For years, Ogungbemi Olabode was known as Bode Blaq, a name tied to music, visual arts and Nigeria’s wider creative economy. Today, the Pan-Atlantic University graduate is applying that same experience to a new frontier: sports technology. In June 2025, Olabode began building SportyCam, a sports management and recording platform designed to solve everyday problems facing grassroots sports communities in Nigeria, with ambitions to expand across Africa. Rather than a departure from his creative work, the move is a natural extension of it. Olabode’s background in culture, audiences and creative communities isn’t incidental to how he builds SportyCam; it is the foundation of it, shaping how the platform is designed, why it prioritises community and participation, and where he sees it going next.
The problem SportyCam is chasing is bigger than keeping score. For many grassroots football clubs, running a team still means juggling WhatsApp groups, spreadsheets, manual payments and improvised methods of recording matches and player statistics. Players often belong to several communities at once, while administrators must track attendance, dues, fixtures and communication across a patchwork of platforms. SportyCam brings these scattered activities into a single digital ecosystem. Founded by Olabode alongside Akindipupo Oluwafemi and Gbadamosi Abiola, the platform gives players and clubs tools to manage membership, availability, payments, events and communication, alongside a statistics-recording component that makes match data more accessible and useful. SportyCam is also developing a 180-degree AI-powered camera capable of recording and following the action without a conventional production crew, designed to function as shared infrastructure for clubs that would otherwise find professional match recording too expensive or impractical, giving them a way to capture games and build a digital record of their activity over time.
That design instinct traces directly back to Olabode’s years in music and visual arts, where he learned how communities are built, how participation is sustained, and how culture, storytelling and experience combine to hold an audience together. SportyCam applies those same principles to sport, treating it not simply as a collection of games but as communities in need of better ways to participate, communicate and preserve what they do together. “We started with football because that is where the density is,” Olabode says. “But the idea has always been bigger than one sport.”
That bigger idea is the point. SportyCam isn’t just a football management tool, it’s digital infrastructure for grassroots sports communities more broadly: connecting players and clubs, creating digital records, capturing match data and footage, and laying the groundwork for talent discovery and engagement over time. That ambition shapes the product’s design as much as its vision. SportyCam is being built around the operational realities of its first market: inconsistent connectivity, fragmented payment behaviour and limited access to professional recording infrastructure are the norm for grassroots sports communities, so the platform is designed to make recording and uploading practical even in those conditions. Players can build a record of their participation. Clubs can maintain histories across seasons. Match footage can form part of a team’s digital archive. And, over time, structured sports data can open new possibilities for talent discovery and engagement.
For Olabode, the shift from Bode Blaq to sports-tech founder is not a story about starting over, it’s a story about applying the same instinct in a new space. The ability to build community, hold an audience and create meaningful experiences around culture doesn’t change depending on the industry; it simply finds a new outlet. With SportyCam, that instinct is now being channelled into technology and sports infrastructure, built for communities that have long operated without it. The stage and the art studio shaped how Olabode thinks about people, culture and connection. The football pitch is simply where he’s applying it now.
