric Wubbena
Awesome.
I think you are probably a little bit apprehensive of saying it, but you’re going after some competitors that are out there, right?
Drew Tripp
A little bit. I’ll call us Switzerland. We want to play in the sandbox with everybody. We think there’s so many solutions out there and we want to get the best technologies together for a number of reasons. But to the point you made earlier about coaches being set in their ways, there’s so much out there from a technology standpoint that players are interested in, coaches are interested in, scouts, and recruiters, parents. How is a coach – who is often a one-person shop, running a dugout and managing a game by themselves – supposed to evaluate all that technology?
Eric Wubbena
That’s a great point. There’s tons of technology. And there’s new stuff all the time. So what do they know? What’s good? What’s bad? I know a lot of these coaches are buying all this technology, and they’re using tiny little bits of each. And it’s like, “Wait a minute. If that’s all you’re using that for, there’s better options.” And they don’t know it. They don’t understand technology because it’s so expansive and it constantly changes.
Drew Tripp
And to ask a coach to keep track of all of that. They’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. They’re developing players, and making sure they learn how to play the game, and play it right and advance their careers, if that’s an aspiration. So are we getting into a space where we’re introducing or becoming more apparently competitive with those solutions? I don’t think so. It’s all a matter of perspective, and I’m obviously jaded and biased, and I don’t want to think that we’re competing with others, but sure.
Eric Wubbena
Nobody wants to say that they’re directly competing with somebody because it brings a whole different attitude and different aspect of the game of what we’re doing. Being a part of the solution is better. But I think competition is also good. It pushes everybody. It’s what makes capitalism great. Make this country great. Constantly competing and making it a better product, because if you get one standard, all of a sudden, you get lazy and that’s where people start suffering.
So I think the competition is a really tricky thing because I totally agree with what you’re saying. I don’t compete with anybody. I love everyone. Actually, I want to be better. We want to drive this market better, and we want to have some competition to make us keep doing. When we’re up at night going, how can we make this better for our customers, is really the key to what we do.
Drew Tripp
There’s one more thing I actually want to add to that competitive though, and you triggered it in your response to me. I find it flattering if another technology provider or solution provider or vendor out in the baseball and softball space has us on their radar as a competitor. That’s great. That means we’ve done something right. I don’t want to say “bring it on,” because that’s not what I mean, but, hey, we’re doing something if we got noticed.
Eric Wubbena
Well, absolutely. And it’s going to push both companies.
So how are you enjoying the show?
Drew Tripp
It’s been great. It’s a little cold, but that’s okay. That energy or rush is back, and I haven’t felt it in a little while. It’s great to be here. It’s great to be talking to coaches and programs and other vendors in the trade show like yourself, and I’m excited.
Eric Wubbena
Well, that’s great. Well, hey Drew, it was great talking to you. I appreciate you joining us. I like to keep in touch. I think we could talk about a lot of different things, but this was kind of a prelude to what I think might come down the road. I’ve had a lot of people return back on the podcast, too, to share progress. Like I’ve said, baseball is this really tight fraternity of brothers and sisters. It’s a great place where we’re all kind of going after the same thing. We’re trying to raise men, not just players. And I think that’s the really important part of what we need to have a goal for.
Drew Tripp
Couldn’t agree more. This has been great. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Eric Wubbena
No, thank you. I appreciate it, Drew.