For Khayri Cobb, basketball and innovation go hand in hand. A third-generation engineer, the Indiana native, is bridging his passion for tech and hoops with the launch of “We Got Game,” a new mobile web app connecting pickup players across New York City to nearby basketball courts, AfroTech reports.

Cobb’s journey started with family traditions rooted in both engineering and HBCU excellence. His father attended Tennessee State University, his mother went to Miles College, and he proudly continued the legacy at Clark Atlanta University, where he earned his bachelor’s in engineering. “Best decision I ever made,” Cobb told reporters.

From there, he built a powerhouse career in tech, serving in engineering leadership roles at Al Jazeera America, The Atlantic, Axios, and Remine. Speaking about his time at Remine, a data intelligence company in real estate, Cobb said, “We were kind of the first in the game in the residential property space using artificial intelligence and machine language learning for a lot of our components … We were using AI in 2019-2020. So I always had the leg up in that way.”

Now, he’s using that same forward-thinking mindset to transform how hoopers find their next game. We Got Game is described as “the first basketball-focused court finder and community platform.” 

The idea sparked from Cobb’s own experiences in New York. “When I lived in NYC, I encountered issues with finding courts and wanted to have a quick way of finding courts and sending them to my friends, not to mention NYC is the basketball mecca,” he explained.

Using tools like a customized Claude Code, Cobb spent three weeks building the foundation for We Got Game. The app utilizes a database featuring over 250 public basketball courts across Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island, enabling New Yorkers to navigate directly to nearby games. Players can also create personal basketball profiles that show park hours, available courts, and even invite friends to play through social media, text, or email.

“We’re building tools to help NYC basketball players spend less time searching for courts and more time playing the game they love — connecting communities across all five boroughs, one court at a time,” Cobb explained.

As the app evolves, users will be able to customize their profiles by saving favorite courts and selecting their favorite NBA players. Eventually, We Got Game will feature player updates that merge stats, culture, and lifestyle, blending basketball’s influence both on and off the court.

“I really got tired of going to different places to get information … I consume the NBA app, ESPN, all these things. And after a while, I was just like, ‘Man, I don’t even know where the game is. Don’t let it be on Peacock or something like that.’ It’s like, ‘I can’t even find it now,’” Cobb said. “It really was a pain point there … The next iteration that we come out will be all of the feeds that come from those NBA players … You can pull all of these feeds from different places about everything related to that given player, whether it be on the court and off the court as well.”

Even before its official launch, We Got Game has garnered more than 1,000 sign-ups and growing interest from hoop enthusiasts eager to reconnect through community play. Cobb plans to expand next to Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia, with a bigger vision in mind: building a global network for pickup basketball that brings people together, one court at a time.

Learn more about We Got Game at the website HERE.

Cover photo: Engineer Khayri Cobb Builds New App To Connect NYC Hoopers To Local Courts/Photo credit: AfroTech