Dick’s Sporting Goods has announced a three-year technology partnership between GameChanger, the digital scorekeeping and management app for baseball and softball teams, and the National Federation of State High School Associations, the national leadership organization for high school sports and activity programs.
Available at no charge, GameChanger by Dick’s Sporting Goods will allow coaches to monitor their pitchers’ health with pitch count alerts and inning-by-inning pitch count recaps. GameChanger will serve as the exclusive partner in the baseball and softball app category for the NFHS, which writes playing rules in baseball and softball for the 15,000-plus high schools nationwide that sponsor the sports.
“GameChanger is committed to elevating the youth sports experience by doing everything we can to reduce arm injuries among young pitchers,” said Ed Plummer, senior vice president, Dick’s Sporting Goods. “This partnership between GameChanger and the NFHS will help build awareness of the availability of this important pitch count technology with coaches and high school baseball and softball communities across the country.”
GameChanger gives coaches access to more than 150 statistics, instant spray charts and a suite of team management features, including game and practice scheduling and a player attendance tracker.
GameChanger also works in conjunction with MaxPreps, a website for high school athletics news, stats and recruiting, to sync game data and pitch counts automatically between both platforms. More than 13 million games have been scored using GameChanger since its launch in 2009.
In 2016, the NFHS mandated each NFHS member state association develop its own pitching restrictions policy based on the number of pitches thrown during a game, in response to concerns regarding student safety. In efforts to help coaches and states comply with the new pitch count guidelines, GameChanger has built a tool that can automatically send each state association a state-wide pitch count report.
“We are thrilled to be partnering with GameChanger,” said Bob Gardner, executive director, NFHS. “GameChanger is already the preferred app for 70 percent of the high school baseball state champions in the U.S. this past year, and we hope that our partnership can help connect more coaches around the country to GameChanger’s world-class solutions.”
