DataRook emerges as a gateway to STEM education through soccer
DataRook began offering STEM-centric clinics in early 2025. The founding team pitched the business at the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center’s What’s the Big Idea pitch competition in March.
Soccer is one of the most accessible sports in the world. To play a pick-up game, all you really need is a ball. For Gustavo Alvarez-Suchini, that simplicity holds power, not just for building community, but for opening doors to something much bigger: data literacy and STEM education.
Alvarez-Suchini, who goes by “Gus,” is the co-founder of DataRook, a new Knoxville-based start-up with a mission to bring high-impact STEM education to underserved communities through soccer.
Connecting Sports and STEM
Before launching DataRook, Gus spent three years designing classroom lab kits at Flinn Scientific for project-based learning lessons.
“I really liked Bill Nye growing up,” he said. “At Flinn, I made lab kits for middle school and high school classrooms. That job led nicely into what I’m doing now—it’s where things started to click.”
That curiosity led him to Knoxville, where Gus began a Ph.D. program in physics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). He completed his master’s, but found himself increasingly drawn to the practical applications of data analytics and how they could be used to solve real-world problems.
“I learned that top professional soccer teams—Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester—had started hiring physicists and statisticians to build mathematical models,” he said. “They were using high school-level physics and machine learning to improve scouting and tactics. It blew my mind.”
That’s what started Gus down the sports analytics path. He engaged One Knoxville SC during the program’s infancy and onboarded as the organization’s first Data Analyst. He helped with scouting and predicting opponents’ game plays, until eventually he was promoted to the program’s Director of Growth.
At the same time, Gus was coaching a youth soccer team. He began tinkering with the idea of getting more students, who were passionate about sports but not STEM, involved with sports analytics and data tracking.
“I thought… what if kids could learn coding and data science through the sport they already loved?” Gus said.
Leaning on his skills at Flinn, Gus developed a program with cameras, data collection, and analytics software for students to track their own sports statistics.
“I bought the equipment and began testing it with the students I coached,” he said.
He saw some preliminary successes with his own youth soccer team and decided to extend the programming out to other non-profits to try for free. He held his first external five-week clinic at Girls Inc. in Oak Ridge.
“The Girls Inc. opportunity was like magic. They gave us the space to try it,” he said. “The kids absolutely loved it, and it validated the idea.”
Out of that pilot came the official name: DataRook, which nods both to the sports term “rookies” and to the concept of learning something new.
This fall, Gus will begin pursuit of a PhD in Learning, Design, and Technology at UTK, where his research will focus on innovative approaches to STEM education—work that will directly inform DataRook’s curriculum development and impact assessment.
Building DataRook
Through word of mouth, Derek Downey, a cloud infrastructure expert with a background in managing databases on AWS and Google Cloud, learned about Gus’ DataRook clinic.
“This project really resonated because of the focus on data literacy,” Downey said. “We want kids to know how to use actual data to make better decisions. You have a statistically higher chance of success when you understand the numbers.”
Downey joined DataRook as the Chief Technology Officer in February.
Together, they are building a program that’s not only hands-on but rooted in relevance. Gus shared that “relevance” is the missing ingredient in most STEM education.
“For a lot of students, STEM isn’t engaging or relevant right now,” he said. “If they’re only doing problems on paper, then where’s the fun? Where’s the application? DataRook proves to these students that there are a lot of fun career opportunities through STEM.”
In many ways, Gus and Derek got the ball rolling on DataRook in early 2025. But one event that accelerated their growth trajectory was participating in the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center’s What’s the Big Idea pitch competition.
It was an opportunity to pressure-test their concept and receive feedback on how to scale it.
“We decided early on to focus the clinic on soccer exclusively (for now), which means that our first strategy to scale would be to expand the DataRook program to other markets like Chattanooga, Asheville, and Nashville,” Gus said.
Soccer, in Gus’s opinion, is the perfect sport to focus on with the clinic for now. He provided three key reasons, with the third being of utmost importance: data-rich gameplay, diverse scenarios, and unmatched accessibility.
Building on their success with current partners, including Tate’s School and multiple Boys & Girls Club locations, the DataRook team is looking for schools, community organizations, and non-profits that need interactive STEM programs.
Their goal is to make STEM education as accessible as the sport of soccer itself.
Learn more about the DataRook clinics.
Connect with Gustavo Alvarez-Suchini.
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