Todd L. Young and the trouble with being unseen

The basketball hoop was in the driveway. The ambition belonged to his son. The question that eventually became a company belonged to Todd L. Young: how could a parent tell whether all this effort was producing improvement? There were tournaments across Texas, equipment to buy and plenty of people prepared to offer an opinion. A family could spend considerable time on basketball without getting a particularly clear account of what was changing.

Young had already built a business around a related frustration. Before Ballogy, there was ProspX, his commercial-insurance software company. Its customers wore different shoes, but they also needed something surprisingly difficult to obtain: useful information, delivered in time to act on it. Put an insurance broker and a basketball parent together and the conversation might run out quickly. Young’s career gives them rather more to discuss.

Eleven years learning where knowledge hides

Young came to software through insurance. He worked as a producer and manager for eleven years, moving through four national brokerage organizations as mergers changed the names around him. His professional biography includes executive roles at Marsh/Sedgwick and Summit Global Partners/USI Holdings, opening a branch office and establishing mentoring and practice groups. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Texas Christian University. This was a founder who had spent time doing the job his product would address.

Commercial insurance gave him an awkward practical problem. A salesperson needed to understand clients in different industries and find specialists who understood their risks. Relevant knowledge could exist somewhere inside a firm or its carrier relationships while remaining difficult to locate. Recording a prospect’s details was only the beginning. The next useful step might require an underwriter, an experienced colleague or information about a carrier’s changing appetite.

ProspX, founded in 2005, combined search, collaboration and customer information. Young described its approach as simple CRM. The company concentrated on sharing information through an organization rather than assembling every feature a customer-management system could conceivably contain. In an industry with a complicated sales process, a shorter route to the right person had an obvious appeal. A contact list is a pleasant possession; knowing which contact can help today is considerably more useful.

By 2009, Young was talking about scaling the company to meet client demand. Assurex Global was a major relationship, with XpertConnect bringing ProspX’s collaboration tools into an international brokerage network. In his description of the business, the emphasis stayed close to the work: communication across the brokerage, better information about the client and a way to handle a sale involving several parties. Software earned its place by helping a transaction move.

“Erik Qualman is a Digital Dale Carnegie.”

Todd Young’s endorsement of Digital Leader

An early meeting with Assurex CEO Jim Hackbarth offers a small, telling episode. Hackbarth had allocated an hour to hear Young’s presentation. The discussion ran to three, and he brought members of his management team into it. An endorsement followed after Assurex partners tried the software. Young’s problem had become recognizable to someone responsible for connecting expertise across a much larger network. The meeting acquired the most useful sort of overtime.

There was capital behind the effort, too. ProspX announced a $6.5 million Series A in December 2008 and an $8 million Series B in February 2011. These were separate financing rounds in a company attempting to sell a specialized system into an established industry. Young led it as president and CEO; by May 2013, his title on a company filing was executive vice president. Ballogy would become another chapter, with another set of users to persuade.

A driveway hoop changes the question

Basketball brought the problem home. Young’s son wanted to play at college level and beyond. The family supported the ambition, but Young began looking for a way to track development that offered more than someone’s impression of a player. He could see sophisticated tools around professional sport. His interest was in making measurement and a clearer development path available further down the ladder.

Ballogy put that idea into an app for youth and amateur athletes. Its proposition included skills measurement and a place to connect with other players and coaches. The combination suited a founder whose earlier company had also put information and relationships together. A performance record had to be useful to the athlete collecting it, while also making sense to the people helping that athlete improve.

His own sporting résumé includes three 70.3 Ironman triathlons and a 140.6 Ironman triathlon. The detail sits comfortably beside a company interested in tracking development over time. It also supplies some welcome scale to the family’s sporting enthusiasm: this household’s definition of a recreational outing could involve rather more mileage than most people would request.

