Local athletes benefit from app

Student athletes in rural areas such as ours, with less recruiting activity than the big cities, now have an outlet to promote themselves nationwide.

Sports Thread is a social networking application for the youth sports market that helps individual athletes connect with coaches, fans, parents, potential colleges they may want to attend and tournament organizers.

“We help athletes promote themselves to a nationwide audience and sort of use the app for social networking within the sports community,” explains Sean Leary, founder and CEO of Sports Thread.

Leary got his start through an amateur baseball career as he played at three different colleges with plenty of experience transferring and trying to find a good fit while obtaining a scholarship. This led him to believe there was a need for athletes to promote themselves to colleges for less money – or no money in this case – than what was available at the time.

“We’ve managed to attract some really incredible business people into the company and what they’ve done is kind of helped us branch out and add more services to what our app does.”

Sports Thread is described as a fun and positive atmosphere for kids to jump in and show their skills to a wide audience.

“For people who live in smaller towns and may not have access to that kind of exposure locally, we provide a really good option for them to get their name out there to schools and to make sure they’re not being overlooked because of where they live,” said Leary.

With most youth sports shut down due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, it doesn’t matter which city an athlete lives in as no one is going to watch them play. While stuck at home, everyone may as well be in a remote area and connect online from the comfort of their home.

According to Leary, Sports Thread has helped thousands of kids promote themselves to schools during the past few weeks while maintaining full connections and quite a few even landing scholarship offers.

The Sports Thread app can be downloaded from the Apple store or through Google Play. Shortly after signing-up for the free program, users receive instructions on how to use it in order to start connecting with others.

Listen to our recent interview with Sean Leary of Sports Thread: https://soundcloud.com/cifn-radio/sean-leary-sports-thread-5-19-20