How A Volunteer Youth Basketball Coach Launched A $5 Million Digital Playbook App

Keith Rumjahn was running out of ideas.  As a volunteer coach for a U14 boys basketball team in Toronto, Rumjahn did everything he could to grab the attention of his players but nothing was working.  The first time coach’s attempts to implement whatever drills and plays he could remember from his high school playing days were resulting in chaos.  Noticing the surging popularity of iPhone apps, Rumjahn decided to create a digital playbook to help himself out.  When he unveiled his app during practice, his players actually started to buy in and listen to him.

“That was like a ‘wow’ moment, because the kids thought it was a video game.  They were like woah, I want to touch it!  They actually did what I told them to do for the very first time all season,” Rumjahn excitedly told us.

The app, called CoachBase, has grown into a company valued at around $4-5 million dollars in five short years.  CoachBase is free to download and offers plays and drills for coaches to digitally send to their players.  Users can also create and send their own plays out.  CoachBase currently has over 20 sports, although basketball remains the focus.  What differentiates CoachBase from similar apps is the option to purchase highly premium content for a monthly fee.  Paid subscribers are given access to plays and drills drawn up by prominent NBA coaches, namely Lionel Hollins of the Brooklyn Nets and Jeff Hornacek of the Phoenix Suns.  To date, CoachBase has amassed nearly half a million paid downloads across all platforms, even ranking #1 across all paid sports apps for a two month span.

The rapid rise of CoachBase is quite an inspirational tale for those looking to make a mark in the sports technology industry.  The first major point of success closely followed the release of the iPad.  While at first unsure of the potential use of the iPad in a day and age where everyone has a smart phone and a laptop, Rumjahn decided to give CoachBase a shot on the iPad anyway.  Immediately, he found that the digital playbook was perfect for the iPad; a phone was just too small for ten people to huddle around.  In 2011, Apple took notice and put CoachBase up on their website as a featured app for the iPad.

“That propelled into a lot of other opportunities.  It was used in the Kevin Durant movie Thunderstruck. Flip Saunders (coach of the Washington Wizards at the time) emailed me and told me to add a certain feature. It was crazy.  A lot of things took off at that time. It was making me money, enough so that it could cover my salary, so I quit my accounting software job.  No brainer.”

After quitting his job and moving back to Hong Kong, Rumjahn decided to apply for an accelerator.  An accelerator is basically a company that provides a business with a capital investment and with connections to industry mentors, which can lead to other investors.  CoachBase was accepted to a joint accelerator with Techstars and Nike+ so Rumjahn and his team flew out to Nike HQ for the three-month long program. There, Rumjahn presented his app to Nike CEO Mark Parker and received feedback from Nike Basketball and Nike Soccer.   Through some links, CoachBase met with Kauffman Sports, leading to partnerships with some of the NBA coaches that the firm represents.  

“Its huge partnering with these NBA coaches.  Before partnering with Kauffman everyone was telling me to partner with NBA coaches so I went online and tried to find their emails.  Impossible! Even if you do email them they don’t respond.  Having Kauffman helped us – I think they reached out to us because of Nike, so one thing lead to another.”

At that point, CoachBase had begun to establish itself in the sports app market.  A series of events spawning from Rumjahn’s difficulty connecting with his players ended up creating a multi-million dollar company.  

But Rumjahn is still looking to improve and grow the app.

“We have a successful digital playbook, but teams practice almost every day, so for our next move we created a practice planner.  We’re mainly targeting amateur coaches for middle-school teams and below. We did some studies like how much time does a coach spend on planning for a 5th graders practice. 10 minutes? Are they winging it? So imagine if you had a really well planned, age-appropriate practice schedule for your entire season.  The app’s called Practice Planner, and it’s coming out in a few weeks.  We have a lot of partners for the app.  I’m really excited.”