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Men's Basketball
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Teams Get Wired
By Bryan Strickland, The Herald-Sun
DURHAM, N.C. ? Duke offensive lineman Zach Maurides almost never gets his hands on the football, but that doesn't mean Maurides doesn't have a lot of balls in the air.
"When I came in as a freshman, I had just had ankle surgery and had all the stuff that comes with that -- rehab and doctors appointments and just the difficulty of getting around school when you're recovering from an injury on crutches," said Maurides, now a fifth-year senior who starts at left guard for the Blue Devils. "And on top of that, I had the normal schedule of an athlete, which is practice, film, lifting [weights], mandatory study hall, mandatory tutoring, classes, meeting with professors.
"It's like 10 different things plus the doctors appointments, and it was hard for me to manage."
So when an assignment in a computer class called for him to design a Web site to help people, Maurides decided to help himself.
"I started thinking, 'There's got to be a way that I can remind myself electronically what I have to do,' " Maurides said. "What I started thinking about and what eventually resulted was TeamWorks, which is a complete system for managing athletes."
Maurides liked the idea so much that he didn't actually use it for the class project, fearing that letting his brainstorm out of the bag would hinder his chances of developing it into a patented product. Instead, he began to research it on his own, talking to Duke's support and training staff about whether they would use such a system and what components it should include.
As a result, Maurides founded and incorporated Logistical Athletic Solutions (www.lasllc.com), a company that offers an Internet-based program that allows athletic teams to manage the scheduling of the plethora of practices, meetings and weightlifting sessions that college athletes must balance. It also allows administrators to pass information to athletes through a text-messaging system.
Duke's football and men's lacrosse programs are using the patent-pending system, and the Duke athletics department is using the text-messaging components. Maurides said that a school in Florida also is under contract, and a school in Arizona should be soon. He's also discovered that the system can work well away from athletics, and his company is about to land a contract with a security firm in Chicago, where the business is based.
Not bad for a college kid still having to juggle academics and athletics.
"He's an entrepreneur and he's an innovator," senior rush end Patrick Bailey said. "He thinks of things, and he's able to see a plan and make it come into action. That's a skill he has and he's developed really well."
The way the systems works is that each athlete's class schedule is loaded into the system, along with any other time commitments. If a coach wanted to schedule a team meeting on short notice, he could pick a time and date, and the system displays which athletes are available at that time and which are not. Then the coach could type in a message announcing the meeting and deliver it via a text message, e-mail or both.
"My first year, it made it so much easier to communicate," Duke lacrosse coach John Danowski said. "We don't have a secretary here. We've got three coaches and 46 students, and you have all sorts of responsibilities, from fund raising to recruiting to managing your current roster.
"With the text-messaging program, I can type one thing out on the computer, press one button and the message can go to everybody. It can go to seniors, it can go to goalies or it can go to senior goalies -- however you want to script it. That's really, really neat."
The lacrosse program has helped Maurides take the system to another level. Danowski's staff wanted to include more data, so this year they're cataloging everything from players' shot speed to their body fat.
Maurides isn't personally making any money off his creation -- it would be an NCAA violation for him to receive money from member schools while still a student-athlete. Maurides is involved in product development, and the team running it on the financial side includes his father, George, who owns a Chicago law firm.
Maurides will face a decision come December, when he's set to graduate with a degree in sociology in addition to a certificate in information science and information studies and a certificate in markets and management. Maurides interned at SciQuest in Cary over the summer and has been invited to return there after graduation, or he could turn all his energy to TeamWorks.
"This is a great thing, but I want to continue to grow," Maurides said. "I think I can continue to build my business acumen and my skills in the real world by going to work for another professional company and continuing this on the side."
Tony Sales, Duke's director of football operations and a regular user of the TeamWorks system, suspects that Maurides will make it work.
"When he starts a task, he doesn't quit, as evidenced by him coming back to play his fifth year after back surgery this summer," Sales said. "He's not going to quit on anything."
Special Thanks to the Durham Herald-Sun for allowing GoDuke.com to run this story.
