Founder Spotlight: Mark Branstad & Brian Spilbeler – Unlocking Athletic Potential with Data

In the competitive landscape of college football recruiting, few innovations have made as big an impact as the analytics-driven platform behind Tracking Football. Founder, Mark Branstad, and Head of Sales, Brian Spilbeler—longtime educators turned tech entrepreneurs—have built a service that turns decades of standardized track and field data into actionable intelligence for coaches and scouts nationwide.

Mark and Brian first joined forces as high school teachers and coaches at Franklin Central High School in Indianapolis, where they encouraged student‑athletes to cross‑train between football and track and field. What began as a simple effort to boost participation quickly revealed a larger insight: standardized track times, jump marks, and throws offer a reliable, apples‑to‑apples metric for athleticism—information that football recruiting needed but didn’t yet have in one place.

Track and field has long benefited from consistent, comparable measures: the 100m is run under the same rules in every state, the shot put weighs 12 pounds everywhere, and the long jump pit remains unchanged. By digging into media guides, Excel sheets, and even eBay‑sourced archives, Mark and Brian compiled a proprietary database of high school performance metrics stretching back to the 1980s. This “back‑testing” of legendary athletes—think Bo Jackson’s 100m splits or Randy Moss’s high school broad jump—formed the foundation for their objective scoring system.

With data in hand, the founders crafted three core scores:

• Player Athletic Index (PAI): Combines track performance, body type, and position to benchmark an athlete against historical norms.
• Strength Coefficient: Focuses on traditional combine metrics (40‑yard dash, shuttle, broad jump, vertical) to model what colleges typically value at camps.
• Combined Score: A customizable blend of PAI and Strength Coefficient, letting programs tailor evaluations to their roster needs.

Rather than hiding behind a black‑box algorithm, Mark and Brian emphasize transparency: coaches can see exactly which inputs feed each score, making it easy to validate against their own instincts and film study.

Today, Tracking Football operates as a subscription‑based SaaS platform used across the spectrum—from Division III schools to Power Five programs and NFL organizations. Sales teams led by Brian work directly with athletic departments, demonstrating how the platform’s insights can narrow down recruiting lists, compare prospects to current roster profiles, and even identify overlooked athletes who excelled in track but flew under the football radar.

An acquisition of SportSource Analytics expanded the service from pre‑recruit evaluation to ongoing production metrics, enabling coaches to track in‑game performance alongside historical athletic grades. This holistic view helps programs make faster, data‑backed scholarship decisions and optimize roster composition in an era of transfer portals and evolving scholarship limits.

Mark and Brian haven’t just built software—they’ve cultivated a network. By hosting industry meetups, sponsoring events at major conferences, and partnering with key high school combines, they’ve fostered a community of coaches, scouts, and performance analysts. This relationship‑driven approach underscores their belief that analytics works best when it supplements, not supplants, the seasoned eye of football evaluators.

While football remains their core focus, Mark and Brian see broader opportunities in other camp‑based sports—lacrosse, baseball, and even emerging flag‑football leagues. Their guiding principle: dominate the niche before expanding. As roster‑building becomes more complex across college athletics, Tracking Football’s founders aim to deepen their analytics suite, refine their contextual scoring, and ensure coaches have the clearest possible picture of each athlete’s upside.

Mark and Brian’s journey from social studies and communications classrooms to leading-edge sports tech exemplifies the power of domain expertise plus data innovation. By uniting decades of reliable track metrics with customizable football analytics, they’ve created a tool that’s reshaping recruiting workflows and giving programs the competitive edge. 

Hear the whole story on the STHQ Podcast. 

Stay tuned for more founder spotlights as we illuminate the minds driving sports technology forward—one data point at a time.