How a Winnipeg father turned a living-room accident into a computer vision training platform for young soccer players.
The UPRO story begins the way family legends do: a soccer ball, a broken living-room TV, and a father deciding not to ban the beautiful game in his house. Dante, son of Brazilian-Canadian industrial engineer John Barbosa, loved to play soccer, and on a Winnipeg winter day, the living room was the only field available. Instead of ending the indoor sessions, John began developing a safer, more structured way for his son to practice at home.
That instinct became a company. UPRO Soccer, started in Winnipeg in 2023 and incorporated in 2024, exists to solve what Barbosa calls the between-practice problem. Most kids in organized soccer get one or two team practices a week. The players who improve are the ones who touch the ball on the other five days. UPRO was built so those days are no longer left to chance.
UPRO turns them into training days. A child unrolls a patent-pending training mat, sets a standard smartphone in front of it, and the app takes it from there. It works like an assistant coach: it guides the player through drills while the phone’s camera tracks 33 points on the body to score each repetition. The mat’s markers are the heart of the patent-pending design, built to let a phone map the training space in any room. There are no sensors and no wearables on the player, just the mat, the camera, and computer vision.
The team’s shorthand for the experience is “Duolingo meets Fortnite, for soccer”: the learning habit of one and the fun of the other, so training feels like play. Every session is designed to invite a child back, never to pressure one, and parents decide how their child’s information is used.
Built for players aged six to fourteen, UPRO is designed to reach families through the clubs they already trust, extending what coaches do on the field rather than competing with them.
An early prototype of the UPRO training mat
The early numbers suggest kids agree. By April 2026, alpha testers had completed 877 training sessions, logged 7,950 minutes of playtime, and rated the experience 4.7 out of 5. Underneath, the system had captured and analyzed 177,196,800 biomechanic landmarks, the individual body-joint positions the system uses to score each movement. In that small, supported alpha group, 43.75 percent of players were still training seven days after signing up. In 2026, UPRO began enrolling families in a private beta, the step before its first club pilots.
The technology is standing up to formal scrutiny as well. UPRO’s international PCT application received a positive Written Opinion on all 20 claims, covering novelty, inventive step, and industrial applicability. A U.S. utility patent application followed in April 2026, filed under the Patent Prosecution Highway.
The UPRO team in April 2026, from left: John Barbosa (Founder & CEO), Hamdi Elzard, Daniel Schwade, Ethan Henry, and Da Tan
Barbosa leads a small team that includes Daniel Schwade, Head of Research; Slava Korenblit, Head of Engineering; Hamdi Elzard, who develops the game; Da Tan, who works on machine learning; and Caique Andrade, Head of Player Development, who works from Brazil and keeps every drill grounded in how young athletes actually learn.
Backed by Startup TNT and supported by the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, UPRO is preparing its U.S. expansion. It has shared its research with U.S. Soccer’s Performance Innovation team and is in conversations with state soccer associations about its first club pilots. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, played across North America, brought new attention to youth soccer, and UPRO wants to help families keep that energy going between practices.
Led from Winnipeg, inside the North Forge and Manitoba Innovates ecosystem, UPRO is built by a team convinced that a kid’s development shouldn’t depend on postal code, weather, what a family can spend on private training, or how many practices a club can schedule.
Somewhere in Winnipeg tonight, a kid is unrolling a mat in front of the family TV. This time, the TV is safe. And the training counts.
