An avid tennis fan from Rancho Santa Fe recently launched a new app that connects tennis fans around the world.
Henry Shear, a Torrey Pines High School alum and 2026 Vanderbilt University graduate created Standm, a mobile app that matches up like-minded fans (or Stans) into small chats or pods centered around the players they love.
The app went live on the App Store shortly before the recent US Open. Shear got the app’s name out through a poster campaign in Queens, New York around the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center venue and through some collaborations on Instagram with tennis podcasts and influencers.
The app was also featured in an article in “CLAY”, a trilingual tennis media outlet with content in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
“Fandom is supposed to be social,” Shear wrote on a recent tennis blog. “It’s how you end up close to people you’d otherwise never meet. There are shared nerves, storylines and irrational beliefs that evolve over the course of the year. But most of what we’re offered instead is a comment section: thousands of strangers shouting past each other, nobody there tomorrow.”
With his app, he said, the conversations don’t have to end when the match does.
The idea for Standm came from being a tennis fan whose friends didn’t watch tennis. He had played tennis as a kid and he grew up loving watching his favorite player, Roger Federer. His tennis fandom followed him to Vanderbilt.
“I’d be up at 2 a.m. for the Australian Open final, watching a match turn on a single point, and there was no one to turn to,” he said. It was tough finding people as committed to following the sport as he was and many of the online platforms or forums he tried turned out to be toxic and he wasn’t truly engaging with other people.
Standm was Shear’s first experience with app development and coding—a friend doing their Phd in computer science was instrumental in helping him to get started and teaching him what he needed to know in building and troubleshooting the app: “It’s been a learning curve for the last year or so,” Shear said.
The app matches users based on their favorite players, niche interests and questions about how they like to talk about sports. Members can chat one on one or in a small group rather than a big posting feed. One feature of Standm Shear has been adamant about is safety—chat moderation is in place and users can’t share inappropriate content in texts or images.
After earning his degree in philosophy from Vanderbilt this spring, Shear took a leap and moved to Amsterdam. He’s been in the country for a little over three months and has a permit to stay for two years—it has been fun for the app’s home base to be in Europe, where tennis is more of a mainstream sport than in America.
With Federer retired, Shear’s new favorite is Spanish player Carlos Alcarez, “one of the most stylish, fun and dynamic players on tour.” He also loves the slightly polarizing Italian Jannik Sinnner and Polish pro Iga Świątek. “I’m also happy to talk about Americans too,” he added. There’s some local pride with Taylor Fritz, the number three American men’s tennis player who grew up in Rancho Santa Fe and attended Torrey Pines, just a few years ahead of Shear.
Shear catches most tennis action on Tennis Channel, where he will follow Alcarez through upcoming tournaments such as Japan Open, Shanghai Masters, Paris Masters and exhibitions leading up to January’s Australian Open—the app will help diehards like him track and talk about Alcarez and others’ progress.
One of Shear’s most special memories was being able to go to the clay courts at Roland Garros in Paris a few years ago—he said there’s not much that compares with being around people who love the sport as much as he does. That’s just the type of community he’s trying to build online with Standm.
“It’s super early days, so I’m not at the triple-digit active users point but I have the beginnings of some really fun groups,” Shear said.
To learn more visit, standm.app