Robert Angarita and the games worth keeping

The BallerTV co-founder had found a game his own company would never cover. His son Leo was playing under-10 soccer, and Robert Angarita was testing an early version of BallerCam. The audience included a grandmother watching from home. By the standards of national sports television, this was a small assignment. By the standards of the people involved, it needed no justification.

Angarita later coached Leo’s under-12 team. The recordings became useful in a different way: he could revisit the play, adjust tactics and show children what had happened on the field. His account of the experience is refreshingly practical. A coach needs something to point to. A grandparent needs a way to watch. Neither request requires a stadium.

That combination of personal attachment and ordinary usefulness runs through Angarita’s career. He has helped build businesses around college recreation, homework assistance and youth sports. In each case, the internet supplied a way for people to reach something they already wanted. The interesting question was how to deliver it often enough, and reliably enough, to make a business.

The Trojan and the Bruin

Angarita grew up in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley. He and Aaron Hawkey met at La Salle High School in Pasadena, then attended rival universities: Angarita at the University of Southern California, Hawkey at UCLA. Angarita earned a business administration degree with an emphasis in entrepreneurship. Their professional partnership survived the campus divide. Their football arguments apparently did, too.

In 2008, when the two were running Cramster, they described spending roughly five hours a week debating USC’s national championships. Hawkey disputed the count. Angarita defended it. The exchange has the texture of a working friendship: a familiar disagreement, carefully preserved, with neither party particularly interested in a settlement. A business can change its model. A college allegiance is less negotiable.

Their first shared company, Intramurals.com, began in 1998. The problem was close at hand. Hawkey managed an intramural basketball team and found himself walking to the recreation center to check the schedule. Putting campus sports administration online was a useful answer to a gloriously unglamorous inconvenience. Hawkey later said the service reached 500 campuses before its sale in 2000.

The pair sold Intramurals to StreetZebra and returned to finish college. By then, they had experienced the unusual interruption of building and selling a company before settling back into student life. Angarita’s route through entrepreneurship included an actual return to the classroom. The classroom, in turn, supplied the next business problem.

Homework after the first exit

Cramster was founded in 2002 by Angarita, Hawkey and Kaveh Golabi. It offered help with homework and textbook problems, bringing questions, explanations and a community of contributors together online. At the time of Chegg’s acquisition announcement in December 2010, the service reported more than one million members and offered both free and premium access.

Angarita served as Cramster’s president. Getting the operation established involved work well beyond finding a promising idea. He spent three months in India as the company developed its overseas operation. There were staffing and communication problems to solve across offices. A website’s neat interface can conceal a considerable amount of scheduling, recruiting and explaining.

The business also changed how it charged. Cramster moved from a subscription-only approach toward a freemium model, accepting an initial revenue reduction to bring more students into the service. That is a fairly concrete expression of ambition: allow more people through the door, then work out how the larger operation sustains itself. It demanded patience with the accounts as well as confidence in the product.

Chegg announced the acquisition on December 8, 2010. Its later filings identified Cramster as the acquisition that added Chegg Study. That connection gives Angarita’s earlier work a place in the development of a larger education business. It also helps explain why premium content and recurring access were familiar territory when he and Hawkey began looking for their next company.

“I love the idea of creating something out of nothing.”

Robert Angarita · 2019

Finding an audience beyond their own soccer team

BallerTV was founded in 2016. Youth sports gave Angarita, Hawkey and founding executive Sandeep Hingorani an audience with unusually specific interests. Families wanted to follow their own athletes. Coaches wanted to see players. Much of the action happened outside the reach of conventional sports coverage, leaving games with devoted potential viewers and no broadcast.

The founders had initially explored streaming their own recreational soccer games. That experiment had an audience problem. Their eventual move toward young athletes was more promising, and Hingorani’s relationships in grassroots basketball helped the company establish itself. There is a useful modesty in that origin: the founders had to discover which games other people actually wanted to watch.

The work soon became a matter of covering many games at once. In early 2019, BallerTV expected to broadcast more than 250,000 amateur sporting events during the year. Its network of freelance videographers supplied a physical presence at venues around the country. Streams could be watched live, then revisited. A game no longer had to disappear when everyone left the gym.

For Angarita, this meant applying the habits of an operator to a business built around weekends, courts and distant viewers. The product depended on events happening somewhere in particular. A broadcast required someone, or some piece of equipment, to capture the action there. The viewer might see a simple play button; the company had to arrange everything behind it.

A camera has to get to the court

In September 2019, BallerTV acquired FieldVision, whose technology combined player tracking, ball tracking and recognition of game context. The acquisition joined BallerTV’s growing coverage operation with a team working on autonomous sports filming. It addressed a practical constraint: expanding the number of broadcasts meant expanding the ability to produce them.

The announcement also pointed toward field sports such as soccer. Filming a game involves following motion, keeping the action in frame and making the recording available to viewers. Automating those tasks could change the amount of attention needed at each event. The acquisition belongs in Angarita’s story because it connects the company’s early work at venues to the camera system he would eventually try at his own son’s games.

BallerTV describes its purpose in terms of families staying connected, athletes reviewing footage and players gaining exposure to recruiters. Those uses overlap, but each asks something different of the recording. A relative wants to see the game unfold. A coach may need to study a sequence again. A player may want a clip to share. Keeping the footage makes all three possible.

The customer on the touchline

BallerCam became available on July 22, 2025. The system and accompanying app offered recording, livestreaming, ball tracking, scoring, clips and replays. Its launch brought the company’s filming technology into a package aimed at families and teams, allowing a parent or coach to take responsibility for coverage of a game that might otherwise remain unrecorded.

Two days later, BallerTV announced Alex Morgan as an investor and brand ambassador alongside the launch. The company said its technology had already powered coverage of more than two million youth sports games. That figure describes accumulated coverage, rather than a count of viewers or customers. Behind it are separate games, separate teams and separate reasons for somebody to press play.

BallerCam uses an iPhone, an ultra-wide-angle lens and on-device tracking to capture play and adjust the picture. The appeal is straightforward: the person who brought the camera should have time to watch the match. The product’s promise can be judged from the sideline, where following the ball with a phone competes with following it with your own eyes.

Angarita’s experience as an early tester adds a personal test to that promise. He had a son playing in a league outside BallerTV’s coverage, a family member watching remotely and, later, a coaching job that benefited from game film. The co-founder was using the product in exactly the sort of setting its launch addressed. His professional and parental interests had arrived at the same touchline.

Still working on the next game

In 2026, BallerTV announced Angarita as a speaker at the PEAK SportsTech Conference in Las Vegas, scheduled for April 20-22. The discussion placed youth sports alongside artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure and changing broadcasting models. For a founder whose first sports company handled campus recreation, it is a substantial change of tools around a familiar subject.

The partnership with Hawkey remains part of the story. Angarita has publicly described him as the business partner and friend he would choose to face the work with. Their shared history includes a sale, another company, another sale and the continued demands of BallerTV. It gives their current venture a longer memory than its 2016 founding date might suggest.

The work also gives his career a consistent geography. Pasadena is where he met Hawkey, where Cramster operated and where BallerTV is headquartered. Across different markets and changing equipment, the business relationship kept returning to the same city. For a story about helping distant people stay connected, there is something apt about how much of it begins close to home.

There is also a pleasing loop in Angarita’s career. A campus schedule led to a sports website. Difficulty finding study help led to an education service. Years later, a youth soccer game gave him a place to test another product. The scale changed. The habit of paying attention to an inconvenience nearby remained useful. And somewhere at the other end of the stream, a grandmother could watch the game.