Seven years ago, three central Illinois residents created an app to track high school football scores in real time. With friends and kids involved in high school football, Scott Leathers, John Ingles and Nate Smith would use text messaging and social media to find out the scores at other schools. “For a long time, we’d sit at our school’s game wondering how another school was doing,” Leathers notes. “[We] thought, wouldn’t it be fun to create an app that allows fans to post scores in one place for all to share?”
Talk turned to action, and the three developed Illinois Prep Scores, which initially included three conferences but has since expanded to include the entire state of Illinois. The app is based on crowdsourcing—relying on its users to report and update scores as they happen. Each game has its own chat room that can be used for general conversations or play-by-play commentary. Users can create a list of favorite teams, making it easy to toggle from team to team and stay in the loop.
While Smith left the project to focus on Readable Report—a company he cofounded whose apps track the effectiveness of its users’ online posts and social media activity—Leathers and Ingles, full-time app developers at local companies, continue to support Illinois Prep Scores. “Scott and I spend around 100 hours each season developing, updating, testing, promoting and monitoring the app,” Ingles explains. It’s free and available for download on Android and iPhone devices. PM
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