NEW YORK — DribbleUp founder Eric Forkosh theorizes that Americans lag behind the rest of the world in soccer because youth in this country have less access to quality training and less emphasis on regular drills — and he offers a simple, portable solution.
In the back room of Long Island City coffee shop Sweetleaf, the 24-year-old Brooklyn native and creator of the successful smart basketball sets his new invention on the ground: the DribbleUp soccer ball, with a companion smartphone app that optically tracks its movement. He stations his iPhone on a small tripod. The camera calibrates by recognizing one of the ball’s three logos, then Forkosh starts a series of footwork exercises arranged into a playlist. (“Instead of songs, you have drills,” he quipped.)
A soccer instructor appears on the phone and demonstrates the activity, which in this case is rapid-fire side-to-side taps. Two cones appear on the screen, superimposed via augmented reality; they stay green when he keeps the ball between them but go red and prompt vocal encouragement from the trainer when they veer outside. A speed meter lights upon the side to track his pace.
Even in these tight quarters, Forkosh is able to practice his technique under the watchful gaze of a former professional player — all video instruction is offered by Yannick Salmon, who played for Jamaica’s international youth teams and overseas in Finland. The app can also offer data such as velocity and curvature of shots, but Forkosh’s face lights up while discussing the ball drills.
“Goal tracking is important, but daily touches is what I’m very, very passionate about,” Forkosh said. “I don’t know if this is necessarily [the answer], but I know it’s the right direction.”
Salmon, 27, is now a full-time coach running the Salmon Soccer Training program in New York City. He said touches and ball mastery drills are a regular part of the homework he gives his youth players, so the DribbleUp soccer ball and app — which launched today on Kickstarter — is a fun and interactive tool to impart the importance of those exercises. When one of his 10-year-old players used a demo version of the app, the boy didn’t take a break for 30 minutes.
“It’s a staple of our program that I give to all my kids,” Salmon said. “It’s so important. Most players around the world, they just spend all the day with the ball. The kids in America are a little bit different. They have more things consuming their minds, so anytime you can give them those touches and just fall in love with the ball, it’s going to have a big effect over years to come.”
DribbleUp soccer is the successor to the basketball and shares Forkosh’s vision of being “a training tool that is accessible to everyone.” The genesis of the smart sporting equipment was born from he and his younger brother, Marc, 20, playing and practicing as kids. Eric freely admits that Marc is the more athletic and more competitive athlete, but Eric always had a passion for robotics, even building one that played soccer.
“He was playing sports, and I was building robots that played sports,” Eric Forkosh said.
Marc (left) and Eric Forkosh
Forkosh studied engineering at Cooper Union while continuing to work in robotics on the side. He invented a commercial product called Drone Cell, a cellular module that connected drones to the Internet, and collaborated with a college group to design a couple health-care products — two devices monitor a patient’s heart and another detects edema. (Those are among the four patents in Forkosh’s name.) He even took a year off from school to teach a robotics course at Cooper Union on Micro-controller projects while consulting for Social Bicycles and earning his pilot’s license.
Their basketball product featured Gabe Gibbs as the video trainer — he’s worked with Metta World Peace, DeMar DeRozan and Gilbert Arenas, among other NBA players — and received early funding from the Dorm Room Fund (a student-run venture fund) and subsequently from angel investors including Detroit Pistons forward Anthony Tolliver. It also gained support from New York City’s Future Works incubator program that backs local entrepreneurs. The Charlotte Hornets have used theDribbleUp basketball at their youth camp.
Crucially, no electronics are embedded in either the basketball or soccer ball. This frees the balls from needing charging; Forkosh found that user compliance diminished with extra instruction. As Salmon noted, all of his trainees are on their smartphones all the time anyway. The lack of microchips in the ball also eliminates any subtle weight distortions that will affect the trajectory of shots or bounces. The use of augmented reality and video instruction helps players know immediately how they’re faring.
“There’s something about that live feedback that’s so critical,” Forkosh said, adding: “If you’re not measuring, then you can’t learn from it.”
DribbleUp demonstration at New York City’s Upper 90 soccer store
There’s a social dynamic, too, in which players can compete with friends over the scores they earn doing drills and share videos of slick freestyle maneuvers. For the shooting tracker, the Forkosh brothers researched average skill levels of goalies at youth, amateur and professional levels. From that data, they are compiling a future feature that will determine whether a user’s shot is likely to have been saved or not.
“What we found was, there’s a pattern between where it hits in the goal, where the goalie is, and the speed of it and the curve of it,” Eric Forkosh said.
The ball was meticulously designed: yellow to aid with visibility in various lighting, with match-quality texture and hand-stitched panels. The app runs on the same patented technology that power the basketball version, which was made possible by smartphone camera and processor improvements in the last few years.
“I’m not trying to change anything, I’m just trying to make it better,” Forkosh said. “I’m just trying to make it more magical.”
