Founder Khayri Cobb is using technology to benefit basketball players in New York City.
The Indiana native is a third-generation engineer thanks to his father and grandfather. He is also carrying forward another family tradition as an HBCU graduate. His father went to Tennessee State University while his mother attended Miles College. He selected Clark Atlanta University and obtained a bachelor’s in engineering.
“Best decision I ever made,” Cobb told AFROTECH™.
Cobb went on to carve an impressive path in technology. His career trajectory includes Al Jazeera America (DevOps engineer, lead DevOps engineer), The Atlantic (senior DevOps engineer, DevOps engineer), Axios (engineering manager, lead infrastructure engineer), and Remine (platform director, director of platform engineering), according to information on his LinkedIn.
Speaking to his time at Remine, which delivers data intelligence to the real estate ecosystem, he said, “We were kind of the first in the game in the residential property space using artificial intelligence and machine language learning for a lot of our components … We were using AI in 2019-2020. So I always had the leg up in that way.'”
We Got Game
Cobb is now pouring his decades of experience into a mobile web app called We Got Game, “the first basketball-focused court finder and community platform,” according to a press release shared with AFROTECH™. It was inspired by his time living in New York City. Now he splits his time between NYC and Washington, D.C.
“When I lived in NYC, I encountered issues with finding courts and wanted to have a quick way of finding courts and sending them to my friends, not to mention NYC is the basketball mecca,” Cobb explained.
With the help of various tools, including a customized Claude Code, he spent three weeks building the foundation of We Got Game, which aims to connect the 1.5 million active players in NYC to the nearest basketball court with turn-by-turn navigation. This is made possible through a database that shows more than 250 public basketball courts in the following boroughs: Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island.
Furthermore, players will be able to create basketball profiles. By doing so, they can access a detailed map grid showing park hours and how many courts are available at a given park. Users can also invite their friends to a court via social media, SMS, or email. The goal in the future is to make this feature more seamless by making it available directly within the platform.
“We’re building tools to help NYC basketball players spend less time searching for courts and more time playing the game they love — connecting communities across all five boroughs, one court at a time,” Cobb told AFROTECH™.
Later, players will be able to further personalize their profiles by selecting their favorite courts and NBA players. In the future, users will receive updates on NBA players’ movements as well, covering their game stats as well as their global brand in areas such as business and fashion.
“I really got tired of going to different places to get information … I consume the NBA app, ESPN, all these things. And after a while, I was just like, ‘Man, I don’t even know where the game is. Don’t let it be on Peacock or something like that.’ It’s like, ‘I can’t even find it now,'” Cobb shared.
“It really was a pain point there … The next iteration that we come out will be all of the feeds that come from those NBA players … You can pull all of these feeds from different places about everything related to that given player, whether it be on the court and off the court as well,” he continued.
We Got Game has attracted more than 1,000 sign-ups ahead of its official launch, per the press release, and Cobb plans to expand the platform beyond NYC to Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The overarching goal is to create a global network for pickup basketball.
