In 2011, Hudl purchased its primary competitor in the high school football market, DSV.

Matt Starr, now the founder and CEO of Sideline Power was a sales manager at DSV at the time of the buyout.

“What we did was basically what Hudl did, but Hudl took what we were doing and took it a step further, doing it online,” said Starr.

Starr was retained as a consultant for Hudl, contracted for six month after the sale of DSV. During that time he provided support for the transition of the DSV software and, in his free time, planned his next venture, Sideline Power.

When it was purchased, DSV had a client base of 4,500 Coaches, many of which Matt had established good connections with while employed by DSV. He decided that his best plan of action was to use those connections and help meet a need that he saw in the coaching community.

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“HME headsets [were] fairly new at that time, and we had a lot of coaching connections that wanted to get out of their current headsets, and we sold them HME,” said Starr.

Making a name for themselves

Initially opening up its doors as a reseller for sideline headsets and endzone camera equipment, Sideline Power soon expanded its products and created its own line of equipment, including the X-Series headset system for smaller coaching staffs.

“We had a lot of coaches that were on a budget. They couldn’t afford the HME system,” said Staff. “We developed our own product line called the X Series, which is a cost- efficient coaching systems for smaller schools that have 3, 4, even 2 coaches.”

Soon after the development of their own line of headsets, Matt and his team partnered with a New Hampshire group, Insight Replay to come out with their own sideline replay system.

“They came out with a rule for high school football, Rule 1612, basically you could see that video on the sideline and watch it and do your breakdown during the game,” said Starr.

Using the endzone camera systems that Sideline Power was already selling, installing, and servicing, coaches could use Insight Replay to instantly watch the previous play on the sideline using an a tablet device.

Home in Greenwood

Sideline Power proudly calls it’s home Greenwood, Nebraska. Starr, originally from Greenwood, began the company in the basement of his Lincoln home. But with the early success of the company and their line of products, they quickly outgrew the basement.

In 2014 Starr moved his business to a larger space in his small home town of Greenwood where he plans to continue to expand.

“We’ve had a 30% growth every year, and we continue to try going down that trend,” said Starr. “Within five years, we want to have a lot more space. We want to build, expand, add on to our salesforce team to basically have somebody control each area.”

Sideline Power has recently expanded their products to drones and plans to look into other sports markets where their products could be utilized. They supply and service both high schools and colleges across the United States.

“A lot of the sales that we have local are lower-end, that’s why we came out with the lower-end Endzone camera and the lower-end headset stuff,” said Starr. “That’s the stuff that we sell here in the Midwest. Now, our upper-end, our MULTIVOICE and other stuff, we sell in Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, where football is a huge.”

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Jake Hull is the Lincoln Editor for Silicon Prairie News and a Community Builder for AIM in Lincoln, Nebraska.