Gravenhurst student scouted by Silicon Valley

iTEEN. Grade 12 Gravenhurst High School student Cameron Dearsley is helping a California-based, start-up information technology company design a new sports themed social media website and mobile applications. Photo by Neil Etienne

GRAVENHURST - Cameron Dearsley’s classroom window has a much different view these days.
While his peers in Grade 12 gaze out over snowy, slushy fields and pore deep over texts he’s been touring south to Silicon Valley, helping design what could become the next major craze in both social media and sports fan websites.
“It’s the first of its kind,” he said. “It’s going to be an outlet for sports fans to really show off what they know and prove they are the biggest fan out there.
“We think it has fantastic earning potential,” Dearsley added. “And I’m really excited about what it could be in two to three years and all the things we can add.”
Dearsley, as one of a team of eight young international entrepreneurs, is helping design MVP Tracker, what he says will be the ultimate sports fan website. It will be a place where people can create profiles and track their favourite athletes or sports teams. Dearsley said a massive amount of data allows people to access information on current and historical players, compare statistics that can be updated live during a game and earn the users ‘rep’ points by accumulating followers to prove themselves to be true fans.
“We have just about everything and every athlete you can think of, right back to about 1970 so far,” he explained. “There’s basketball, hockey right to curling if you want; you can create cards for individual players or whole teams and follow them through the season.”
If all goes as planned, the crew hope to be able to provide live streaming of games where members can chat about the sport, their favourite athletes, post pictures or video clips and essentially show off everything they know.
“I wasn’t really into sports a lot, I got into this more because of the technology and the design aspect, but doing this has made me much more of a sports fan now and the passion in the (sports) industry is just awesome,” he said.
Dearsley was found by the founders of MVP Tracker online. He said he found a love for graphic and website design in about Grade 9. He created an account with Dribbble a couple of years ago, a job-seeker and head-hunter forum for computer design, and they found him there out of a pool of hundreds of potential designers. Through his full-semester co-op program at GHS, he accepted the position late last fall and has made two, two- to three-week-long trips to Silicon Valley, just a couple of hours south of San Francisco. He has another scheduled for the end of January, when hopefully the final touches to the website will be made and it can go “live”.
“It’s not often you have a young student from a place like Gravenhurst being flown by a company down to California to work on a major project,” said school principal Rick Sellon. “He’s a very bright young man.”
Dearsley said a great deal of his passion was encouraged and supported by former GHS teacher John Weir, who passed away last year.
He supplied me with the software and encouraged me to pursue a career in the tech industry; without it I wouldn’t be where I am today,” he said.
At 17, Dearsley is not the youngest member of the team, and the eldest is only 20. He is the only Canadian, while there are two British designers and the rest are from the US. He said the experience of bringing like minds together from around the globe has been beyond his expectations.
“We can do a lot of our work remotely but the energy when we all get together in the same room is incredible,” Dearsley said, adding if the site’s launch is successful, he has been asked to move to California after high school graduation to work and live there for the year.
“I was really just doing it for the fun, but it’s turning into a chance for a great job,” he said. “There’s so much passion there; we’ve put in some many hours on this project but it’s just amazing to all be working together in this collaborative way.”
He said the initial plan was to launch the website by mid-January, but “there’s still a massive amount of coding work to do yet,” so that has been pushed back until earlier February.
Dearsley said the team is attempting to secure some major backers for advertising on the site and there is also a mobile application he created that will be available once the site goes live.
Although it is not yet complete, people can check the website out at mvptracker.com.
“We’re really excited about this; there’s so much potential,” Dearsley said. “It could be like the next Facebook for sports.”
As a side project, Dearsley has also partnered with his father to work on local client projects, with a company called Steam Creative (steamcreative.com).

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