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Up Your Game: An app designed to get young people active won the UK’s first ever sports hackathon

Up Your Game – an app designed to get young people active – won the UK’s first ever sports hackathon. The team behind it is now working to bring it to market

by Tom Walker, Leisure Media | Published in Sports Management 02 May 2016 issue 119
CEO of the Sports Technology Awards Rebecca Hopkins was the driving force behind the first ever sports hackathon
CEO of the Sports Technology Awards Rebecca Hopkins was the driving force behind the first ever sports hackathon

Mobile developers, coders and programmers from across the UK were invited to take part in the UK’s first ever sports hackathon in October 2015. With a brief to create an app capable of facilitating social change through sport, 10 teams took up the gauntlet and travelled to the Sport England HQ in central London.

During the 24-hour event – organised in partnership by Sport England and the Sports Technology Awards – coders were asked to come up with a solution which would encourage NEETs (young people not in education, employment or training) to get more physically active by playing sport.

From the 10 teams taking part, three were shortlisted and offered guidance on how to develop their ideas further. Following a six-month evaluation period, an app called Up Your Game was declared winner at the Sports Technology Awards event last month (15 April). The young innovators behind Up Your Game – led by programmer Rich Salt and inventor Emily Cummins – have now been given a £10,000 grant to help turn their idea into a business.

Getting started
The driving force behind the hackathon is Rebecca Hopkins, CEO of the Sports Technology Awards. She says the time was right for a competition which would tap into the burgeoning talent base of young programmers in the UK.

“I had a conversation with a friend in the US in early 2015 and he said we should look at the possibility of a hackathon,” Hopkins says. “After he explained what one was, I thought he was right – we should do one and include it as part of our annual awards.

“We pitched the idea to Sport England and they bought into it immediately, seeing the vision behind it. As an organisation they are very committed to sports tech and are very forward thinking. They’ve been amazingly supportive in terms of the subject we decided to tackle – youth inactivity – and of course hosting it and moving it forward as a concept.”

Icy inspirations
According to Salt, the winning app took inspiration from the wildly successful “ice bucket challenge” – a charity campaign for motor neurone disease which went viral in 2014. “We looked at the success of the bucket challenge and wanted to do something similar, but in a more controlled way,” Salt says.

“Our app is based on the concept that users can challenge others to match a physical activity challenge they’ve set themselves. A user could, for example, do 10 press ups or run 5 miles and then challenge their friends to do the same. The idea is to create challenges within social circles, which a group of people then see and want to get involved in.”

Salt adds that what makes the app different is that it hasn’t been created as be a piece of technology which attempts to solve a problem directly. Rather, it was conceived as an idea which is supported by tech.

“There are already a lot sports apps out there,” Salt says. “So our starting point was more on the lines of what do people do on a day to day basis? What kind of lives do they have and how could they be inspired to get more active? We wanted to find a way to tap into that and support it using technology.”

Up Your Game also looks to harness the power and reach of existing social media platforms. “We want the users of the app to be able to use their social media profiles and pull them all into one place.”

Sport England executive director, Tanya Joseph, says the app ticked all the boxes when it came to meeting the hackaton’s objectives. “Technology is key to getting young people active – and the hackathon was a great way to throw the challenge out there and see what came back,” she says. “The team behind Up Your Game stood out from the crowd because they really understood their target market and what makes them tick. We liked the idea behind the app because it promotes the have-a-go-attitude that is really important when trying to get people active.”

Next Steps
For Salt and his team – none of whom had taken part in a hackathon before – the experience has been inspiring. “We decided to sign up mainly because we thought it would be fun,” he says. “We didn’t set out with the attitude of desperately trying to get an end product out to market.

“There was no pressure on us to perform, which made us rather chilled about everything on the day. There might have been other groups who entered the process with the mindset of winning being a way to start a business, but for us it was quite a relaxed experience. Probably why we ended up winning it.”

Salt is now busy taking Up Your Game to the next level.  “We need a bit more cash to develop the app, so we need to decide  whether we go down the social enterprise route or set ourselves up as a private company,” he says.

The winner: Up Your Game

Aimed at 16-24 year olds, the winning app looks to get youngsters physically active by encouraging peer inspiration – while also utilising existing social media platforms. Up Your Game prompts friends to nominate each other for sporting challenges and to share their progress for “bragging rights”.

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