BallerTV welcomes Donnie Campbell as Director of Data Acquisition
With more than 400,000 games and more than a million athletes covered, BallerTV has the largest and widest video content library in the youth sports market. The next challenge for BallerTV is organizing all the games and data in a way that maximizes exposure for athletes to college coaches and recruiters.
BallerTV’s mission is to create an easy-to-use, personalized experience for athletes to showcase their games, highlights, and stats, while also becoming a destination for college coaches and recruiters to identify and track prospects.
To lead these data efforts, BallerTV is proud to welcome Donnie Campbell to the team as Director of Data Acquisition. Donnie has been a highly regarded figure in the youth sports community for many years, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to have him join us.
We sat down with Donnie to talk about his story.
You were a college athlete playing basketball at St. Louis University. What was the journey like to get there?
Looking back on my time at St. Louis University it’s my wish that everyone gets an opportunity to be recruited and to be part of a team. I am eternally grateful for the opportunity that the late great Charlie Spoonhour gave me to be part of an incredible organization.
Growing up in the small town of Tucumcari, New Mexico, my journey to play Division 1 ball was tough. Averaging 20+ points & rebounds resulted in a few form letters from coaches but I didn’t receive a single D1, D2 or D3 offer and was a far cry away from my dream of playing at the University of Arizona. At the time, my family and I had no knowledge or experience with the recruiting process but knew there had to be a spot on a team someplace for me.
The lesson I learned very quickly is that if you want something, you have to make it happen. My parents and I went on the road to visit several schools unannounced with a homemade mixtape and my transcript.
I saved my dream school for last and it wasn’t till we spoke to Lute Olsen that our journey bore fruit. At 6’6” I was on the small side to play my position but Lute called the head coach of Eastern Wyoming Junior College Bob Davis to see if he could develop me into a perimeter player. The funny part about it was that after spending two years working on my game outside the paint, I wound up at St. Louis University being the tallest player on the team and back in the post.
Tell us about your experiences after college.
For the last 20 years I’ve provided Consulting and Advisory services for many Fortune 500 companies and startups all over the US. My time at Ernst and Young armed me with a broad set of skills/knowledge and provided an opportunity to work across several different industries. Each initiative was different but the most important skills that I learned that were common across each effort was the ability to listen, identify process/technology gaps, connect teams and quarterback solutions that align with stakeholder needs.
I’m looking forward to those exploratory conversations and design sessions with my new team, event operators, players, parents, and coaches as BallerTV is uniquely positioned to transform the youth sports space and drive industry standards.
For the last five years you’ve been well known in the youth sports livestreaming space. What inspired you to get invested in this industry?
When I was young, I remember going to Radio Shack, playing with a toy robotic arm, and realizing that I wanted to embark on a technical track and build robots one day. Although I didn’t wind up building robots, many years later I was the first person in the US to purchase a cutting-edge autonomous sports production camera.
I was experimenting with the autonomous camera to see if I could provide exposure for my little sister, Amber Campbell, as she was working hard to hone her hammer throwing skills and pursue Olympic dreams. What many people don’t know is that while it’s a tremendous honor to make the Olympic team, it doesn’t pay the bills and athletes usually have a full-time job on top of their rigorous training schedules. Athletes that train and compete at this level need a mechanism where their fans can support them, and I still believe video is a great tool to drive monetization and engagement.
In that experiment with the autonomous camera, I realized that it wasn’t technology that excited me — it was innovation.
My consultative approach and experience with the specialized camera system opened a lot of doors to engage with facilities, event directors and production companies that were curious about how Artificial Intelligence could reduce their cost and/or provide revenue streams.
After several years of advising many of the production companies in the youth sports space behind the scenes, I was finally called up to the Big Leagues to work with BallerTV. I’m in a unique position to definitively state that no one can compete with BallerTV as it relates to providing end to end solutions that scale for youth sports. As you can imagine, working at BallerTV is my dream job — we are setting the bar for video production and sports data science.
What do you see as some of the opportunities BallerTV is trying to solve from a data perspective?
BallerTV is the Sports Information Director for millions of teams across the country. We need to be in a position to help organize and catalog millions of games so they are accessible by the masses. As the Sports Information Director for teams participating in BallerTV events, it’s our goal to help market individual players and provide decision support for recruiting.
A critical component of youth sports’ “Big Data” issue is game statistics and analysis. Getting stats to complement our massive library of video content is not an easy problem to solve, but we believe we have the resources and data capture infrastructure in place to enable this capability and help connect recruiters with athletes.
It’s hard to believe how far the sport has come in 20 years since I played at a high level, but I always have to wonder where I would have fared on the nationwide leaderboard averaging 23 rebounds a game in high school. We will never know, but it’s my mission for that kid in New Mexico with no exposure to get their shot to compete for scholarships with the power programs all over the nation.
