Alumnus Ben Moffat (Economics, 2018) has built an app – Huddle – that allows amateur/university sports clubs and leagues to manage their fixture schedules following his own university sports experience. The University of Exeter Football Club are currently using the application and we caught up with Ben to find out more.
Whilst studying at the University of Exeter Ben played football for University of Exeter Athletic Football Club (EUAFC), was a member of the tennis society and helped organise an intramural 6-a-side football team. He enjoyed the various benefits of sports both physical and social but realised that organising sports leagues and teams can be time intensive and stressful. As such, his experiences playing sports and organizing teams at university gave him the idea for Huddle and the motivation to pursue it.
Ben says: “It was always a challenge for team captains and organisers to keep track of schedules, collect payments and communicate with teammates. Through Huddle, we wanted to create a platform that would make it easy for sports teams and leagues to communicate, manage schedules, organize events, and engage with players through fun features like Fantasy points and stats.”
Huddle was founded by Ben and his friend Toby Sparkes, who studied at the University of Cambridge, after they both graduated. It is a user-friendly application that simplifies the process of managing sports teams and leagues by providing convenient access to all necessary information and features in one place. The app benefits competition organizers, league organizers, team managers, and team captains by streamlining administrative tasks and allowing them to focus on their core responsibilities.
For competition organizers, Huddle makes it easy to generate an entire match schedule in just a few clicks and manage amendments and payments quickly and easily. League organizers can take advantage of engaging features like fantasy points, live performance stats, and league tables to keep players and fans engaged throughout the season.
Team managers can also use Huddle to streamline team administration, with features like availability tracking, team lineups, and payment tracking. They can interact with players using engaging features like match awards, polls, social media-style posts, and fantasy points and stats. The chat functionality allows the team to communicate effectively through sending match stats, photos and polls.
Ben and Toby both share a passion for sports and technology, and saw an opportunity to create an innovative solution that would help sports teams and organizations better manage their activities and engage with their players. The building of the platform required reskilling and was a learning curve for them both. They retrained during the COVID pandemic and learned how to develop mobile and web applications and we have built the entire application from scratch themselves.
In addition, Ben mentions that his time at university was also beneficial in helping with the process:
“My Economics degree was helpful in teaching me how to solve problems and think critically, which has been essential in running Huddle. It gave me a solid foundation in business and finance, which has helped me navigate the challenges of running a startup. My experiences playing sports and organizing teams at university, gave me a real understanding of what amateur and casual sports teams need. This helped me identify the gaps in the market that Huddle could fill and design a product that meets those specific needs. We also recently worked with some talented students through the IKEEP programme at the University to help develop our branding and messaging.”
EUAFC have been an early user of the application and used it for a charity day tournament in November 2022 and they are now using the application for their interclub Bleed Green tournament that they are currently running where all the football teams compete against each other. Ben says this has been wonderful to help them out: “EUAFC have had a great experience using the app and we are going to continue working with them over the coming months (and hopefully years). Louis Rosher, the EUAFC club captain, has been a great help in providing us with feedback on the app’s features and functionality. We’ve been constantly working to refine and improve the user experience based on feedback from users like Louis.”
Looking to the future for Ben and Huddle, they plan to specialise in university and casual sports leagues, as they believe this is in an undeserved market. They are constantly working to enhance the app’s functionality and user-friendliness, based on user feedback and hope to encourage more intramural sports at the University and elsewhere to use the platform.
You can find out more about the app and download it via their website, or contact them at team@letshuddle.app