Hey, I'm Andy the Hoops Geek!
On the hoopsgeek.com I am making life easier for basketball coaches.
My obsession with basketball started when I was little: my Dad mounted a basketball hoop to the garage in our driveway and I immediately fell in love with the game. Some of my fondest childhood memories are my first dunks on that shaky little 8ft hoop.
I've played basketball ever since, never professionally, but at a decent amateur level, and I follow the NBA closely.
Starting thehoopsgeek.com (2016)
I started thehoopsgeek.com back in 2016 as a passion project. I was working as a developer at the time, getting a little bored at my day job, and I wanted somewhere to talk about the sport I love.
The blog wandered for a few years, articles about training, gear reviews, basketball shoes, random things I was geeking out on at the time. There was no real plan. I'd just write whenever I had something I wanted to figure out or share. Honestly, that's still what I love about running it.
Creating the Play Creator (2023)
In 2023, I wanted to start writing articles for basketball coaches, strategy, set plays, X's and O's, practice ideas. The trouble was that every coaching article needs diagrams, and the play-diagramming tools I could find were either clunky desktop programs, paywalled apps for college programs, or static-image generators that felt fifteen years old.
So I made the classic developer mistake and asked myself how hard it could be to just code one myself. About six months later I shipped a free prototype.
I expected a handful of coaches to use it. What I got instead was a steady stream of emails: could the plays animate, could you share a play without making someone install an app, could it handle a practice plan, what about equal playing time for youth teams. Most of what's in the app today exists because somebody emailed me asking for it.
The All-in-One Basketball Coaching App Suite (Today)
Today, what started as a quick play-diagramming side project does a lot of things, Play Creator, a Practice Planner, a Rotation Maker, and a live Substitution Manager, all in one app.
The thing I'm proudest of is that 200,000+ users have signed up, which is honestly something I still don't quite believe. You can try the whole thing for free.
So what's next?
On thehoopsgeek.com I'll keep writing articles and shipping new features into the coaching app. If you have an idea for an article, a feature you'd love to see in the suite, or just want to say hi, email me at andy@thehoopsgeek.com or use the form below. The roadmap is built almost entirely from these messages.
