Alumni Score with Statistics Software

Robbie Lightfoot ’08, Steve Smith ’02 and Jeff Myers ’07 (pictured, left to right) make up the Box Out Sports team.

In the athletic market, a lot of time and effort goes into making equipment as beneficial as possible for the coaches and players. At Box Out Sports, a local company based in South Bend, Ind., the emphasis is on the statistics. According to their website, Box Out Sports is “the easiest way to create pixel-perfect, detailed infographics for your team and instantly share them with your fans on social media.”

Before it became a successful infographic business, Box Out Sports (formerly Box Out Designs) was comprised of two
friends and former college roommates Jeff Myers ’07 and Robbie Lightfoot ’08. Lightfoot, who spent his time at Bethel as a sports management major, began a side-project with Myers: a photography gig with cameras, drive and big dreams.

“Jeff and I were taking photos for all of the Notre Dame sports teams. We did that for six months to a year before we added the infographics,” Lightfoot says. As the two were taking pictures, Lightfoot kept his dreams of expanding their work to include infographics alive in the back of his mind.

“I had this concept in my head. I was a sports information director before, so I knew there was a need for simple, everyday stats, like you would see in a newspaper, that could instantly go up on social media.”

The dream came to fruition when Myers and Lightfoot envisioned a software program that could fit their needs and said, “Enough talking about it. Let’s do it!”

To make it happen, however, the duo needed to add a programmer to create their imagined software. They brought in
Lightfoot’s cousin-in-law, Steve Smith ’02. Smith took Lightfoot’s ideas and combined them with Myers’ artistic talent to code a program that revolutionized the infographic game. Box Out Sports was born. Their first client? The Notre Dame men’s and women’s basketball teams.

“We just said we’d do it for them. They gave us press passes and we took our laptops to the games to do it [create the
infographics],” Lightfoot says.

Now the company’s program is used by more than 60 sports teams ranging from high school to the professional level. Their reach extends from local teams to some Canadian football teams in Vancouver. Needless to say, Box Out Sports is a growing business that is helping information directors on a large scale.

“Our program saves people hours of work in PhotoShop,” says Lightfoot, who then explained how information directors use the program.

“I give the program to the information directors. They can log in and type in their stats or the stats of a featured athlete. They click a button and the program organizes the information into graphs. From there they can link it to their social media pages.”

In the two years since opening, Box Out Sports has seen rapid growth. And while each of the team members currently does this as a side-job, it shouldn’t be long before they can make this their main event.

For more information on Box Out Sports, visit BoxOutSports.com.