Catapult costs $800 a unit. STATSports isn't far behind. Both are built for professional teams with sports science staff and enterprise procurement budgets.
Every basketball trainer and coach we've talked to is tracking their players with notebooks, spreadsheets, and gut instinct — not because they don't care about data, but because nothing has ever existed at a price that works for them.
We're college students building this during the school year, with limited time and limited budget. Every decision has to be the right one. We're not VC-backed. We're not doing a Kickstarter. We're making it with our own hands and shipping it in public.
Handles the business side — customer discovery, go-to-market, making sure we're building something trainers and coaches will actually pay for.
EE at UCLA. Works on the hardware side with Kai — analog circuits, PCB layout, sensor integration. The person asking "will this survive a season in a gym bag."
CE at UCLA. Works on the hardware side with Ryan — firmware, embedded software, the data pipeline from sensor to coach's iPad. The person asking "will this data actually mean something."
The performance gap between pro programs and youth basketball isn't about coaching quality. Pro coaches have data. Youth coaches and private trainers have instinct.
Slingshot closes that gap — not with a watered-down version of what the pros use, but with something built specifically for the person running a training session at 6am before their day job. The trainer with 15 clients. The coach with 22 kids and no budget.
We're building the tool they should have had all along.
Beyond the three founders, we're building out a small early team to help with field outreach, health data, and brand as we move toward the summer pilot.
Wilson alum. Helps with trainer and academy outreach across LA, OC, and SD — supporting the team's in-person presence with the operators we're building this for.
Bioengineering at UCLA. Works on the health and physiology side — making sure what we measure actually reflects athlete load and recovery. The person asking "is this data telling us something real about the body."
Wilson alum. Advises on media, brand, and how Slingshot shows up publicly as the product moves from build to pilot.
That's by design. We're four college students trying to make an impact in an industry we love, and we don't have a real company yet — we have a hypothesis and the time to prove it out.
The 2026 pilot makes us $0. Hardware ships at breakeven. What we're trading for is feedback from real trainers, real data from real sessions, and the chance to build the version of this product that operators actually want — not the one we'd build alone in a dorm room.
Revenue comes later. After the product earns it.
If you train or coach basketball and you've been waiting for this, we want to talk. 5 design partner slots for Summer 2026 — priority access, direct input into the product, and founding pricing.