While operating a family business can be challenging, Costabile’s parents never pushed him, his two brothers and sister to take over the business.

“Our parents always encouraged us to pursue a job making something that people needed,” Costabile says. All four kids would take this advice to heart, each ultimately choosing a career in the healthcare field — though Mike Costabile was destined for something a bit different.

The Pre-Game Show

Growing up in the heart of Carolina basketball country would impact Costabile’s life in many ways — only one of which was playing the game itself.

“I’ve followed basketball since I was a kid,” he says. “My dad used to referee basketball for high school and college games.”

“My brother talked me into going and refereeing,” Costabile says. “He said, ‘Dad used to it, why don’t you give it a try,’ so I said okay and went after it.”

This side hobby became something more when Costabile started to referee at college games. He made a full-blown career change in 1989 when he was selected as referee for the NBA. The whirlwind had begun.

Game Time

Life as an NBA referee was exciting, but it also proved to be one of the most challenging endeavors of Costabile’s life. Coming from the high school and college circuits, Costabile had never encountered the “supply and demand” that existed in the world of professional refereeing.

“There are only so many college and high school games a year,” Costabile explains. “There are 30 games a year (each requiring three referees) and a pool of 500 referees.”

This surplus of referees can lead to some pretty intense competition among that pool, as everyone wants to be on the court as much as possible.

“It can be a very political process,” says Costabile, who worked as an NBA referee for four years before taking the leap into full-time entrepreneurship with the invention of his Precision Time System.   

The inspiration for the system came from several sources: 1) the obvious need for a device that could solve the arguments that often arise due to subjective calls; 2) an attempted technology that never caught on; and 3) Costabile’s own experience with the technology used in amateur radio.

After his decade of experience as a referee, Costabile had often been on the receiving end of the controversy that can surround certain game time calls. Without a system of checks and balances, the number of incorrect calls due to human error simply can’t be avoided.

Following his retirement from the NBA in 1993, Costabile heard about an existing technology that used air from a referee’s whistle to signal the folks manning the scoreboard to stop the clock.

“What I invented was different, in that it used the frequency of the whistle to actuate our system,” Costabile says. With a background in amateur radio, Mike had a working knowledge of the technology needed to run the system, but he solicited the help of an engineer friend to build the base station that would receive the signal from the referee’s whistle.  

This system consists of two components — a base station receiver, containing a small computer, housed on the sidelines, and a radio transmitter built into a belt pack worn by the official. As the official blows the whistle, the transmitter in the belt pack recognizes the whistle’s frequency and instantly sends a message to the base station, connected to the scoreboard controller. As technology improves, so does the system.

“We’ve now taken the system a step further,” says Costabile. “We’re not only stopping the clock, we’re also recording who did, what time they did it and we’re logging it — whether it started or stopped, we have that capability.”

Since the system was patented nearly 15 years ago, it has become the industry standard for timekeeping in basketball games. Used by the NBA, WNBA, college conferences and high schools across the country, the system gained international acclaim when it became mandated for use in all future Olympic games. This international attention meant more stamps in Costabile’s passport, as his territory expanded from coast to coast to continent to continent. The Precision Time System has taken Costabile to Greece, Turkey, China, Japan and Brazil, just to name a few stops on his world tour. Now that the system has been implemented by the European basketball league and the World Championship, Costabile’s travel schedule isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.

Off the Court

When he isn’t traveling the world or managing his growing team at the Precision Time headquarters in Bolivia, Costabile likes to take advantage of any downtime (which doesn’t happen often) and spend time with his fiancée, Kim, at home — which happens to be conveniently located directly next to the company headquarters.

The travel has its perks — “We’ve had a chance to travel to quite a few places, which has been a lot of fun,” Costabile says.

While he may still be in fast-forward mode as the company and technology continue to expand, he hopes to one day write a memoir to document this whirlwind experience. And for a normal guy from Carolina basketball territory, it’s quite a story to tell.