Andrew Walton: The Origins of MyCricket — Part 1

So let's kick off. And Andrew, just tell the people a little bit about who you are. You've been tremendous in the cricket community for over two decades, but there's something really special about you which probably people don't know. Tell them exactly what you were doing roughly 25 years ago in the cricket community.

Anthony, thank you for this. So 25 years ago roughly, I had just come back from following the Australian team around the 1999 World Cup in England. It was my first time to the UK, and I realized then that the internet was just starting, and the only way to really keep track of what was happening back home in sport was if you happened to walk into a tavern like the Walkabout Tavern in the UK and pick up Time Out magazine to find out what was going on. During that trip, having played with South Cricket Club for many years, we developed a website for our club. On the website, we contained information about the club, photos, and scorecards. Teammates Peter McCaulay and David McCaulay were both highly into IT and computers, and they delivered a program for the club that was Results Vault initially, which basically meant at the end of each game, as a coach or captain, you could put into Results Vault the stats from the game scorecard, and it would produce what was needed for presentation night.

So that we were able to capture all the information—awards, bowling averages, best performances, but also bring in things like most maidens bowled or most boundaries struck. After that period, we extended that out a bit further to be more dynamic, with the mindset that apart from the website being static information, how can it actually be used to give dynamic information? Because it was starting to become a medium where at South Cricket Club, the only thing was we had four teams playing in two different associations, VTCA and MCA.

Of the 70-odd players on our list, only one person came from South Yarra. The rest came from all over the place. The common connection was Uni Blues Footy Club and the Goulburn Valley up in Shepparton. Therefore, many people outside the local community were interested in what was going on. So it gradually evolved over time, and we realized that if we can create a scorecard, what are the elements that go into that? Apart from our own information, you've got opposition, competition information, umpires, and we started to build out Results Vault into being a competition management tool for our club. But also we had a great complexity first up because we had four teams in two associations, and we wanted to ensure that the players' records weren't duplicated—so there's always a single source of truth. Just as a reference, one of our teammates who still plays there, Gideon Haigh, whom most people in cricket would have heard of—Gideon Haigh on the system, he's number 21.

And despite his whole playing career—he's filled in for other clubs, he's been a club delegate, administrator, selector—all those things are part of his profile. He's still number 21. It's a moment in time.

And what's really interesting about that—back in those days I was in IT as well. When I was at uni, if I had been successful in my uni career, because I was focused on cricket and not very focused at uni, I had always thought that my end of year thesis in computer science would be effectively what you ended up building with Results Vault. Like, we got to get this big clunky laptop down to the ground and someone's going to enter in the details, preserve that, and it's going to go into a database built with Perl. A few years later, Results Vault came in and CB Marist was one of the first clubs to embrace it. I still remember on my Results Vault history, 2002-03, the first game on there for me was making 68 batting at number 9 or 10 to take us from 6 or 7 for nothing to at least a competitive score. We ended up getting smashed anyway, but that's my first memory of Results Vault.

Like I've got that anchor point with Results Vault. But then, how did Results Vault transfer into what would become MyCricket and what most people probably know today?

Well, first of all, it took seven years. It took a long time to get there because back in the day, half of our time was trying to explain to people what the internet was. Also, Cricket Australia didn't own their own digital IP—BaggyGreen.com.au was owned by Channel 9.

So what we were building—imagine a Cricinfo database for community cricket. Between the three of us, Dave was the hardcore coder, developer, gatekeeper, builder of the system. Pete, his brother, was more the designer, open thinking creative, problem solver. Myself, I was the co-club coach and captain, the grind monkey putting scorecards from the newspaper into the online system and testing the database, but also the front person going out explaining to people why this is going to be useful. The WA link was initially hard because we couldn't get cut-through in Victoria and New South Wales. But I transitioned to playing cricket at Parkdale Club in the lower grades at the same time a young David Hussey came across to Melbourne. David introduced me to his dad, Ted. Ted had just retired as a schoolteacher and was taking on full-time admin for Wanneroo in WA.

We showed Ted what we were doing over distance before Zoom, over telephone. Wanneroo used it for a season, and then Ted exposed us to Paul Layman at Perth, South Metro, Bunbury, and many grade teams. I went across to Perth, did a couple of demonstrations, and was really embraced by the local community.

