“Finding the Fastest Athlete in America”

How We Turned a Dead Sales Season Into a Brand Engine for VNN and PlayOn! Sports

Late May through early July is a dead zone in the high school sports services calendar. Athletic directors are on break, facilities are locked, and the phone mostly stays quiet. For most companies in the EdTech-Athletics space, this period is the equivalent of hitting “pause.” No one blames you for coasting, most wouldn’t even notice.

But that’s also exactly when you can make a move.

At VNN, we saw summer as an opening — a chance to punch above our weight and build brand momentum in a way that would cut through the seasonal silence. It was just weeks after our acquisition by KKR-backed PlayOn! Sports, and our team got on a Zoom in late April and asked a simple question:

“What’s something bold we could launch that would make a coach or athlete talk about us at dinner, while they’re on vacation?”

We wanted to build something sticky. Something that used our core assets, sparked conversation, and blurred the lines between product and marketing. B2B can be imaginative — and it should be.

We landed on a universal sports question:

“Jordan, LeBron, or Kobe?”
“…and how do I stack up?”

We realized we had the tools at out disposal to give athletes a way to find out- not just compare themselves to each other, but to legends. Not hypothetically, but quantitatively. Using real game tape.

The Insight

Through the NFHS Network, we had access to game footage from over 50% of all U.S. high schools, going back a decade. That meant we had tape on everyone, from NFL stars like Leonard Fournette, Myles Garrett, and Ja'Marr Chase to future walk-ons and hometown heroes.

The only thing we were missing was a way to extract data from those videos.

Enter Reel Analytics, an Atlanta-based startup led by Cory Yates and Alfonzo Thurman. Their proprietary In-Game Athleticism® (IGA) Score could pull speed and agility metrics directly from game footage. It was a Moneyball-meets-Madden system trusted by elite college coaches like Deion Sanders and Trent Dilfer.

Reel had the tech. We had the reach. So we partnered.

The Idea

We licensed Reel’s scoring engine and built a summer campaign around a deceptively simple idea:

Find the fastest high school football player in America.
No combine. No stopwatch. Just pads, tape, and data.

Athletes signed up by pointing us to a game where they balled out. We pulled the footage, analyzed it using Reel’s engine, and delivered a shareable highlight with their verified max speed and IGA Score. That overlay became the fuel for social spread- athletes shared it, friends reposted it, and coaches got curious. Packaging it all together was VNN’s social media pages, where we broke down more about each athlete in an authentic of-the-moment style, creating sharable content for college fan-sites and allowing fans to follow along with the contest and learn more about each participant.

We even planned for future phases: a “Fastest Team” leaderboard, legacy player comparisons, live combine events, and brand partnerships with performance-first companies like Oura, Cadence, Equinox, and Lifetime.

Results

The inaugural campaign did exactly what it was designed to do- spark the imagination of the high school sports community and generate momentum when no one was paying attention.

Highlights:

  • Fastest Athlete:

    Turbo Rogers (Pike Road HS → IMG Academy, Class of 2025) clocked a verified 22.8 MPH. Now a four-star Ohio State commit, he’ll be a name to watch this fall.

  • Big Names Participated:

    • Ryan Williams (WR, Alabama)

    • Cam Williams (WR, Notre Dame)

    • KJ Bolden (DB, Georgia)

    • Bryce West (CB, Ohio State)

  • 📈 1.6M+ Organic Impressions:
    No paid media. Just content athletes and fans cared about.

  • Unexpected Insight:
    The highest engagement didn’t come from high school parents, it came from college fans hungry for content about their incoming recruits. College fan sites amplified our reach, unprompted.

  • Strategic Asset Creation:
    We built a rich database of high-performance athletes, and drew in attention from scouts, D1 coaches, and evaluators who began using the tool to surface under-the-radar prospects.

Why It Mattered

This wasn’t just a summer stunt- it was a signal. That even in a B2B space traditionally focused on district-level decision-makers and long sales cycles, brand can be a moat. It showed what was possible when you align product, storytelling, and distribution in a way that meets both emotional and functional needs.

By embracing the downtime, we didn’t just fill the calendar, we redefined the conversation.