Icecap Sports is an IoT device design and software company. They build Icecaps - small motion trackers that fit on the bottom of lacrosse sticks to tell players their shot speed speed and their shot type (Left, Right, Ovehand, sidearm, underhand).
I met the CEO and founder, Kyle Costabile, through a close friend of mine while visiting San Diego one year. On a sunkissed Friday evening, Kyle and I got to talking about technology over beers. He told me the story of Icecap and how he started building the devices in college for his brother Bryan, a professional lacrosse player in the PLL. The next day, I went over his house and got a tour of Icecap's West Coast HQ. He showed me their manufacturing operations and how he was building the icecap's housings with a 3d printer. We reviewed circuitry designs that he contracted out to device manufacturers in Asia. Finally, he showed me the Icecap in action by taking a shot with a lacrosse stick and showing the MPH and shot type on a mobile app he'd built.
In September of 2023, I joined the Icecap sports team after returning from Croatia. The project I worked on was for the data pipelines to transmit streaming data from Icecaps to Google Cloud Platform. For the Icecaps to work, they need to understand how you shoot. To do this, when a user logs on and sets up their device, they are required to take a few underhand, overhand, and sidearm shots on the left and right sides. This data is used to train the ML model, so it knows what type of shot the player is taking because everyone's height and arm length are different. Kyle and I programmed the data capture, transmission, cleaning, ML model, APIs, storage and application screens for this.
In April of 2024, I got a job with ServiceNow as a Solutions Consultant. I amicably parted was with Icecap from a work perspective, but keep in contact with them to this day.