Decisions, not data: Texarkana startup PIVOT Intelligence builds AI for basketball

TEXARKANA, Texas – Every NBA game now produces tracking data on all 10 players and the ball, 60 times a second. A Texarkana startup is betting the next competitive edge in basketball will not come from collecting more data, but from turning it into answers a coach can use before the next possession.

PIVOT Intelligence, founded in 2026 by three Texas A&M University-Texarkana baseball players, is building a decision-intelligence platform for professional and college basketball teams. Its slogan sums up the pitch: “Decisions, not data.”

“The goal is to shorten the distance between information and action,” said Will Erickson, the company’s 19-year-old co-founder and CEO. “We want to give a coach clear options, the evidence behind them and the tradeoffs, while keeping the final decision in the coach’s hands.”

From team manager to tech founder

Erickson, a Portland, Oregon, native, plays baseball for the Eagles under head coach Chase Brewster. He met his co-founders, Evan Jackson and Worth McMillen, on the team. Jackson serves as chief marketing officer, and McMillen is chief operating officer. Erickson built the platform himself, from the front end to the back end and the live data feeds.

The idea started in January. Erickson said an important influence was A&M-Texarkana assistant coach Wade Elliott, co-founder and president of Diamond View Analytics. That company’s platform brings together baseball performance, tracking and biomechanics data and includes an AI-powered Virtual Coach. Elliott’s work sparked Erickson’s interest in applying the same ideas to basketball.

“We’ve always been super numbers-oriented,” Erickson said.

His interest goes back to high school, where, he said, he was not built to star on the court. Instead, he kept stats, served as a team manager and tried to build his own system for finding an edge.

“It was very lackluster,” he said.

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The problem: plenty of data, not enough answers

Pro and college teams already buy data, hire analysts and pay third parties to break it down. Erickson said the trouble is that the information is spread across separate tools and is slow to act on.

“Access is not the problem. Translation is,” the company says on its website. Raw tracking data does not tell a scout who to draft, a coach who to guard or an executive who to sign. That work falls to analytics staff running manual queries, often slower than the decisions in front of them.

PIVOT is developing a decision-intelligence platform that connects basketball data, film and team context to help coaching staffs evaluate lineup choices, practice priorities and game-plan adjustments. Its recommendations are intended to support the staff’s judgment and reflect the coach’s approach.

The platform is designed to shorten the time between analysis and action. PIVOT has working software that uses real basketball data, while additional capabilities and integrations remain in development.

The PIVOT Score

The PIVOT Score is a proprietary player-evaluation metric designed to estimate a player’s contribution to winning using the performance information available to the platform. Erickson compares it with Player Efficiency Rating, a widely used statistic that rolls a player’s offensive and defensive production into a single number.

“It tells coaches, players or GMs how much a player actually contributes to winning,” he said.

A moment that clicked

Erickson said the team knew it had something during a prototyping session last season. They were watching a late-game playoff situation on TV, and their team needed a quick score. With the app open, Erickson played coach and asked it for a play.

“Ten or 15 seconds later, we watched that play unfold on TV in front of our eyes, and it was successful,” he said. “At that point we kind of realized that we had something special.”

Built for people, not to replace them

As AI tools spread through every industry, Erickson said PIVOT has been clear from the start that it is meant to support analysts and coaches, not replace them.

“From day one we made sure our software was marketed to humans and not as a way to replace a department,” he said. “Our goal is to build the strongest software, and it stays in human hands.”

The company says every recommendation should be traceable to the evidence behind it. In its weekly newsletter, The PIVOT Report, it describes a standard for each answer: the decision a staff actually faces, the evidence supporting it, the tradeoffs of other choices and the limits of what is known.

What comes next

PIVOT is in discussions with A&M-Texarkana about a potential demonstration and evaluation of its software, while developing independent case studies and interactive demos for coaching staffs. The company has not started generating revenue. Erickson said it is in investment conversations to bring the product to market, which he believes is possible within six months.

This fall, the team is also finishing game and film breakdowns that connect what happened in a game to the decisions behind it.

“I’m extremely proud of the work we’re doing,” Erickson said in the company’s Nov. 1 newsletter. “I want teams to see how PIVOT connects the analysis to decisions, give us honest feedback and help shape what we build next.”

Over the next year, Erickson wants the technology in use by 10 college programs, along with a professional pilot in the G League, WNBA, NBA or EuroLeague. College basketball, he said, is the first frontier.

He knows the biggest doubt some people have about the company: its founders’ age.

“Of course we’re young. That’s a fact,” he said. “But I think we’re ready to battle against the big guys. A traditional business takes a long time to get off the ground. With this AI revolution, I could see this really taking off within the next year to year and a half.”

He said PIVOT started as a passion project to prove he could build something “smarter than me, arguably,” and quickly grew into a real company.

Coaches, front offices and anyone working in basketball operations, sports technology or applied AI can learn more or request a demo at pivotintelligence.ai or by emailing [email protected].