Sports Thread Adds Age Verification to Its Virtual Networking App to Empower Young Athletes

Built by Saritasa, Sports Thread is a platform with an audience of 2 million people who use it to help promising athletes everywhere, and is ranked in the top 50 sports app list on the Apple App Store rankings

DENVER, March 23, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Saritasa announced its latest age verification update for Sports Thread, an application for empowering young athletes to help them share virtual resumes with colleges and high school coaches. The new "Sports Thread Play Safe" update adds safety measures to the application to protect youth and requires an age verification step for attending youth events.

Sports Thread gives student-athletes nationwide a networking tool to create an athletic profile. As a first step towards building their professional career, young athletes can leverage, track, and display their stats while connecting with recruiters in real-time. Users can also access a resource center with more information about colleges of their choice. Athletes can upload videos of their workouts, games, and personal highlight tapes and showcase their personalities and strengths to help coaches identify the players that meet their specific requirements.

"Sports Thread Play Safe" is a new service offered by Sports Thread to companies who use Sports Thread's registration and data capture product to collect age verification data on attendees of youth sporting events. Athletes, parents, fans, and coaches who register through Play Safe receive a badge on their profiles on Sports Thread. The preliminary pricing of this product is $10 per player from participants attending events hosted by Sports Thread software-as-a-service clientele.

One challenge Sports Thread faced was young athletes "playing down" or playing into age decisions below their actual age to gain an unfair advantage by signing up to play younger, less physically developed athletes. Companies hosting youth sports events often ignore this problem and encounter frequent complaints from coaches and parents attending the event who believe there is an unfair competition happening without age verification. Some youth sports event companies undergo a manual process where they ask players and their parents to present birth certificates to them, and event staff individually review each birth certificate to ensure age eligibility for their event, creating hours of unnecessary work.

With design input from Sports Thread, Saritasa  engineered an automated solution that would reduce staff overhead. Saritasa developed a new registration system allowing parents or athletes to capture a photo of their birth certificate, driver's license, state ID, or passport which is instantly scanned and checked for forgery as part of the event registration process. This process makes Sports Thread the only company on the market today that can instantly verify an athlete's age through an automated process for event eligibility.

"Sports Thread, with its cutting-edge technology, has helped greatly transition our youth football division to the next level in player certification," Ace Carney, Executive Director, Prospects by Sports Illustrated.

"I use Sports Thread and it's a wonderful and easy process to track the kids and see where they are going. [The app] makes it very easy to send out one and only one good link without anything getting crossed over, " said one academy coach.

For more information on Saritasa's development services, please visit www.saritasa.com.

About Saritasa

Headquartered in Newport Beach, California, Saritasa aims to empower global brands with innovative, customized solutions that fit their needs and support an ever-evolving technology ecosystem. Saritasa specializes in custom software development, mobile development, augmented reality and virtual reality development, IoT solutions, web, database development, and DevOps. Founded in 2005, the Saritasa team employs over 140 employees and has delivered thousands of successful software, hardware, and mobile app projects to a range of clients across multiple industries.

About Sports Thread

Sports Thread, based in Denver, Colorado, offers a free social media-based, self-promotion, and communications software platform for the 125 million student-athletes, coaches, parents, and fans in the youth sports market. The company was founded by 29-year-old Sean Leary, a former Division 1 college pitcher who was featured in USA Today as one of "Top 10 Most Innovative Entrepreneurs of 2021." The Sports Thread app is consistently a Top-100 ranked sports app in the Apple App Store out of more than 40,000 sports apps. The Sports Thread network, including its mobile app, Software-as-a-Service platform, and social media sites, is used by more than one million individuals in the youth athletic community annually.

Media Contact:

Chelsea Freeman
Firecracker PR
(888) 317-4687, ext. 706
[email protected]

SOURCE Saritasa