Attention, casual athletes: Ready for a Pickup?

By Drew Thompson

In a league of your own? If you’re a solo player – or even a small group – looking to play a sport, one of the big challenges is simply finding a game.

Three recent Virginia Commonwealth University alums have merged their own experience, as well as their College of Engineering skills, into Pickup: Connect & Play Sports, a year-old app that facilitates game time for the casual player. As students, they realized how hard it was to find pickup games at specific times – or to efficiently communicate with like-minded players.

“Sports is something that we’re all passionate about,” said Mahir Rahman, who came together with Prakash Chatlani and Sheikh Uddin to create the app, which is available for Apple and Google devices.

The trio of computer science graduates met at the College of Engineering and bonded over sports, which they carried forward after graduation to build Pickup. They all balance full-time jobs while dedicating free time to the app’s growth.

“A lot of the classes we took kind of gave us the baseline,” Uddin said. “From the beginning of the Capstone projects” – which focus on solutions to real-word challenges – “into what we do now, it’s helped us a lot.”

Uddin is CEO of Pickup, Rahman is chief technology officer, and Chatlani is chief information officer. But regardless of title, all three collaborate on strengthening the app and its reach.

Amid the challenges of marketing, the trio has relied more on word of mouth to promote Pickup, whose sports include basketball, soccer, tennis and more. Uddin noted that going into the community and speaking with players can deepen their ties to the app.

Pickup currently serves Richmond and surrounding areas, but the founders aim to extend its reach across Virginia and then beyond.

“Our goal is just to dominate that market, the recreational sports market,” Uddin said. “I want us to be that kind of shift … where we have kids playing outside again.”