Ben Schragger achieves things other guys his age can only fantasize about, which is kind of ironic since his latest venture deals in fantasy.
The man who founded Cards2Kids, a charity organization helping children-based organizations, who coaxed Steph Curry to Pennington for a game of HORSE and ping pong in ninth grade, and who as an intern watched Super Bowl LI between New England and Atlanta from Eagles president Don Smolenski’s suite, is now advising thousands of Fantasy Football players on how to stock their teams.
He’s doing it with help from his friends, as Schragger and some fellow Hopewell Valley Central High School grads launched the website ffootballlive.com last January after establishing a popular twitter account five years earlier. With training camps underway, Fantasy fanatics may want to check out the sites, which are loaded with informative stories, podcasts, player rankings, chat sessions and everything else needed to prepare for the draft.
“We interact with followers daily,” Schragger said, “tweeting out NFL news and advice, while answering any fantasy football questions posed by our followers.”
And that’s a whole lot of questions. The website is a spin-off of Schragger’s twitter handle, @ffootballlive, which he started in 2013 while still in high school. “It was a way to share my fantasy football knowledge and expertise with a wider audience than just my close friends,” he said.
In five years, ffootballlive has amassed 14,000 followers from over 40 countries, including 30 professional athletes. During the course of the NFL season, team members are fielding questions from the likes of NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin and Reds catcher Tucker Barnhart.
“It’s really cool for a group of high school friends to interact with professional athletes due to having one thing in common — an interest in fantasy football,” Schragger said.
The Twitter success is what spurred Schragger on to create the website, which had 1,000 unique visitors and averaged 100 page views per day in its first two months, and consistently averages 1,000 views a week.
“I was spending 20-plus hours a week on fantasy football research scouting, and fantasy trade negotiations and realized I could share this information with others,” Schragger said. “I made the Twitter account with the expectation that it would be a place to share fantasy football information with some of my Hopewell friends and baseball teammates.”
When he garnered 1,000 followers in the fall of 2013 — many who interacted with the account and asked weekly questions — Schragger decided to step it up. He asked some friends to join him.
“Such a big and supportive following gave us the confidence to become more than a twitter account,” he says.
Schragger is heading into his senior year at Rice University, where he pitches for the baseball team. He is involved in two fun-only fantasy leagues. As an NCAA athlete, rules state he cannot play for money. His assembled team are all college seniors – Fred Lorenz (Penn State), Eric Olaya (Washington University of St. Louis), Sean Greener (Central Florida), and contractor Simone Bergsrud (Rice), who works on an as-need basis. Only Bergsrud did not graduate from HVCHS.
As CEO, Schragger manages everything from the website to social media accounts to meetings. He writes all the tweets based on his own thoughts/research and the articles written on the site; edits the website, develops story ideas and assigns time slots for team members to help answer twitter in-season questions, which average 500 to 600 per week.
“Sunday mornings are the busiest time for questions as everyone is tinkering with their lineups,” Schragger said. “So, we often have two people logged into the account at once on Sundays to ensure everyone’s questions are answered.”
Lorenz, whose home served as the site for the fabled Curry ping pong/HORSE games in 2012, runs the Instagram page, co-hosts the podcast and works with graphic design. As a double major in pre-medicine and Spanish, he responds to any questions submitted in Spanish.
Asked his thoughts when Schragger made his pitch, Lorenz said, “The last time Ben came to me with an idea, Steph Curry ended up coming to my house!”
Olaya and Greener write three stories per week and serve as the data analytics team, performing extensive statistical research used in articles, social media posts and podcasts.
Bergsrud created the website and occasionally helps with graphic design. Schragger said his college classmate managed the infiltrate the HVCHS alumni association “when we were ready to take the next step with FFL and knew we needed a clean website.”
Schragger’s team was carefully chosen from among a group of 16 self-proclaimed “fantasy nerds” that even the teachers made fun of during their senior year at Hopewell.
“I knew I had some great options of people with top fantasy knowledge who might be willing to help,” he said. “I picked, out of our league, guys who I thought would be best to contribute to FFL. Jeff Lorenz is a strong writer and great football mind, so he took a lead right away by being my right-hand man with the Twitter account. Eric and Sean were recruited specifically due to their data analysis skills combined with fantasy knowledge.”
The site is free and Schragger would like to keep it that way, although he may look to generate income through ads, partnerships and sponsorships. His goal is to have the site become a “one-stop shop” for fantasy football players around the world.”
Lorenz says that while the field is crowded with fantasy advice on Twitter and in podcasting, Fantasy Football Live has an advantage.
“We answer every single question sent to us, guaranteed, so for that reason I could see this being so popular,” he said.
It may be only a matter of time before Curry starts coming to his old pals for advice.
Eric Olaya, Ben Schragger, Jeff Lorenz and Sean Greener of Fantasy Football Live. (Photo by Pat Dunne.),