The introduction is part of the product

Young pursued partnerships with organizations already working with players. Ballogy’s collaboration with the National Basketball Players Association connected its technology with professional-player resources. Athletes could work through shooting challenges and drills, receive virtual feedback and retain results in their profiles. The structure joined a familiar sports aspiration, learning from people further along, to an ongoing record of practice.

A five-year partnership announced by the National Federation of State High School Associations in November 2023 gave the company another institutional connection. NFHS named Ballogy its official and exclusive athletic skills development and curriculum app. For Young, the agreement offered a route to coaches and students across school sports. Reaching a young athlete can mean first reaching the adult responsible for organizing the next practice.

The move beyond basketball became more visible in 2024 when Ballogy partnered with Houston Texans quarterback C.J. Stroud. Young sat down with Stroud for a conversation about faith, family and football. The partnership placed the company’s development pitch alongside a player recognizable to young football fans. It also gave Young another occasion to connect his interest in measurement with the people whose example athletes already followed.

That September, Ballogy and AquaBloom International Sports Technology Group announced a New York showcase involving student-athletes from the Joe Tsai Basketball Scholarship and an elite basketball league. The planned mini-camp put training technology into workouts, with individualized feedback. The international partnership extended Young’s stated ambition to make development tools available across geography. A demonstration in a gym gave the proposition a more concrete setting than a presentation slide.

In December 2024, Ballogy announced computer vision shot tracking. The app could register shots, show percentages by court zone and build a history across sessions. Coaches could also follow multiple players in training groups. That brought Young’s original parental question into a specific interface: an athlete could compare the record of successive workouts, with a heat map showing where shots were falling.

The recruiting connection became more explicit in April 2025 through PrepStar. The partnership would bring Ballogy Skills Assessment results into athletes’ recruiting profiles. Test video would be captured, reviewed, verified and scored. A measurement could then travel with the player’s profile to a coach or scout. The company was working on the passage between doing the work and having that work evaluated.

The same month, Ballogy announced that its NAIA partnership, which began in 2021, would run through February 2030. The relationship included sponsorship of the men’s and women’s basketball opening rounds. Schools, governing bodies and recruiting services occupy different places in an athlete’s life. Young’s business was developing connections across those places, with the app supplying a shared record.

A concert with an afterlife

Another part of Young’s career began with a musician rather than a broker or coach. Patrice Pike encountered a young person in need while touring. She and Young organized a benefit concert, with support from the Austin Community Foundation. They exceeded the fundraising goal, and the effort developed into the Grace Foundation. The organization traces those beginnings to 2004.

In 2015, it became Step Onward Foundation. Its work now includes financial assistance and tailored case management for families and young adult students facing housing instability. Young is identified as a co-founder alongside Pike. The connection adds a different sort of institution to his biography, one built around immediate practical support. A benefit concert can end when the equipment is packed away. This one left an organization behind.

Back to the kid in the gym

Young remained Ballogy’s founder and CEO as the company launched a new multi-sport app in August 2026. Ballogy reported serving more than 300,000 athletes, coaches and teams across North America. Its latest version included progress dashboards, recruiting profiles and a community feed. The scope had widened from its basketball beginnings, while keeping the development record close to the product’s center.

In September, Young returned to the family story in a blog post. He remembered the other children at tournaments, talented players who lacked the same access to resources. His ambition was to bring useful tools within their reach. In an August interview, he also described the time pressures facing coaches who hold other jobs. The concern connected two sides of the same gym: a player seeking guidance and an adult with limited hours to provide it.

By October, Ballogy and Dave Campbell’s Texas Football were again recognizing 60 head coaches as finalists for a Game-Changing Coach Award. The announced prize for the eventual winner was $5,000 for the program. Young credited coaches’ feedback with helping shape the product. After the brokerage offices, the driveway hoop and the software launches, his work still returned to asking people what they needed. There is something appealingly practical about that ending. The next useful feature may begin with someone explaining why Tuesday’s practice was difficult to organize.