Why do you think that was? Do you think WA was a little bit more forward with technology, or was it the personal relationship? What did it?

Personal made it easy. Also, a lot of administrators on the eastern side of the country were generally of the senior generation and didn't understand email, let alone websites. Right from the start, we applied a subscription model: $50 per senior team, $25 per junior team, roughly $5 per player per year. Back then, the servers running the system were literally in our bedrooms.

There was no cloud. This was before the cloud. Literal white box PCs sitting in the bedroom with an internet connection?

Pete and I had a dining table upstairs where we lived, sitting on opposite sides. In the corner cabinet was the PC running the servers, with fans running to keep it in good order, while I was sleeping in the room next door.

That's how we did it for quite a few years. How good is that? That's amazing.

The network we built through clubs like Wanneroo, Perth, St George, Tea Tree Gully, Manly Warringah Association—by 2007, when Cricket Australia brought a collective together under senior manager Damon Deuau, we were servicing around 41% of the Australian market. Historical clubs like St George Cricket Club, where Bradman came through, methodically entered their history, going back to the 1950s, because they trusted the system.

The fundamental rule was Results Vault must never crash, and every button you click goes to something that makes you keep clicking through—from scorecard to player's name, season performance, career performance, opposition, and so on.

Also recognizing that starting with four teams in two associations, players could play Saturday and Sunday. Your record could be separated by grade or brought together for career performance. Another thing—explaining to a developer that in cricket you can bowl 7.5 overs, seven overs and five balls, but that's not decimal 7.5.

Cricket brought up so many statistical edge cases. That allowed it to be robust and flexible as time went on, growing into live scoring on iPads, mobile-first devices, live streaming, and packaged highlights. In 2007, Cricket Australia brought it together, forming MyCricket. We shifted from a direct subscription model to an enterprise model through Cricket Australia.

At the same time, our business Interact Sport delivered similar competition management platforms for tennis, rugby union, football—any sport with a ball and a score. Yet the focus was primarily grassroots.

Apart from early adopters like Subiaco Marist, our first cohort included North Texas Cricket Association, Cricket Sweden, North Scotland Cricket Association.

With Cricket Thailand, we could break down language barriers through numbers and a genuine love of the game. Then in 2015, we won the tender with the ECB in the UK as they reached the end of their legacy system.

Play Cricket had been hosted on a data center in Dublin that they no longer had control over. They adopted a complete mobile-first design. By that stage, Interact Sport employed 26 people, many of whom were friends and associates through cricket. The rest is history.

Well, it's amazing. Tell us a little bit about the transition to PlayHQ, as it's very important context for where we're going.

A lot of the fundamental architecture in PlayHQ is still what was there in MyCricket, but because it services multiple sports rather than being cricket-specific, it hasn't quite kept pace with digital expectations or AI innovations coming out of India, the UAE, and the US.

Because one thing's for certain: if you belong to a cricket club, you are very proud of your history and involvement. In this day and age, people want a meaningful connection.

That's the origin story for ClubStats. We were struggling to celebrate stats and losing connection between old and new players. Younger players didn't know the history or achievements of club stalwarts they were playing alongside. I knew when I was young that I was playing with someone who took 500 wickets or won our first flag back in 1995. That made my connection to the club super strong.

We'd lost that connection. Young guys didn't know what older players had achieved. Exactly 12 months ago, I started building ClubStats to bridge the gap between printed yearbooks, MyCricket, and PlayHQ, uniting offline history with the online era into a complete club record.

When MyCricket evolved, Ricky Ponting was captain of Australia, yet the only way to find Ricky Ponting's junior record was physically pulling scorebooks off shelves at Mowbray Cricket Club.

In an Under-19 match, Victoria had Aaron Finch, Peter Siddle, Adam Crosswaite, Peter Nevill; New South Wales had Usman Khawaja, David Warner, Steve O'Keefe, John Hastings. At Interact Sport, we allowed clubs to download condensed annual yearbooks, 40–60 pages, at the end of each season.

I personally found it useful because I could print it off and give it to my mom so she understood what I did for work!

ClubStats is focused entirely on the club itself, bringing in records back to the 1880s and surfacing them on digital player profiles where history comes back to life.