Ira, Ross, Gauri, and Aaron Hacklytics 2025
(https://devpost.com/software/en-guarde)
The inspiration of this project comes from one of our members, Ira Pathak. During the 2023-2024 year, she was ranked 394th in the world for senior division (up to 35 years old) epee representing India. Despite being a quality player, she found the recruiting process for collegiate fencing difficult to navigate. Not being well connected, she fell behind on recruiting. A notable example was when Columbia had already recruited the incoming 2024-2025 fencing class two years prior.
In general, most international fencers on US fencing collegiate teams studied at international schools in well established fencing circuits and scouting networks helped them stand out. This means that thousands of athletes from other countries fall behind.
The design of this app is inspired by College Football 25 Franchise Mode Recruiting Portal, Dating Apps, and the Common Application, we build a portal that helps connect players to coaches.
Gives Athletes Exposure Athletes create a profile on the website and upload key things to their profile such as practice tapes, rankings, and a bio. Athletes can express interest in a school or program. Their profiles will be pushed to coaches who may offer them a position.
Organize Recruitment for Coaches Coaches get a unified system to organize their recruitment. Instead of having to organize hundreds of emails from applicants, they have a central portal where they can do it all from.
Provide Statistical Data
Coaches also get to see analytical that help measure a player's potential impact on the program.
Link to the pitch deck : (https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10Gmd_RV4oiTbaZI7XSYK-t1qPS2BhOv9l6ziT81mmbw/edit#slide=id.g33917df5030_0_589)
Frontend: HTML, CSS
Backend: Python, JavaScript
Frameworks: Django, Selenium, BeautifulSoup, Chart.js
During the hackathon, our team encountered several challenges that tested our technical skills and collaboration. Our first major hurdle was to define our problem space. Several ideation and iterations cycles were done within the team in order to formulate our final idea. Many of our initial ideas in the various sports fields we were interested in were already somewhat researched in or already had some software that attempted to solve this. Spending considerable time iterating and considering new inspirations, we arrived at the current problem space. Another major problem was in data scraping and collection. Data scraping proved difficult as much of the data available for our sport, fencing, was stored on the International Fencing Federation Page (FIE). However, data, especially match results and urls were inconsistent, making data scraping hard. Finally, managing the work distribution based on the abilities of each member was a tough task as on. These problem required and emphasizes the importance of teammwork, passion, and adaptability to overcome these difficulties.
We are proud of several key accomplishments. Despite being relatively new to data scraping, teammates were able to scrape the proper data from the website and wrote code that help overcome inconsistencies. In addition, we are proud to have quickly learned several libraries quickly and sucessfully applied them to develop the web page. We are also proud to have developed such a unique idea. Our idea has no comparison in terms of its combined scope, function, and impact. Each member played an active role, whether it be the team's pitch developer, to our frontend and backend developers. Finally, we are proud of the energy the team displayed. Everyone was highly enthusiastic and saw it for what it was: a chance for the underdog to live the American Dream. It was a potentially massive idea with the clear ability to expand and permanently affect college sports.
During the hackathon, we gained valuable experience in web development and data processing. We learned how to scrape and process data, and use new libraries for effective web development. Aditionally, we enhanced our skills in research, both during the ideation process and during the development process.
En Garde has major potential for the future. We see three major ways that this can expand and be furthur developed. More Sports: Tons of other sports such as tennis, wrestling, and golf have similar problem spaces that this software can be applied to. Devlopment of Advanced Statistics: More statistical models can be developed to help coaches measure a player's impact. New metrics could also be created such as bWAR (bouts won above replacement), xW (expected wins), and xMOV (expected margin of victory). This could be a potential avenue for AI to be implemented to help find hidden meanings in these large datasets. Expanding into underrepresented American markets: American markets, especially those from poorer and underrepresented schools could see potential benefits from this, namely a college education, which may not have been possible due to the lack of exposure.