Before Matthew Glick built software for athletic departments, he was one of the people whose story an athletic department might struggle to tell. He was a defender, the position where applause is usually borrowed and a good afternoon can look like nothing happened. At Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles, he captained the soccer team, earned first-team all-league recognition and became team MVP. He also served as the school’s “Head Fanatic,” a title wonderfully short on corporate polish. It meant leading the cheering section. He understood both halves of school sport: the work on the field and the noise that gives the work a public life.
During a senior-year entrepreneurship class, Glick imagined a place where sports highlights could be collected and shared. The idea followed him to Colgate University. In 2016, when he was a sophomore on the Division I soccer team, the first Gipper appeared as a free iPhone app. Players could upload clips, tag a sport or school, slow a moment down and pass it along. The premise was generous and broad, reaching from formal matches to backyard games. It was also only the opening formation.
The habit Glick had noticed was real: after a match, teammates reached for their phones. But the durable customer was not merely the athlete with a clip. It was the administrator or coach responsible for scores, schedules, milestones, sponsor messages, alumni memories and the steady work of keeping a community informed. The raw material was everywhere. The bottleneck was turning it into something clear, branded and publishable before the next obligation arrived.
The stories were already there. The missing piece was a practical publishing desk.The product insight behind Gipper
A pivot without leaving the stadium
Many startup pivots sound dramatic in retrospect, as if a founder burned the old map beneath a full moon. Gipper’s shift was more sensible. Glick stayed with sports and stayed with digital storytelling. He changed the tool and sharpened the user. Instead of asking everyone to join another highlight network, the company helped school staff create professional-looking social graphics without requiring them to become professional designers.
That distinction made the product less glamorous and more useful. A template is not a trophy object. It is a way around the blank canvas. Brand controls replace the hunt for the right color. A repeatable workflow turns “we should post something” into an ordinary task. Gipper was becoming infrastructure for a peculiar modern reality: every athletic department had acquired the duties of a small media company, but almost none had acquired the staff.
Glick had a useful view from inside the institution. At Colgate he majored in Peace and Conflict Studies, graduated magna cum laude and won the program’s Dag Hammarskjöld Prize. On the soccer side, his minutes were limited: ten appearances and one start in his senior season, with a single shot on goal. Yet he made the Patriot League Academic Honor Roll in all four years. The record suggests a kind of founderly patience - sustained work without the narcotic of constant public reward.
Colgate also supplied a workshop for the business. Gipper entered the university’s Thought Into Action summer accelerator in 2017, alongside cofounding teammate Jack Zamore, and Glick won backing from the Colgate Entrepreneurs Fund. The company could be tested in a community where coaches, teams, administrators and potential collaborators were close enough to observe. It was a laboratory with muddy cleats.
The customer is already late
Glick’s public writing returns repeatedly to speed. It is a revealing priority. Design software usually advertises expressive possibility; a busy athletic administrator may care more about escaping the software before the bus leaves. Gipper’s customer might oversee a dozen teams, field parent questions, manage facilities and still be expected to celebrate a record before the moment goes stale. The elegant feature is the one that gives back five minutes.
This produces a clear product philosophy: professional appearance, nonprofessional operator. The point is not to turn an athletic director into an art director. It is to encode enough of the art director’s judgment that the athletic director can make something coherent on a phone, publish it and move on. The software succeeds when it becomes less interesting than the athlete being recognized.
There is a democratic streak in that proposition. Professional clubs can employ photographers, designers, editors and social teams. A public high school cannot casually imitate the payroll, yet its athletes and families do not consider their own moments minor. Glick has described organizations from youth clubs through Division I programs as having athletes to highlight and information to share. Gipper’s bet is that production value should not be reserved for the organizations with the deepest bench off the field.
The market rewarded the focus. In 2021, Gipper raised a $2.7 million seed round and introduced Gipper 2.0. The following year it closed an $8.6 million Series A led by Telescope Partners, with TIA Ventures participating again; the company announced the round in January 2023. Glick wrote that the money would support hiring, product investment and customer experience. By then, he said, more than 3,000 organizations across youth sports, K-12 and college athletics were paying customers.
A mobile app for uploading and sharing sports highlights.
A summer accelerator and early institutional backing at Colgate.
Seed financing, Gipper 2.0 and a growing school-sports focus.
An $8.6 million Series A to expand the team and product.
Newsletters, planning, signage and recognition extend the publishing system.
From the feed to the hallway
A narrow software category can become a trap. “Social graphics” is specific enough to sell, but school storytelling does not end at the edge of a post. Gipper gradually followed the same work into other formats. Newsletters gave departments a direct channel to parents, alumni and supporters. Content Planner made publishing less improvisational. Digital signage carried announcements onto campus screens. Touchscreen products offered a way to present records, halls of fame and decades of photographs without asking a trophy case to develop infinite shelving.
The expansion looks broad only if one inventories features. Viewed through the customer’s job, it is a single sentence: make the school’s story, distribute it, then keep it available. The social post handles the present tense. The newsletter collects the week. The touchscreen remembers the decades. Each format gives the same under-resourced publisher another place to be legible.
This also explains Glick’s interest in branding. In school sports, brand can sound like an expensive word for picking a font. In practice, consistency is a form of wayfinding. It helps a parent recognize an official update, an alumnus reconnect with a program and a student feel that an achievement was treated with care. The point is not to make a school pretend to be a professional franchise. It is to help the school look like itself on purpose.
“The first thing my teammates would do after a game is pull out their phones and jump on social media.”Matthew Glick
What the defender noticed
Founders are often praised for vision when attention is the more useful word. Glick did not invent school pride, mobile video, design templates or the athletic director’s overfull calendar. He noticed how these things collided. He saw that the audience had moved to phones, that the institution still had to speak and that the person doing the speaking rarely had the right production tools.
His own route made the collision difficult to ignore. The high-school captain wanted to preserve highlights. The campus entrepreneur learned to test an idea. The college player watched the postgame migration to social media. The peace and conflict student studied how people and institutions communicate. None of those experiences mechanically predicts a SaaS company. Together, they explain why this particular inconvenience stayed interesting long enough to become one.
There is also restraint in the company’s central promise. Software cannot create community spirit, supply a good photograph or make an administrator care about telling the story. It can reduce the distance between intention and publication. That distance is where many worthy moments disappear: the score never posted, the alumnus never thanked, the senior recognized three days late with a blurry improvisation.
Glick’s public posture remains that of an operator close to the selling and teaching. He writes practical explainers, appears in industry conversations and frames marketing as a task athletic departments are already performing, whether they use the label or not. The language is less concerned with “content” as an abstract commodity than with the people on either end: the administrator trying to keep up and the community trying to see itself.
The reusable lesson
What can another founder steal from this story? Begin with proximity. Glick’s first users were not a demographic assembled in a slide deck; they inhabited fields, offices and schools he knew. Next, distinguish the enduring problem from the first product. The original app and the current platform are different machines, but both answer the wish to make amateur sports visible. Finally, treat time as a design material. A feature that saves an exhausted customer ten steps may be more valuable than one that adds ten options.
The pleasing irony is that Gipper grew by moving away from the individual highlight. Its larger subject became the institution around the athlete - the schedules, ceremonies, identities and archives that make a highlight mean something. A goal is exciting for seconds. A well-told program can hold generations.
The former defender’s company now works in a similar position. It does not need to be the spectacle. It organizes the back line, moves information forward and lets somebody else receive the cheer. In an industry forever tempted by louder scoreboards, Matthew Glick found a business in helping the smaller voices publish on time.