On a recent rainy night, about two dozen spectators gathered at an Equinox Sports Club on the Upper West Side to watch a basketball game: the X-Men vs. Almost Famous. The teams are part of the Equinox Basketball League, which is made up of ex-pros, pickup lifers, and the occasional bona-fide player still looking for a call-up. (One of the players had to quit recently, after he was drafted by the Development League affiliate of the Brooklyn Nets.) Equinox is a fairly swanky gym; the league’s leading scorer is an account manager for a big pharmaceutical company, and a number of the other players work on Wall Street. The games have the feel of a Rucker League for the one per cent. On this particular night, seeding for the upcoming playoffs was at stake. Late in the second half, Almost Famous, the underdog, began to press and harass the X-Men’s bigger, slower guards. It paid off: Almost Famous won 60–47. According to Vasu Kulkarni, the team’s captain, the victory had everything to do with an analytic database and video-streaming service called Krossover.
Kulkarni, who is thirty, had reason to talk up the service: he created it, in 2010. Krossover compiles game film and breaks the video down to a seemingly infinite variety of plays and data points. The service only requires a tripod, a camera, and a videographer—often a coach—to film each game and upload the footage; by the next morning, the videos, which are dissected and tagged by analysts contracted by Krossover, are ready to be viewed. One day in 2014, while Kulkarni rested between runs at his local Equinox, a staffer inquired about the company behind the logo on Kulkarni’s T-shirt. That conversation led to a Krossover demo with Equinox execs; before long, the fitness goliath was paying roughly fifty thousand dollars a year for the service at locations in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and, soon, Boston. (Kulkarni said that three N.B.A. teams are also using Krossover to monitor high-ranking high-school and college prospects, but he declined to say which ones.)
If you happen to play in the leagues at those gyms, you can look up anything from your games online—from box scores to catch-and-shoot jump shots to the percentage of layups you convert (or don’t) with your left hand. As soon as each run finishes, Kulkarni uploads the memory cards, which store the videos from each game’s action, to the Krossover server; the players are e-mailed the next morning with an invitation to view their videos. “When I get that e-mail, I log on immediately,” Max Domnitz, an I.T. recruiter who plays for Almost Famous, said. “I first check out my shooting percentages, assists, and turnovers, and then I watch the game in full.” Domnitz estimated that he spends about two hours each week looking at his stats and thinking about how he can improve.
Kulkarni had the idea for the service when he was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, in 2008. After making Penn’s junior-varsity basketball team, he was taken aback by how arcane its scouting reports were. “The coaches were printing out these PowerPoints and then giving them to the players. It was all old-school.” The concept behind Krossover isn’t new: Synergy Sports and, later, the player-tracking system SportVU have been the go-to streaming services for college and N.B.A. teams for years. But both are expensive—Synergy costs more than six thousand dollars per year, while SportVU’s price tag reportedly comes in at about a hundred thousand dollars —leaving room in the market for cheaper options. Kulkarni began by contacting high schools, but Krossover didn’t take off until the University of Kentucky coach John Calipari recommended the site during a coaching clinic a year after it launched. “There were five hundred people in the audience at that clinic, and about two hundred signed up for Krossover,” Kulkarni said. “That was a crazy moment.”
Most of the Equinox players I spoke to said that they use Krossover to refine their games and tweak their weaknesses, but they also enjoy simply watching themselves on video, like it’s their own personal “SportsCenter.” Kulkarni says that he was a “bum-ass player with bad knees” before he began to study himself on tape. “I have more footage of myself playing than Steph Curry, and I’ve just about perfected my shooting form,” he told me. That evening, when he tried to show off a Euro step he had been practicing and was called for a travel, someone yelled from the crowd, “I bet you won’t post that online!” Kulkarni admitted that if a highlight is particularly embarrassing—a player giving up a wide-open layup after biting hard on a pump fake—he’ll enhance the video with some graphics and music and then share the video on Instagram with the entire league.
In some instances, a player’s lowlight video has been transformed into a meme enhanced with music and special effects. “Putting people to shame and blasting them internally helps to make the next game just a bit more competitive,” Keith Howard, a brand director for Moët & Chandon and the X-Men’s captain, told me. This past season, Howard noticed, thanks to Krossover, that his squad was weak on the glass, so he recruited another frontcourt player to the team. “It’s like doing analysis at work,” Howard said. “We look at the data to confirm and support the way we should play.”
To make room for that additional body, Howard had to ice out the X-Men’s backup point guard. “He turned the ball over way too much,” Howard said. “We couldn’t kick him off the team, because he had already paid, but we took away his minutes. He understood—we had the stats from Krossover. It wasn’t personal. It is what it is.”
