Got game? They did. What they didn’t have was a place to play.

Basketball buffs Peter Naylor and Pramod Shantharam drive up and down San Francisco a chilly February evening looking for a pick-up game. No luck in any of the courts on Mission Street or Church Street or Glenn Park or Portero Hill. An hour passes by in the car. They know there is a game out there somewhere, but where?

They don’t play ball that evening, but they get together with friends Vladislav Temnov and Fernando Recoder to figure out how to find a game in San Francisco.

Before long, a light bulb moment! How about a Web 2.0 website with a google map interface, on which players can let other players know if they are starting a game or if they want to join one?

“Brilliant!” they think. “Now that we’ve found a way to find where the fucking game’s at, what do we call the website?”

“Let’s lose the ‘fucking’ and keep the rest,” someone quips.

And the idea of www.wheresthegameat.com is born.

They like the name and they think users will like it too.

“You ask ‘Where’s the game at?’ And we tell you. Very common sense, down to earth, like how people think and operate,” says Shantharam, animation director at Palma VFX, San Francisco.

“We’re a search engine for sports,” Naylor adds.

Naylor, Recoder and Temnov graduated from SF State’s Engineering department and Shantharam from the Academy of Art University. They are in their mid-twenties and they now hold full time jobs in the Bay Area.

“But this is more exciting, this is what I love,” says Recoder, a San Francisco Public Utilities employee. And the four believe they are running the website for others who love the game just as much.

A player looking for a game gets on the wheresthegameat homepage and at once sees all the basketball courts in San Francisco, all upcoming games and all current games as different colored markers on a map, they explain.

“You don’t have to be logged on. It’s got a Google-map interface,” Shantharam explains. Orange markers show courts, purples show upcoming games and greens show current games.

“You can tell how many people are playing right now and on which court with just a click on the marker,” he says. The court address, date and time of the game, the number of players and their playing-skill level appears on a small interactive window near the marker.

“We try to make it as easy as possible—a minimum click interface,” says Naylor.

A player registered on the website can join an existing game or start a new game by logging in right away. To find a game outside San Francisco they type in the zip code and the map displays the area courts and games.

The website serves just about every player profile—easy players, medium players, ballers or good players, players looking for a basketball challenge, or just people looking to make friends. And the more people use it, the more successful it is.

“We are a Web 2.0 company,” explains Naylor, “Like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, the value is in the community—by people putting in information. It’s only as good as the information they put in. It’s user-driven.”

It is the website users who keep the ball rolling by up-dating information on new courts, games and players. The founders admit this facet can be both its strength and weakness. The website can remain small or it could become a huge success—like in the case of their competitors Active.com and Sportsvite.com.

Sportsvite debuted their website (beta version) based on the same premise with 125 games and activities in the summer of 2006. The wheresthegameat team is still kicking itself for being tardy when it came to launching their website—they waited till July 2007 to do it. They say they came up with the idea for the website in February 2006.

“We checked online then to see if anyone else had a similar website,” says Shantaram, “and there was none.” But then they put the idea on hold for many months and Sportsvite, an East Coast venture beat them by launching first, he says.

The group insists that they are different from Sportsvite. They believe that their site is easier to navigate, and the fact that wheresthegameat allows a player to find a game in progress gives them an edge over the competition.

“Some people don’t want to plan to play in a day’s or week’s time, they want to play right now!” says Shantharam.

They are also banking on the cool factor of their logo—the letters of wheresthegameat scrawled in graffiti style.

“It’s very street, very catchy,” says Shantharam. Recoder sees definite potential in the logo as a clothes brand. “People who play street ball want a logo that matches,” he says.

The group knows their venture needs investors and more importantly, a loyal following of users who can keep it going. And they are confident both will happen soon.