Sandeep Hingorani and the Games That Used to Disappear

The old youth-sports archive was a wonderfully unreliable institution. It lived in a parent’s camcorder bag, on a VHS tape with a doubtful label, or in the memory of an uncle who insisted the winning shot had been launched from somewhere near the parking lot. If nobody pressed record, the game disappeared. The scoreboard went dark, the gym emptied and a small piece of family history became hearsay.

Sandeep Hingorani has spent the past decade working on that problem. As an executive vice president and founding team member at BallerTV, he helped build a company around games that conventional television ignored: weekend basketball tournaments, sprawling volleyball championships, baseball diamonds and soccer fields where the spectators might number in dozens, but the people who cared could be scattered across the country.

The useful word is not content, although BallerTV produces an enormous amount of it. The useful word is absence. A parent is working. A grandparent lives three time zones away. A recruiter cannot stand beside every court at once. The camera fills the empty chair.

The night the doors looked too small

The company’s early proof arrived in Las Vegas in 2016. Mater Dei and Chino Hills met in the Platinum Division final of the Tarkanian Classic. LiAngelo and LaMelo Ball were playing for Chino Hills, and interest in the game extended well beyond the people who could get inside the building. BallerTV offered viewers back in California a way to watch.

What happened next was less a cinematic revelation than a useful commercial commotion. Hingorani later recalled people “knocking down our doors” to bring the technology to their own events. The appetite was evident; the machinery required to feed it was not. The team had to work out how to deploy cameras across many venues, make them simple enough to operate reliably, distribute the streams and pay for the whole undertaking.

That is where Hingorani’s career makes sense. Public professional profiles trace a path through economics at the University of California, Irvine, consulting at Triage Consulting Group, revenue-cycle management at Accretive Health and a co-founding role at Tecniq. It is a résumé of processes, systems and young companies. At BallerTV, those disciplines met a category whose chief inconvenience was abundance. There were far more games than any traditional production model could afford to cover.

BallerTV’s first method was deliberately practical: mobile broadcast tools and a national network of freelance videographers who could arrive, set up and stream without a television truck idling outside. By 2019, the company said it had covered more than 250,000 games since 2017 and could broadcast 17,000 in a weekend. That year it acquired FieldVision, whose compact system used computer vision to track players, the ball and the context of a game. BallerTV had built scale with people on the ground. FieldVision had pursued automation. The two approaches met in the middle, which is where most sensible technology stories eventually do.

Every court changes the view

A partnership with USA Volleyball made the argument tangible. Beginning in 2021, BallerTV was to stream every match from every court at selected major events, replacing a limited footprint of a few courts with something approaching completeness. This was more than a larger television schedule. A relative could watch from home, an athlete could revisit a match, and a college coach could scan prospects without attempting the physical comedy of being in twenty gyms at once.

Hingorani was careful about the order of those benefits. “At the heart of our mission will always be the connection between athlete and family,” he said when the partnership was announced. Recruiting was a by-product, albeit a potent one. During the pandemic, when travel and in-person scouting were constrained, the archive gave coaches another route to players. Hingorani also pointed toward products that could make talent discovery more efficient.

The timing exposed another oddity of the industry. A tournament may occupy a single convention center, yet it is not one event in the way a televised final is one event. It is a thicket of simultaneous matches, age groups and brackets. Covering only the show court preserves the hierarchy television has always preferred. Covering every court creates a different kind of map, one in which an early match between unfamiliar teams is as available as the championship.

That abundance also rearranges scarcity. The coach no longer has to choose one court and surrender all the others. The family no longer has to nominate a single traveler as its witness. Time remains limited, of course, but video can be searched, clipped and replayed. The weekend stops being a schedule one must physically conquer and becomes a library one can revisit.

The distinction matters because businesses have a habit of replacing their first clear purpose with a bouquet of fashionable ones. Hingorani’s account keeps returning to the modest original job. BallerTV did not enter the business to solve recruiting or help coaches win. It entered because sport connects families, relationships and memory. Product features accumulated around that fact.

The founder’s task, in this telling, was not to persuade people that a child’s game mattered. Families had settled that question centuries before broadband. It was to make the economics and logistics behave as though the game mattered. A professional broadcast lavishes many workers and machines on one contest. Youth sports required the opposite equation: a production system light enough to reach thousands of contests without treating each one as a small moon landing.

A camera in the long tail

By 2026, the market around that equation had become crowded and technically ambitious. Automated cameras followed play. Phones became production kits. Software assembled highlights and layered in statistics. The youth-sports streaming business was being discussed as a $10 billion market, and BallerTV could carry up to 50,000 games on a peak weekend. Hingorani’s description of the cultural change was brisk: in 2016, the premise was that high-level high-school games could now be produced. A decade later, he said, “every game needs to be produced.”

Every is an expensive word. It contains lonely baseball fields, auxiliary volleyball courts and early pool-play games whose live audience may share a surname. It also contains the occasional contest that suddenly becomes a national attraction. A platform has to serve both without knowing in advance which is which.

Hingorani has remained a public advocate for that infrastructure. He spoke about emerging sports technology at UCLA Anderson’s inaugural Global Sports Business Forum in 2022. In 2025, he joined The Profluence Pod to discuss BallerTV’s development, the shock of the pandemic and a future beyond the basic livestream. Silver Waves Media included him in its 2025 list of influential figures in men’s college basketball. At the 2026 Buying Sandlot Summit, he joined conversations about automated production, AI, athlete data and the adoption curve now moving through youth sports.

It is a disarming line, partly because product roadmaps are not famous for happiness. They are famous for boxes, arrows and meetings that require a second meeting. Yet the phrase identifies the customer more precisely than a diagram could. The person buying access is not merely purchasing a video file. That person wants to see someone they love do something difficult, hopeful and fleeting.

The same footage can later become evidence. A player makes a reel. A coach rewinds a defensive rotation. A scout discovers somebody outside the familiar circuit. Those uses can affect opportunity, and they bring complicated questions about access, ownership and the pressure to package young athletes for an audience. Hingorani’s public remarks do not pretend that recruitment was the first cause. The archive existed for connection; the market discovered how many other jobs an archive could do.

The ordinary game earns an afterlife

There is no guarantee that more cameras will make youth sports wiser. A stream can preserve a beautiful pass and a dreadful parental outburst with equal fidelity. Ubiquity creates its own etiquette. Still, the central change is hard to dismiss. The athlete who would once have existed only in a box score can now have a body of work. The grandparent who cannot travel can still complain cheerfully about the referee in real time. The recruiter’s map can widen beyond the tournaments and teams already easiest to see.

Hingorani’s decade at BallerTV is therefore a story about the value hidden below the old media threshold. Traditional television asked whether a game could gather a vast audience at once. Youth streaming asks whether thousands of small audiences, each attached to a different game, can share one system. The answer has required subscriptions, partnerships, acquisitions, freelance crews, autonomous cameras and the occasional iPhone taught to follow a ball.

But the emotional transaction has barely changed. Somebody wishes they could be there. A lens opens. The whistle blows. And this time, when the lights go out, the game does not have to disappear.