New Invention Idea: RFID Sports Analytics

Earlier this week I was eating lunch outside of my office in New York City and had an amazing stream of consciousness that led to my next brilliant idea. My thoughts went something like this "Man its nice out....wouldn't it be so much more fun to be a teacher and get to go outside and coach baseball on a nice day like today...man baseball practice was fun....basketball practice was a lot more physically demanding but also fun...ha ha remember when Coach Morano and Depalma used to always make us shoot 20 free throws and the guy who got the most in didn't have to run the next set of sprints and Sharples somehow always made 18 or 19 but they used to catch him cheating...wouldn't it be cool if there were some way to track the whole team's foul shot % with RF ID chips so coaches don't have to do random checks to see if one of their players is cheating....

The idea is using RF ID to track sports analytics; makes and misses in basketball which can be applied to a wide array of things like high school team foul shooting practice to NBA arena halftime contests. In baseball the RF ID chips can measure the speed of pitches more accurately than Juggs guns by using the R*T=D formula. Football contests like the punt pass and kick contests could be measured easily and more accurately than just measuring based on sight.

I ordered a RF ID Experimentation Kit from ThinkGeek.com this week to set up my prototype. It comes with a bunch of software development libraries to integrate with the RF ID reader so I'm pretty pumped about that. The plan for the prototype is to embed a small chip in a mini basketball and clip a few RF ID readers to a mini hoop. I'll whip up some code to interact with a simple application (either web application or MS Access form) and then I'll be ready to show off my invention.

Kaplogna.com Update

Following Team Fair Lawn's Kaplogna BBQ & Beer Pong Fest dramatic bracket championship victory I updated the functionality of Kaplogna.com. The bracket web pages now query a MySQL database table to display the winners of each match that already took place. In addition there are hyperlinks for each match which display a pop-up window with a game summary and pictures. I'm playing around with several Ajax frameworks like Real Simple History, to try and fix the well documented Ajax history/back button pain point for the Kaplogna web application.

I posted the Kaplgona April 21st bracket photos on Picasa. Enjoy!