An avid tennis fan from Rancho Santa Fe recently launched a new app that connects tennis fans around the world.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The app went live on the App Store shortly before the recent US Open. Shear got the app\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The app was also featured in an article in \u201cCLAY\u201d, a trilingual tennis media outlet with content in English, Spanish and Portuguese.<\/p>\n
\u201cFandom is supposed to be social,\u201d Shear wrote on a recent tennis blog. \u201cIt\u2019s how you end up close to people you\u2019d otherwise never meet. There are shared nerves, storylines and irrational beliefs that evolve over the course of the year. But most of what we\u2019re offered instead is a comment section: thousands of strangers shouting past each other, nobody there tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n
With his app, he said, the conversations don\u2019t have to end when the match does.<\/p>\n
The idea for Standm came from being a tennis fan whose friends didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d 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,\u201d 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\u2019t truly engaging with other people.<\/p>\n
Standm was Shear\u2019s first experience with app development and coding\u2014a 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: \u201cIt\u2019s been a learning curve for the last year or so,\u201d Shear said.<\/p>\n
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\u2014chat moderation is in place and users can\u2019t share inappropriate content in texts or images.<\/p>\n
After earning his degree in philosophy from Vanderbilt this spring, Shear took a leap and moved to Amsterdam. He\u2019s been in the country for a little over three months and has a permit to stay for two years\u2014it has been fun for the app\u2019s home base to be in Europe, where tennis is more of a mainstream sport than in America.<\/p>\n
With Federer retired, Shear\u2019s new favorite is Spanish player Carlos Alcarez, \u201cone of the most stylish, fun and dynamic players on tour.\u201d He also loves the slightly polarizing Italian Jannik Sinnner and Polish pro Iga \u015awi\u0105tek. \u201cI\u2019m also happy to talk about Americans too,\u201d he added. There\u2019s some local pride with Taylor Fritz, the number three American men\u2019s tennis player who grew up in Rancho Santa Fe and attended Torrey Pines, just a few years ahead of Shear.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s Australian Open\u2014the app will help diehards like him track and talk about Alcarez and others\u2019 progress.<\/p>\n
One of Shear\u2019s most special memories was being able to go to the clay courts at Roland Garros in Paris a few years ago\u2014he said there\u2019s not much that compares with being around people who love the sport as much as he does. That\u2019s just the type of community he\u2019s trying to build online with Standm.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s super early days, so I\u2019m not at the triple-digit active users point but I have the beginnings of some really fun groups,\u201d Shear said.<\/p>\n