Much like the first month of the football season, the last month at STATSdraft has led to some unexpected outcomes. Learnings from our leagues at Johnny’s Tavern have blown open our understanding of the spaces STATSdraft can thrive in. Leaps of faith have led to connecting with exemplars in the sports industry. And this weekend we will engage in our first hackathon.
A hackathon is a code sprint where you start with nothing but an idea and spend 24 hours developing a product or demo that you can show off to participants at the end. This hackathon is called Launchpad and will include 10 other early stage companies.
Participating in events like this still blows me away. I’m learning about wireframes and prototypes, and even being able to answer the occasional question. But the thing that blows me away the most is how our connection to it came in much the same way as most of our connections along this journey have come; as parents.
Launchpad is sponsored by Douglas County CORE, and CORE has been at the center of our journey as entrepreneurs since the beginning. But the way we got connected is even more integral to the story of STATSdraft and its parent company aSsisi Inc.
Melody and I center our lives on family. Assisi is actually a word that represents family, it means sister in Shona, a Bantu language of the Shona people of Zimbabwe, aSsisi Inc represents the genuine way we have tried to grow our connections to the sports tech industry. You see, I created STATSdraft to teach our friend Farai, who is originally from Zimbabwe, what I knew about football, and I know Farai because our daughters are sisters.
Since the first day they met in kindergarten, Francesca Eloise Enneking and Auralai Carmen Rusinga knew that they were sisters. Their relationship connected our families as evidenced every time Farai calls us “m’fana,” the word for brother in his native language of Shona. That’s what our name represents, the relationship between Francesca and Auralai that started this whole thing.
Throughout our growth, that culture of aSsisi has remained. Dustin developed the app after Melody told him about the idea while our children played together. Our connection to CORE has been born of that parent relationship also. One of the cofounders of CORE, Kyle Johnson, is a man who we met first in PTO meetings while our children attended Pinckney Elementary School in Lawrence, Kan. Even our recent lunch with Chiefs Ambassador Shawn Barber immediately found a way to center on our identity as parents and we were able to get to know each other through stories of coaching our children and steering their educations.
Maybe that sharing of our family is why our upcoming Lawrence Chamber of Commerce ribbon-cutting at Johnny’s in North Lawrence feels so special. Not only will we be able to offer STATSdraft for the Chiefs Monday night game that evening, but we get to share in our family tradition of going to Johnny’s on a Monday for cheese pizza.
We hope you can join us at 4 o’clock as we cut the ribbon on the next stage of our STATSdraft journey. And don’t forget to play along using the following link.
Download and start playing STATSdraft today.
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