Statistics are a key part of any team.  Coaches, players and fans find them indispensable to track performance, and statistics are always the next piece of information you want after the score.

Stat Crew Legacy has become the defacto standard for stats in the college market. But professional teams have had to build their own platform and lower levels of competition and overseas teams have had very limited options for statistics.

PrestoSports has spent the last six years bringing sports information online, growing very successfully to serve over 300 colleges and conferences.  In the past year, we have also begun to expand into professional teams, high schools, and internationally.

The college market was an easy first step because schools were already paying staff to take stats and write stories about their teams.  They had existing marketing budgets and a student labor pool to help support their teams.

But outside of the college market, teams lack the necessary statistics software, so they have little more than a single schedule page to publish.  They are keeping scores and limited stats with paper or Excel, and manually creating reports that can take hours.  Even in colleges, many sports are underserved and budget constraints force athletic departments to make pragmatic decisions.

I wanted to change that.  Just as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube ushered a new era of people sharing information with each other, I want PrestoSports to do that with statistics.

PrestoSports Stats Entry will be free for everyone.  This is not just a free trial as we entice people to try a new platform. This will be a free service we offer to every team at every level.

Statistics are every team's first step towards bringing their sports information online.

Our stats entry app is an in-game scoring and statistics platform that supports Windows, Mac, and iPads and allows both offline and online statistics with real-time updates, creates extensive reports, is easy to use, has complete version history, and is 100% compatible with Stat Crew. It will be available for soccer, field hockey, ice hockey, and lacrosse in 2011-12 and football, volleyball, basketball, and baseball in 2012-13.

For NCAA and CIS members, soccer will be available this fall and ice hockey be ready by the winter season. By the end of 2011, teams outside of the NCAA and CIS will be able to sign up for free, and we will allow our users to invite opponents to try our stats platform.  Stats are inherently viral but require trust from both parties to agree on the official statistics for a game.

We will continue to offer PrimeTime as a premium way to let teams share live video and stats with their fans, as well as websites for online team marketing.

I want everyone from minor league teams to colleges to high schools to my 3rd grade daughter's soccer team to have the ability to enter statistics.  If you have the interest, we will give you the tools to let you make that a reality.