Team Clutch Masters wins Sports Illustrated's first-ever Hackathon
Team Clutch Masters won top honors at Sports Illustrated's first Hackathon on Sunday. The team spent 24 hours programming and parsing sports statistics with the goal of creating a "clutch rating" for athletes. Clutch Masters was composed of Brett Woodward, Alex Tandy and Daniel Lee, and bested six other teams during the course of the competition.
"We were thrilled to win first place, and want to congratulate the other participants," said Woodward. "The projects we saw were truly impressive. A big thanks to SI for hosting us, and we hope to be back next time to defend the title.
"At first, we wanted to go even bigger with our idea," Woodward continued. "We ultimately decided to simplify it down to something we knew we could accomplish by the end of the time limit. We found ourselves working right up until the buzzer, and were really happy with the result."
Judges also honored Team Max Throw, composed of father and son Paul and Max Langdon (Max is 12 years old), with the Innovation Award for creating a football with a chip that would measure revolutions, distance and other metrics. The winner for best business and sports integration was a team that met in line for the event: Crowd Play Sports. This team was comprised of Gene Chorba, Anthony Bakshi, Tapiwanashe Ndlovu, and Vijay Permareddy.
The presentations were judged by Time Inc. CTO Colin Bodell, Sports Illustrated senior vice president of marketing Damian Slattery, SI.com executive editor Ryan Hunt and ScoreBig CIO Alison Burnham.
"We were blown away by the quality of the presentations we were able to examine," said Hunt. "We know that we've only scratched the surface of the potential of these ideas, and we look forward to finding new applications for these programs throughout the year and in future Hackathons."
Read more about the event on Twitter using the hashtag #SIHacks.
