ZOGOtennis wants to be your tennis matchmaker

If you play basketball or ultimate frisbee or soccer, finding a time to play isn’t so hard. For team sports, every city has a few standing pickup games. If you want to play, you clear your schedule for that time, show up and odds are there’ll be enough other players for a game. No scheduling. No negotiation. Just show.

The trouble with tennis is that you just need one other person (or three others, for doubles). Tennis players burn a lot of time looking for opponents, scheduling, negotiating, cancelling.

As David Berman, 26, one of the two cofounders of a new app called ZOGOtennis told us via email, every tennis club has a cork board for precisely this problem, but Berman and his partner Eliot Jenkins both thought there was a better way.

Berman shared data with us from the Tennis Industry Association, which estimates something like 30 million tennis players in the U.S., with an estimated 4 million who have simply given up for want of someone to play with.

ZOGOtennis screenshots. (Image via iTunes)

The two University of Chicago alums (who played together while they were in school) began working on the iOS app this spring. Williamsburg’s Berman told us, via email, “Over the summer, we released an MVP in Central Park and Prospect Park and players loved it because it was like having a player matching service from a private club without the hassle of getting called every other day for a game.”

The national app just came out.

The app has 13,500 clubs in its database now, with approximately 100,000 courts, Berman said.

The app will remain free, but the team plans to make a court-scheduling mobile app for clubs that will be their revenue maker. That’s coming in 2015. They also hope to be out on Android soon. Jim Baugh, former president of Wilson Sporting Goods, recently joined the team as a strategic advisor.

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One insight the ZOGOtennis team had into enhancing user experience was building an algorithm that works to get you an optimal match.

When you post a time and place you can play, it looks for the best matches based on, among other things, proximity and skill level. Notifications go out in small batches until a match is found, so users aren’t overloaded with game requests.

This part of the app was built in Google’s open source Go, which the Mountain View search giant describes as an “expressive, concurrent, garbage-collected programming language.” Berman acknowledged that this is an unusual choice, but he said, “it’s incredibly robust and very scalable.”

Obviously, once a match date is set, details may have to be hashed out. Messaging turned out to be complicated — both on the dev side and culturally: people are game to play with strangers but they are reluctant to share phone numbers. Berman and Jenkins thought they could build their own solution but ended up teaming with Layer to get messaging working well in their app. The story is told on the Layer blog.

ZOGOtennis is a team of five now, including the cofounders. They work from WeWork and are on the waiting list for WeWork’s new Brooklyn location. Berman and Jenkins still play tennis in McCarren and Prospect Parks.