If you have ever wondered who actually runs Analytics207, here is your answer. It is not a company. There is no office in Portland. There is no investor. There is no marketing team in some glass tower in Westbrook.
There are five people. We call them gremlins. Mostly because of the hours. Partly because of the eyes. Partly because the group chat is unreadable.
This is who they are. Names changed, jobs paraphrased, marriages still mostly intact. Everything else is more or less how it happened.
How This Whole Mess Started
Winter 2020. Spring sports cancelled. A guy in central Maine, an accountant by day and a high school basketball obsessive by night, opens a blank spreadsheet at his kitchen table on a Tuesday around 9 PM. He starts typing in Class A North standings the way he remembers them. He gets to row twelve and realizes he is mis-remembering Hampden. He goes back to the MPA website and copies the standings by hand.
He is doing this because he is angry. Not at anyone in particular. Angry at the silence. His niece was supposed to start at center for a Class C team in Aroostook County that spring. His son was supposed to pitch his senior year. The newspapers had nothing because there was nothing. And he thought, well, the numbers exist. Somebody could just go get them.
He starts a Google Doc. He calls it MAINE HOOPS NIGHTLY. He shares it with two friends from a coaches clinic he went to in 1998.
Within three weeks the spreadsheet has eleven columns, four hidden tabs, and a person in Bangor he has never met asking if they can be added.
That guy is the first gremlin.
The Five
The Coach
Retired. Coached varsity boys hoops in a Class C gym up north for many seasons. Won one regional. Lost one as well. Drives a 2014 Silverado with a magnetic AAA card on the dash. Joined Analytics207 because somebody needed to look at the numbers and say "that doesn't pass the eye test."
He is the person who pings the group chat at 11:47 PM with one word: no. Then a screenshot. Then a fix three days later. He is also the one who calls athletic directors directly when something looks off, because they will pick up for him in a way they will not pick up for any of the rest of us.
If you have ever looked at a ranking on this site and thought yeah, that feels right, that is The Coach standing behind your shoulder, nodding once.
The Quill
Wrote prep sports for a Maine daily for a few years until the paper sold and gutted half the make shift staff on a Friday morning in 2023. He showed up at his kid's softball game that afternoon and watched a Class B left-hander throw a one-hitter that nobody outside the parking lot would ever read about.
That night he emailed The Coach. By Monday he was writing recaps for free. He has not stopped.
He writes most of what you read in Insights and the Tape Room. Carries a notebook everywhere. Refuses to use Spotify because "I want to hear the bus." He is the reason a kid from Caribou and a kid from Cape Elizabeth get the same treatment on this site. He worked the beat for a long time. He still does.
The Architect
Software engineer in Portland by day. Has slept on the couch more nights in the last three years than he will tell his wife about, and his wife knows it. Maintains the data, the GameIQ compute, the leaderboards, every alert, every red flag that pages him at 3 AM when a game score looks off.
His Tuesday night routine in season looks like this: kids in bed at 8:30. Wife asleep by 10. He moves to the basement. Cold coffee. Two monitors. A space heater that flickers on and off because the breaker is old. He commits something at 2:14 AM. He commits something else at 3:46. He goes upstairs and falls asleep on the couch because he does not want to wake the dog by climbing the stairs.
His wife, last winter, walked downstairs at 6 AM, saw him face down on the couch with his laptop still open, closed the laptop, and walked away without saying anything. That is the closest he has come to getting kicked out. He earned the couch fair and square.
He once described his code in a meeting as "the dishwasher." Meaning: it just runs every night without complaint. The man is the dishwasher.
The Watcher
Drives every back road in the state. Has been to a game in every county. Carries paper score sheets folded in his glove compartment because cell service in parts of Aroostook is a rumor. Once got escorted out of a gym for arguing with a clock operator. They settled it on the parking lot blacktop. He bought the clock operator a coffee the next week. They are now friends.
