DENVER, March 10, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Sports Thread today announced the general availability of Sports Thread Play Safe, the first totally automated software solution to combat age fraud in youth sports. Play Safe allows parents or athletes to capture a photo of a birth certificate, driver’s license, state ID or passport which is instantly scanned, digitally checked for forgery and verified as part of a sporting event registration process.
This process makes Sports Thread the only company that instantly verifies an athlete’s age using a proprietary, automated process for sporting event eligibility. Event organizers receive an easy-to-read report of age-verified players, eliminating hours of manual verification of documents.
Youth athletes “playing down” or playing in age divisions below their actual age to gain an unfair advantage by playing younger, less physically developed athletes is a big issue in youth sports.
Organizations hosting youth sports events often ignore this problem and encounter frequent complaints from coaches and parents who believe there is unfair competition happening without age verification. Other youth sports event companies undergo a manual process where they ask players/parents to present birth certificates to them and individually review each birth certificate to ensure age eligibility for their event, creating hours of work.
“The Play Safe system helps ensure safe and fair participation in youth sporting events,” said Sean Leary, founder and CEO of Sports Thread. “Tournament and league organizers, coaches, and parents can rest assured that all student-athletes are verified as eligible for events.”
“Sports Thread provides an excellent instant and accurate age verification service,” said Joshua Borne, Managing Director of Pylon, the Orlando, Florida-based pioneering organizer of 7on7 football tournaments nationwide and an early adopter of the Sports Thread Play Safe system. “Pylon has had its best year ever since moving its software support to Sports Thread.”
Sports Thread’s age verification technology is an additional tool used by event organizers as more players return to play following the Covid pandemic. The Covid pandemic stopped millions of youth athletes from participating in events over the past two years, according to Project Play from the Aspen Institute; (https://www.aspenprojectplay.org/youth-sports/facts/participation-rates).
ABOUT SPORTS THREAD
Sports Thread, based in Denver, Colorado, offers a free social media-based, self-promotion, and communications software platform for the 125 million student-athletes, coaches, parents, and fans in the youth sports market. The company was founded by 29-year-old Sean Leary, a former Division 1 college pitcher who was featured in USA Today as one of “Top 10 Most Innovative Entrepreneurs of 2021.” The Sports Thread app is consistently a Top-100 ranked sports app in the Apple App Store out of more than 40,000 sports apps. The Sports Thread network, including its mobile app, Software-as-a-Service platform, and social media sites, is used by more than one million individuals in the youth athletic community annually.
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SOURCE Sports Thread
