Steve Johnson was raised in the baseball hotbed of Toms River, New Jersey, and excelled at the prep level and Wofford College, where he was an everyday player for four years. Afterwards, he opened a facility which housed travel teams that had players who were recruited by coaches that included Ken Spangenberg, who served as the head coach at alma mater Arcadia (PA) University.
The two stayed in touch, especially when Spangenberg was hired to run a training facility of his own, sharing advice on how to run the building, construct travel teams, and more. As it turns out, “and more” has included much more, as Johnson (co-founder and Chief Product Officer), Spangenberg (Chief Sales Officer) and Rob Corsi, who pitched at Rutgers, have joined forces to develop AWRE (pronounced “aware”), an advanced hardware and software company that assists with solutions such as event and team management, online charting, mobile apps, video highlights, and livestreaming.
“I played my entire life and after that was done, I got a real job and held it down for about four days. I called my parents and said ‘Sorry, but this sucks, I'm going to coach,’” said Spangenberg, a three-time All-Conference player in his own right. “I was at Keystone (PA) College with Jamie Shevchik, who’s the head coach of the Brewster Whitecaps in the Cape Cod League. He was an awesome mentor. And ironically, one of the first players I coached was Ryan Smyth, who was recently named the head guy for Wareham. So from one DIII team in a town literally called Factoryville, you had two future Cape league head coaches, which is pretty cool.”
“I had two roommates at Wofford,” Johnson recalled. “One was Jesse Cole, the Savannah Bananas founder, and the other is Chris Clark, who is our other co-founder [at AWRE]. Chris had developed a successful golf analytics app that the PGA and LIV golfers used, and he wanted to get into baseball. He knew I was in the space, and I had interest in getting into the tech side of baseball. He came up to visit, and we brainstormed a bunch of ideas. We knew analytics was going to have its place, but I had always thought that video is king. We always had the vision of being a primary video platform, but we needed to start somewhere, so the charting app and analytics made the most sense.”
“We felt that colleges were the most ready for [us] because of the relative continuity of rosters, the playing venues and the coaches,” Spangenberg noted. “We approached them first about our six-camera system on the premise that whether you’re talking about winning games, developing teams or helping players get recruited, one angle doesn’t cut it. And I speak from experience as a person who has tried to recruit via one bad video angle.”
“One of my kids would homer and nobody would see it, which was frustrating,” recalls Johnson. “It’s just so difficult to get seen, so providing a better opportunity for these kids has been a part of our mission.”
“We can set up hardwired cameras at a field, but we’re going to have the ability to ‘go mobile’ if you will, and use iPads, iPhones, multiple angles, and incorporate most everything we can do outdoors,” added Johnson. “Instructors can get clips and have video analysis for performance and development, and if a kid pops off in training and hits 92mph, that’s clearly worth sharing.”
In addition to providing video solutions, AWRE is looking into additional options to make coaches’ jobs easier. “We’ve been awarded a patent that gives us the ability to send notifications straight to your phone,” Spangenberg said. “Say you want to know every time a recruit has a multi-hit game, you can get a notification that will include a link to a stream, box score, and additional highlights. And you can customize your search for, say, any 2027 left-hander that’s hit 85, and any video in our system that matches those parameters will get sent out.”
“We have set out to bring professional-level tools to all levels of amateur baseball,” Johnson added. “We are here to help everyone in terms of development, and to democratize recruiting, which has been our goal since day one.”