The Watcher is the reason you can trust a Class C result on this site as much as a Class A one. He is the single source of truth on whether a game actually happened, what time it ended, whether the score was reported correctly, and whether anything weird happened in the third quarter that the box score would not show you.
He sends voice memos at 9:47 PM. Twenty-three seconds. Wind in the background. "Houlton at home, blowout, no foul trouble worth noting, kid named Sawyer played his guts out, write that down." Then he hangs up and drives to the next gym.
The Numbers Lady
Accountant. Two cats. Fell down the Heal Points hole during the lost spring of 2020 because she was the kind of person who, when locked inside, did not bake bread. She built spreadsheets. She built the first prototype of what is now PIR on a napkin at a diner in Augusta. The napkin is in a frame in her kitchen.
She is the only one of the five with a math degree. She is also the only one who can read the other four's code without sighing. She runs the DSI model, the Heal Points cross-checks, every GameIQ sanity test before the numbers go live each night.
Her line in the group chat, repeated three or four times a season: that number is wrong, here is why, fix it! Nobody argues with her. Once we did. The numbers were wrong.
What This Actually Looks Like
Picture a Tuesday in February. A regular one. Five winter sports games on the slate, three of them late starts.
The Coach is at one of the games in person, sitting six rows up, taking notes in a Mead spiral notebook. The Watcher is at another game in a town with one stoplight, two hours from his house, score sheets on the dashboard, thermos in the cupholder. The Quill is home, watching three feeds at once on his laptop because his wife wanted the TV. The Architect is at his day job, but he is also texting the group every twenty minutes asking if a feed is broken. The Numbers Lady is at her actual job in an actual office building, also running a sanity check on yesterday's Crystal Ball predictions on her lunch break.
Games end around 8:30. Things start arriving. Photos of score sheets. Voice memos. Spreadsheet edits. The Architect leaves work, eats dinner standing up, gets the kids in bed, drops to the basement at 9:45. He starts the nightly job at 10:14. Something fails at 10:52. He fixes it at 11:31. Job restarts. The Numbers Lady sees a number she doesn't like at 12:08 AM. She pings the chat. The Architect re-runs at 12:42. The Coach checks the Class C boys at 1:11 AM (he does not sleep, which is a topic for a different article).
By 1:45 AM the site updates. The job pushes everything to the Slate. The leaderboards refresh. The Mover Board lights up with the night's biggest jumps. The Architect closes the laptop, walks upstairs, sees the couch, lies down on the couch, sleeps four and a half hours. The Quill is awake at 5:45 starting on recaps. He is on his third coffee by 6:30.
The Numbers Lady is at her desk by 7:30 with the morning standings open in another tab. The Watcher is back on the road by 9 AM, sometimes earlier. The Coach is on his second pot of decaf, calling an AD in The County to confirm a co-op roster.
This is every night during in-season. We are not exaggerating. Ask the spouses.
Why Anybody Keeps Doing This
This is the part where a real company would write something about mission and vision. We have none of that.
We do it because there is a freshman pitcher in Fryeburg who throws a no-hitter on a Tuesday and her grandfather, who lives in The Villages and stopped driving in 2019, can pull up Team Central at 7 AM and check out her team. We do it because there is a Class C boys hoops coach in Houlton whose teams have been ranked by the PIR inside the top five three years running, and he prints the page out and tapes it to his office door.
We do it because if we do not, nobody else will. The papers do not have the staff. The TV stations do not have the time. The MPA has its hands full just running the games.
So five weird people stay up too late to make sure your kid's score gets the same treatment as the kid in Portland. That is the whole bit.
Why "Gremlins"
It started in the group chat. The Architect described his on-call hours as "feral." The Numbers Lady countered with "gremlin." It stuck.
There are five of us. We are not a company. We sleep four to six hours a night in season. We eat at the kitchen table while the laptop is open. We text each other at 12:30 AM about whether a Class c football score got corrected and whether the Heal Points need to re-run.
We are gremlins. We are doing this on purpose. The dishwasher will run again tomorrow night.
See you on the Slate. Sleep well.