Why I'm Finally Building Scorecrypt

More than a decade ago I registered the domain. This is the story of how I got here.

More than a decade ago, I registered scorecrypt.com. I bought the domain the first time I tried to find my son's weigh-in time on TrackWrestling and thought, "there has to be something better than this." That was as a parent, watching the tool that runs the sport handle my kid's information like it was 2003.

I didn't build anything that year. Or the next. I had a job. I had a son in wrestling. I was officiating IHSA and IESA every weekend I wasn't on a sideline. I told myself somebody else would build the platform wrestling needs. They didn't. So here I am.

Solo founder. Sole developer. Three months from launch. Targeting Illinois first because that's where my network is. Building the all-in-one platform that wrestling has needed for at least a decade and somehow still doesn't have. This post is the why, not the what. The product is the easy part. The harder question is "why I think I can build this." That's the one worth answering.

The roles that built the spec

I've been around wrestling long enough to have seen it from every chair in the room. Each one taught me something specific that ended up in Scorecrypt.

Athlete. I wrestled. I know what it feels like to be a teenager and have no idea what your weight is going to be on Saturday because the practice room scale is broken and the coach is writing numbers on a clipboard nobody can read. I know what it feels like to lose a match nobody recorded and have nothing to show for it the next year except a memory. Athletes deserve to own their own data.

Official. I started reffing wrestling young and never stopped. Twenty years of IHSA and IESA assignments. I've worked dual meets in small-town gyms and conference tournaments in college arenas. I've watched coaches lose lineup cards in their truck consoles ten minutes before a meet. I've watched scoring tables panic-rebuild brackets on legal pads when the laptop crashed. Officials see the operational reality of the sport more honestly than anyone, because we show up to the mess and have to keep things moving regardless. That perspective is in the bones of this product.

Wrestling dad. My son Owen started wrestling in second grade. He just finished his freshman year at Sacred Heart University. That is twelve years and counting of being a wrestling parent, four of those as the parent of a college recruit. I've stood in the stands at every level of this sport and tried to find out what time my kid weighs in via four different group chats and a tournament app that doesn't update. I've sat through high school recruiting conversations where the coach didn't have any way to show me video, performance trends, or even a printed roster. Parents are not the enemy of a wrestling program. They're the unpaid logistics team. They deserve a tool that respects them.

Volunteer club coach. This is where I learned how brutal the admin load actually is. Tracking dues by hand. Chasing waivers. Texting eighteen parents about practice cancellations and getting four "wait, what?" replies anyway. The volunteer coach is doing this on top of a full-time job. I am not building Scorecrypt for the well-funded program with an assistant athletic director and a full-time admin. I'm building it for the coach who's running practice at 5:30 AM and answering a parent question about uniform sizes during their lunch break.

Middle school head coach. Where I learned that wrestling at this level lives or dies on the parent relationship. You're not just coaching kids. You're coaching first-time wrestling families through a sport they don't understand yet. If your communication tool is a free messaging app with no audit trail and no parent visibility, you are one bad text screenshot away from a problem you do not want.

Varsity head coach. Where it all came to a head. My active stack as a varsity head coach: TrackWrestling for IHSA results and weight management. MatBoss for video and stats. BAND for team communication. Google Sheets for everything that didn't fit anywhere else. Social accounts for parent reach. Plus my phone's notes app, plus a clipboard, plus a binder I lugged around like it was 1995.

That's six tools and a binder. None of them talk to each other. None of them have a coach-first mental model. And I'm paying for most of them.

This is the moment most founders point to and say "and that's when I knew." For me there was no single moment. There was a slow ten-year accumulation of "why is this still like this." The domain has been waiting.

What officiating football taught me

Here's the part I want to be honest about.

I also officiate D1 and D3 college football. Football has more revenue, more attention, and more platform money than wrestling. The individual tools are stronger. As an official, I work with Hudl for film, DVSports for review, Refquest and Qwikref for assignment communication, and Arbiter Sports for scheduling, payments, and game-day logistics. Each one is a real product, built by a real team, with real funding behind it.

And it is still five separate tools. They don't talk to each other any better than the wrestling stack does. I am still juggling logins on a Saturday morning. I am still copying information from one platform to another. I am still trying to remember which app the assignment update came in on. Football has better point solutions than wrestling. It has the same fragmentation problem dressed in nicer clothes.

So the bet I'm making with Scorecrypt isn't "build the wrestling version of Hudl." That would be a fine product and somebody will eventually build it. The bet is "build the all-in-one wrestling has needed for a decade, in a way the existing tools haven't even attempted." Better point solutions don't add up to a coherent operating system. You have to build the operating system on purpose.

Three features, three scars

The product roadmap is long. Three features I want to call out specifically because they trace directly back to moments in the journey above.

Unified roster management. As a coach, I need one view of an athlete that holds everything: weight history, lifting numbers, match results, practice attendance, parent contacts, eligibility status. Right now that data lives in five tools and a Google Sheet. The unified athlete view is non-negotiable. If you can't see the whole athlete in one place, you're coaching with one eye closed.

Match video, with AI extraction for practice planning. Wrestling video has been "press record on a phone and hope" for too long. The next generation of practice planning runs on extracting structured information from match footage. Time on the mat in defense versus offense. Scoring sequences. Opponent tendencies. Position studies. We are at the moment in AI where this is finally feasible. If we don't build wrestling-native tools to take advantage of it, we'll get whatever generic sports AI startups decide to give us, and they don't know what a 3-point near fall looks like.

Match scoring paired with video recording. This is the small, sharp one. As a coach you usually have one parent volunteering to record and another keeping book. Scorecrypt's scoring module is designed to be used alongside the video module so the timestamps align automatically. One person scores. One person records. The video comes back already chaptered by period and tagged with scoring events. That feature exists because I have personally scrubbed through a 90-minute MP4 looking for the second-period escape that decided a meet, and it is a waste of a Sunday afternoon.

The mission, plain

Wrestling coaches are some of the most underpaid, overworked, deeply committed people in any sport. Many of them have full-time jobs on top of coaching. They put in seven-day weeks from November through March and most of October getting ready for it. They are not asking to be celebrities. They want to be on the mat with their warriors, not in front of a laptop reconciling weigh-in spreadsheets at 11 PM.

That's the mission of Scorecrypt, in one sentence. Reduce the administrative burden so coaches get more time to do what they actually love, which is coach.

I'm building this solo, alongside a day job at Microsoft as a Senior Customer Success Account Manager. I have a wife, Monica, who tests every release with the patience of a saint. I have AI development tools that make solo founder pace actually viable for the first time. I have three months until the August preseason window when this becomes real.

The ask

If you've read this far, you're probably a coach, a parent, an athlete, an official, or somebody who cares about one of those four. The waitlist is open. Joining it doesn't cost anything and doesn't lock you into anything. What it does do is put you on the list of people who get first access when Founding Member pricing opens later this summer. The Founding Member program is capped at 100 organizations and is meaningfully cheaper than standard pricing for the first year.

If you know a coach or AD who'd be interested, forward this. The Illinois coaching network this post is going to first is exactly who I built this for. Phase 1 is Illinois. After that, every state with a wrestling tradition that deserves better tools.

I'll be writing one of these every Tuesday between now and August. Honest stuff. The build, the lessons, the bets, the things I'm not sure about yet. If you want to ride along, the waitlist is below.

Brett Anderson IHSA/IESA wrestling official. D1/D3 college football official. Former varsity head wrestling coach. Owen's dad. Founder, Scorecrypt.