Athletes can now connect online to sports scouts by signing up to Athlenda, an international web platform that brings together the global sports community in a disruptive way. Introducing a video annotation tool that helps athletes share their highlights with relevant audience, this platform sets the standards for building an international sports network in a digital era. Athlenda is founded by Lazaros Papadopoulos, the famous professional basketball player that helped Greece win the gold medal in the 2005 Eurobasket, together with Nikos Sfingos and Manolis Tsagkaridis. The beta version was launched on March 1 this year. In just a few weeks of online presence, the platform already has hundreds of athletes creating their profiles and proactively using the available features.
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What sets Athlenda apart from any other web platform is the innovative feature of sharing and promoting best moments during a sports performance through an embedded video editing tool. The tool allows athletes to tag, organize and share highlights from videos stored locally or on YouTube, which can afterwards be searched for and seen by scouts that are interested in discovering new talents with those exact skills or achievements. Thus, athletes create and develop a personal media library promoting their strengths, and they can constantly update it with new content as they make progress in their career.
With this new approach Athlenda addresses in an integral way the problem of self-promotion of athletes and, vice versa, the real-time sports talent discovery by professionals. Moreover, the Athlenda team emphasizes that among the variety of benefits offered to users are also: easy access to scouts and agents, no travel expenses for talent discoveries, reliable proof of sports skills, improved hiring process, event promotion to targeted audience, product advertising, sports news distribution, sponsorship possibilities for students.
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“Athlenda represents a much more noticeable breakthrough in society. It is no secret that sports careers often become the incentive for thousands of young people to become manipulated, while lacking proper education and information, following crafty managers that promise the sports dream as a trap for illegal employment and financial exploitation. Athlenda provides for the first time the ground for equality in sports chances regardless of the economic, social and geographical background,” explains team member Eugenia Zachariadou.
Currently, the team behind Athlenda is focused on establishing the network in Greece. So far, the platform has received great support by a number of teams and coaches who have already started using Athlenda as a coaching tool, suggesting it to their athletes to join, uploading their plays and working on their performance and self-improvement, as reported. The first community is being built around basketball industry, whereas the second will be focused around football. As announced, next steps will soon involve communicating the platform all around Europe. A mobile application for both iOS and Android is currently available upon request, and the official release is expected in the upcoming weeks.
Sounds interesting? Watch this video to find out exactly how it works:
Video credit: Athlenda