BBALLWhere it started
Long before apps, feeds and followers, a basketball coach was trying to solve a simple problem: how do you keep track of the players you are trying to develop?
In 1993, while studying at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, training as a coach and coaching, the founder started his first development project. He called it B-Ball Fascination, and it was built around development work for Ammerud Basket. In the same years he worked as a coach developer for Save the Children in Eritrea. Different courts, same question: what does a player need to get better, and who is keeping track?
From 1995 the answers went into databases. Long-term development, tournaments and registrations were logged in FileMaker, years before anyone talked about sports data.
Picture all the information basketball creates: practices, who showed up, games, minutes played, results, video, photos, club rosters, stats, memberships.
It flows like a river. You see what is on the surface, and the rest runs past and is lost.
BBall is the well. It gathers everything, filters it, and sends it on to the people who need it. And it keeps it, ready to be used again whenever you need it.
BBall — connecting the world of basketballFrom the BBall presentation at Connect Vest, 20 October 2011
THE ROAD HERE
From FileMaker databases to an app in players’ pockets.
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1993–1997
B-Ball Fascination
A student project at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences, built around development work for Ammerud Basket, alongside coach development for Save the Children in Eritrea.
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1995
The first databases
Long-term player development and tournaments, with registrations kept in FileMaker from 1995–96.
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2002–2004
Players log their own game
New attempts at our own solutions: online databases where players register their own activity. Around us, sport IT was centrally controlled and poorly connected. We wanted it in the hands of the people using it.
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2005
National team duty
The founder begins working with Norway’s age-group national teams, a new set of players to follow, spread across the whole country.
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2006
The first BBall
The first BBall specification and a first website. It didn’t take off, but it gave us the logo we still use today, and the core ideas: activity logs, attendance, and following players who don’t live in the same place. Those ideas were put to work following Norway’s U16 and U18 national teams.
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2008
First delivery
In March 2008 the specification became software, delivered with our development partner Digital Logix.
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2011
BBall.com goes live
BBall.com launched on 8 September 2011, with tools for federations, clubs, parents, tournaments, coaches and players: a live digital scoresheet with its own tablet app, online video upload of games, a simulation game and video tools. As far as we know, BBall was the first solution in the world to offer dedicated digital scoresheets as part of its own ecosystem. Six weeks later we presented the vision of the well at Connect Vest.
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2014–now
Back to the court
We stopped trying to serve everyone around the game and focused on the two people closest to it: the player and the coach.
TWO CHOICES
They made BBall harder to build. They are also why it still exists.
No ads. Your data stays yours.
When Facebook arrived, everyone had an opinion about how BBall should plug into it. The founder went the other way: BBall would stay ad-free and protect the privacy of the people using it.
It made partners and investors harder to find. The choice has stood ever since.
Players and coaches first.
A player and a coach need different things than parents, clubs and federations, and not everyone around the game is working to make the game better.
One tool for everyone ended up serving no one well. So after 2014, BBall became a dedicated assistant for players and coaches.
What that means today
There are no walls, reels, stories or ads. If you don’t play or coach, BBall has nothing for you, and the app stays empty until you start using it. It isn’t there to entertain you or win you likes.
It is there to help you train: plan practices and track attendance, talk to your teammates and coach, and log injuries, sleep, motivation and fatigue.
Along the way the founder kept learning, with further studies in pedagogy, psychology, innovation and entrepreneurship, and a period testing the project with a lecturer at UC Berkeley. What came out of it is simple: a product for players, by players, for people who genuinely love basketball.
Because youlove the game.