Housed in the Murray Herrick Campus Center and with two St. Thomas alumni at its helm, SportsData is a 4-year-old company dedicated to providing real time sports statistics to big time fantasy league hosts and media outlets.
St. Thomas alumni Dave Abbott and Rob Phythian co-founded the company that sells statistics from about 20,000 sporting events annually to the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter in fall 2010.
Abbott, chief operating officer, said Phythian, SportsData’s president, had a strong connection with St. Thomas’ alumni office, and the duo made an arrangement with the university that allowed SportsData access to space and students in return for giving St. Thomas equity in the company.
“We leveraged our relationships that we had with the University of St. Thomas, and we wanted to take a run at doing it better than anybody else in the market,” Abbott said. “Our idea was to take on the big competitor, the 800-lb gorilla in the space, and we’ve done very well in competing against them.”
Abbott said the unique part of the process is that students are one of the driving forces behind the company, another benefit tied to SportsData’s relationship with the university.
“It’s funny, you don’t see people my age doing this,” Abbott said. “You hear these concepts of digital immigrant and digital migrants. The people who have played video games I swear have a different path through their brain.”
SportsData employs about 125 part-time, many of whom are students, and 20 full-time employees. Sophomore Chris Connelly has worked for SportsData for a year and a half and credits convenience and the work atmosphere as the reason he stuck around.
“It’s really nice just to stumble in here after class and get your work done for the day and then go home right after that,” Connelly said. “It’s been very convenient.”
Connelly both enters data and works as a supervisor on the weekends, and he said employees’ hours are often up in the air thanks to the unpredictable nature of sports.
“With sports, you never know what’s going to happen, some games go into extra innings, and sometimes you’re here for four, five hours just for what regularly is just a three hour baseball game,” Connelly said. “It doesn’t happen often where it’s that extreme of a possibility, but I know some supervisors have even been here until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. doing games still.”
Ted Harmon is a data entry supervisor for SportsData who graduated from Carleton College in 2013. He said one of the most challenging things about his position is learning how to troubleshoot when unexpected circumstances surface.
“You have to be aware of everything going on, especially when it gets really busy,” Harmon said. “It’s mostly manageable because we have such talented individuals working for us that a lot of time they’ll bring issues up before they even become issues.”
Abbott said although a large majority of the students interested in working for SportsData are males, the company does employ one female.
Unlike in the sporting events these student track every day and night, a lack of cheering in the SportsData’s Murray Herrick office doesn’t reflect a lack of talent.
“We’ve got some talent here,” Abbott said. “Honestly, we’ve tried to have temporary employees, and we’ve brought in people that we’ve advertised for in the market in general and honestly the best people we’ve found have come from St. Thomas.”
Briggs LeSavage can be reached at lesa4364@stthomas.edu.