On a typical Friday in the Naperville Central High School cafeteria, students in the Business Incubator class set up various tables to attract the attention of the student body. Students wandered the tables to get a look at the products on display, some of which had taken hours of commitment and creativity to successfully develop. However, one product on display was more than just a school project. It was the result of almost a year’s worth of blood, sweat and tears from a very dedicated developer.
For almost a year, Central senior and track athlete Tavis Hill has been hard at work developing a running analytics tool for high school track athletes known as Runner Radar. Runner Radar is a website that tracks athletes’ times across their careers and analyzes the data to perform a variety of functions, such as predictive times and matchup trackers.
“In the NFL, you look at quarterback matchups and stats against each other, so I was like, what if we do the same thing but for running,” Hill said. “ You can take two athletes and see all their stats against each other.”
Hill started Runner Radar during his junior year as just a spreadsheet of data from previous races. After Hill became stuck on a problem with the spreadsheet, he came to his father, Zachary Hill, a software developer and data analyst, who encouraged his son to expand on the project.
“[Tavis and I] built a bunch of different features into the spreadsheet, and he showcased it to his coaches,” Zachary Hill said. “They loved it, and then we were just talking [about how] it’d be a cool summer project if we actually made this website instead of it just being a spreadsheet.”
As a senior, Hill is taking Business Incubator, a class that involves groups creating, developing and presenting a product for a competition that awards grant money to the winning group. Hill had begun Runner Radar long before he started the class, so he already had momentum while many other groups were just beginning. This has reinforced Hill’s confidence in his product’s ability to win the grant money.
“I’m a competitor,” Hill said. “I like to win, and so when it comes to Pitch Night, part of the motivation behind getting this product as big as possible is so that we can do well.”
Alongside Hill and his father, Hill’s friend and senior Ben Berkoff joined the development team of Runner Radar in May 2025 as Operations Manager. He is in charge of expanding the reach of the website and presenting it to other coaches in order to receive more data.
“The recent one we talked to [was] the girls’ track coach, and he was also the coach of our football team, Coach Allen,” Berkoff said. “We had a very successful meeting with him [and] he took an immense amount of interest in it.”
Despite fast development, Runner Radar still lacks large amounts of data. According to the Runner Radar website, entries only include two teams, the Naperville Central boys and girls track teams. Furthermore, athlete data only goes back to 2018. While this is an admitted weakness by the team, they feel confident that they will expand data access on the site.
“That’s kind of our main focus right now: getting data, expanding it, and then using the expansion of data to create more accurate and insightful results,” Berkoff said.
Berkoff is currently working on expanding the data by including statistics from the Naperville North and Neuqua Valley High School track teams.
The site is catered to two distinct audiences: athletes and coaches. With athletes, it aims to provide valuable information not only on self-performance, but teammate and competitor stats as well, furthering athletic interest and insight. With coaches, the site is used to create and confirm lineups for meets. The head distance coach, Grant Baganz, expressed how Runner Radar could be used to provide a unique angle on athlete lineups.
“I’m sure at some point that the data will surprise me, and then it’ll cause me to go back and reanalyze the [lineup] decision and see if it’s still the correct decision or not,” Baganz said.
Post graduation, Hill plans to pursue the business route. If he finds Runner Radar to be as successful as he believes it can be, Hill may pursue entrepreneurship in the future.
“I love trying to help others, and I love managing a business; it’s fun,” Hill said.