The Long Road to EliteTime: Why Building Our AI Was Worth It

Hey everyone, it's Ernesto again, a co-founder of EliteTime.

Last time, I shared a bit about how EliteTime was born from a parent's struggle. Today, I want to give you a peek behind the curtain at the real journey of building our core technology. The one thing people don't see is the immense amount of work it takes to make something simple and magical for you. And I want to spend a few minutes peeling the curtain back a bit...to let you understand the time and effort.

When my co-founder and I started, the idea was powerful, but the execution was daunting. We wanted an AI to watch a basketball game and say, "That's a basket!" just like a human would. But AI doesn't have eyes or common sense. It only has data, and we had to teach it to "see".

This led to years of trial and error. We had to go through hundreds and hundreds of hours of game footage, manually tagging every single basket. We taught the computer to understand what a basketball ball is. We taught it to understand what a basketball hoop is. Every layup, every jump shot, every three-pointer—each one had to be carefully labeled. This painstaking process of tagging and training the model was the foundation of everything we've built.

We sometimes take for granted what we as humans are able to easily learn the concept of something...a basket ball...a basketball hoop...a made shot.

We saw our model get it wrong so many times. It would miss a shot because of a bad camera angle, get confused by a fast break, or mistake a dribble for a shot. Each error was a learning opportunity, and we would go back to the drawing board, making adjustments and feeding the model more data to help it learn. Luckily I have hours and hours of my son's game footage. It was a slow, sometimes frustrating process.

But with each correction and each new training session, we saw our AI get smarter. The misses became fewer.

The accuracy improved. It began to see the game in a way that truly delivered on our vision. It's been a long journey, but every hour, every tagging session, and every late night has been completely worth it.

And the best part? We're not done yet. We're still actively teaching and improving the model. The future features on our roadmap—like a player hub and a coach's dashboard—will require even more advanced AI capabilities. We're committed to this ongoing work because we believe it will make EliteTime an invaluable tool for you, the parents, players, and coaches who make this sport so great.

Thank you for being on this journey with us.

ee

😁