Who Are Those Guys?

Good question, thanks for asking.

A few of us are local coaches with high school and collegiate wrestling experience.

Another, a wrestling parent, is bound to the sport by virtue of a wrestling-crazed son.

We hale from all points of the globe, one from southern California, one from Pennsylvania and the other, our international rules expert, has seen life up close in Africa and Southeast Asia but has lived stateside most of his adult life. Right now, we all live in Palo Alto, California, just across the street from Stanford.

All are comfortable with technology, some more than others. We have programming skills and database expertise. We have a Stanford-degreed mathematician and an MBA. It's an over-educated group, to be sure.

But, primarily, we are wrestling enthusiasts working for the betterment of our sport.

A few years back one of us tried to create an statistical understanding of our high school team's performance. Nothing fancy, just tallying up who scored against whom, how they scored or were scored against, etc.

As many of you know, this is a labor intensive task. And, it occurred to us that, unlike other sports -- baseball, football and basketball, for example -- our sport is very poorly understood from a statistical perspective. Why is that?

Because most of the data is inaccessible, hand-written in traditional score books and typically squirreled away in a coaches desk drawer or file cabinet.

At that time, technology wasn't quite up to the task of scoring a wrestling match in real-time from the mat's edge. State-of-the-art laptops were bulky, battery limited and often difficult to use at a wrestling event. Some software existed, but it wasn't as user friendly as we envisioned and often didn't work well without an Internet connection.

Then, in 2010, Apple successfully created the "tablet" computing category with their breakthrough product, the iPad. One of us purchased an early unit and shortly thereafter realized its potential for simple, real-time, mat-side match scoring.

The iPad was easy to carry around and had a battery life of forever. Unlike the smaller iPhone, the iPad screen was large enough to support all the functionality we'd considered. And the touch interface, already omnipresent in the mobile world via the iPhone, was beautiful, highly responsive and available to developers.

Finally, we thought, a platform that made sense for the wrestling scoring environment! We could create an application that made it simple to score a wrestling match. And, from there, we could use the data, tucked away in the iPad, to generate all types of informative reports including one in the traditional score book format.

So, in May 2011 we formed our company and set to work. We focused on match scoring and, later, statistical reporting. Both of these are difficult to do well.

Season, schedule and roster management were also added. A grind, but ultimately very satisfying (sort of like wrestling). Forty eight builds later, gathering advice and field test results along the way, we introduced Takedown to the wrestling community on September 7th, 2012.

And, that's who we are.

For an updated information, see our About page.