Sports Tech

Elias Sports Bureau, Game Plan

Def Method worked with the Elias team to develop a first iteration of Elias Game Plan, a sports app for game-day insights, player & teams stats, and betting data.

Services Provided

Engineering

Product Type

Mobile App

Technologies Used

Ruby on Rails, React Native, C#

Project Highlights

Def Method engineers worked with the Elias team to develop a first ever fan facing application - Elias Game Plan

Def Method modernized Elias’ legacy systems in order to transform large, complicated, historical data sets into useful insights

The new system extracts data from key data partners, merges with relevant statistics from the internal Elias system, and packages this into digestible player, team and game-day insights

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About

Since its founding in 1913, the Elias Sports Bureau has been considered the world’s foremost sports statisticians and historians, providing historical research and statistical services in the field of professional sports. Elias provides content, research and data support to most of the major sports television broadcasts and has worked with dozens of broadcasters - national and local - for more than 35 years on MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, and WNBA telecasts.

A company with primarily corporate customers like newspapers and television networks, Elias wanted to expand their user base to non-corporate sports fans. The team came to Def Method to build an application to reach this new audience. The resulting Elias Game Plan app was the first in their product suite to reach sports fans directly.

Challenge

To expand their user base to non-corporate sports fans, the Elias team uncovered an opportunity in the world of sports betting, addressing a user need to confidently participate in sports betting and fantasy sports with data and analytics. Elias had the relevant content, research and data to provide valuable insights, but they needed to be able to extract, transform and surface this information for a non-statistician to understand, and make the resulting insights available to users in an easy to access and dynamic way to help them participate and make sports betting decisions with confidence.

Solution

To meet this challenge, Def Method engineers worked with the Elias team develop a first ever fan facing application - Elias Game Plan. The development effort focused on pulling real time information from key data sources combined with relevant statistics from the internal Elias system, and then transforming the integrated data into insights to be surfaced in digestible formats to users.

This solution required modernizing Elias’ systems. As a company with a 100+ year history in the sports statistics industry, Elias’ legacy systems required careful navigation by the Def Method team in order to transform large, complicated, historical data sets into insights that users care about. The resulting application now uses react native on the front end, and rails on the backend and to synchronize the data.

Results

The first iteration of the Elias Game Plan app launched in the App Store and Google Play for iOS and Android devices, respectively.