Weplay

» see weplay.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Weplay was built on the assumption that famous athletes could start a social network. Derek Jeter and Peyton Manning were among the players who put their names and some money behind it, Creative Artists Agency was one parent and MLB Advanced Media was the other. In may 2013 the whole thing went to a small Colorado company for less than five million dollars.

It started in late 2007 as Made the Cut and launched under the name Weplay in march 2008. The target was youth sports in the American sense, club teams and the parents who work as their unpaid managers. Members got profiles and video upload, coaches got tools for running a roster, and in march 2009 the site added a Skills and Drills library of instructional video for baseball and soccer. Stephen Hansen, who had come out of GeoCities and Universal, was chief executive.

Money was the easy part. Four and a half million dollars in march 2008, another 8.6 million that august led by Deep Fork Capital, thirteen million in total by most counts and fifteen by some. What did not arrive was the thing a social network actually runs on, which is people coming back without being asked to.

On 21 may 2013 TeamSnap announced it had bought Weplay's customer base and technology. 2.25 million customers moved over, nearly doubling TeamSnap's own base to about five million. TeamSnap was explicit that it was not buying the company and not inheriting the celebrity investors. There is no shutdown announcement to point at, no farewell post, which is its own kind of ending.

American youth sports is a culture with an economy bolted to it, and nothing like it existed around me. Football in Turkey happened at school or on whatever ground was free, with no parent keeping a roster or filming it for a profile page. The closest equivalent I had in 2008 was a forum thread. What I do recognize is what the company died of, because 2008 was full of networks built for a category instead of for the people standing in it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the star money ~

Athlete backing looks like distribution and is not. A name on the investor list buys a press release and a week of coverage, and it does nothing about the reason somebody would open your site on a tuesday in february. Weplay had the names and it had the agency that represented them.

The company that survived was TeamSnap, which sold coaches a schedule and a roster and charged for it. No celebrities anywhere near it, and it was aimed at a job people were already doing badly in email. That is why TeamSnap ended up as the buyer.

~ what teamsnap took ~

The deal covered a customer base and a technology stack, plus the coaching video library, which the buyer kept using. The domain drifted afterward and weplay.com has had no relationship to either company for years.

Five years and thirteen million dollars, and what changed hands at the end was a mailing list with a video archive attached. The people who lost money were a hedge fund's venture arm and a talent agency, which is close to the least sympathetic set of victims a grave here can have. The parents kept their schedules. They just kept them somewhere else.

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