Have you ever wanted to find players for a neighborhood kickball team, but didn’t know how? Now, there’s an app for that.

Wicker Park residents Robert Leshner, 26, and Geoffrey Hayes, 25, launched Friday a free social networking application called Flyer that allows users to advertise virtual flyers for local events and services. The app — now available to BlackBerry and Droid, and awaiting approval from Apple for iPhone — is exclusive to Chicago and works based on proximity. You’ll only see flyers posted recently and within a “meaningful” geographical distance from your phone.

“It’s kind of like Facebook meets Foursquare meets Craigslist,” said Leshner, who quit his full-time job overseeing research at an investment management firm to start developing Flyer in December. “It’s a way to make new friends and continue to stay in touch with them.”

Leshner and Hayes, who is coding the app, met when they were students at the University of Pennsylvania. After studying how students used flyers to advertise events and services on campus, they started to brainstorm how they could replicate that experience in the virtual world. (No risk there of getting in trouble for posting your flyer on private property or the paper being ruined by inclement weather.)

Once Flyer users download the app, they can create a profile and post and search for flyers, which are sorted into eight categories: social, outdoors, sports, games, shopping, music, mingle and “whatever” (miscellaneous). Leshner and Hayes hope it will be a useful tool for everyone from block party planners to yoga teachers recruiting new students to political organizers searching for volunteers to Scrabble buffs looking for players to join them. Like Facebook, Flyer users can “friend” other users and then invite them to future events.

And like paper flyers, virtual flyers are customizable — you can change the color, font and text size to suit your needs — and the developers are working to integrate audio with the app, so bands can put demo tracks on their flyers before they play a gig.

The app focuses attention on services and activities available near the user, which the creators hope cultivates an air of exclusivity. Like a paper flyer, if you’re not standing within a certain distance of where it was posted, you can’t see it. The developers hope that feature will be more helpful than restrictive.

“We want it to be about things you do anyway,” said Hayes, who plans to use his own app to start a pick-up basketball team in Wicker Park. “This is just another way to reach out to people, or for people to find you.”

Users can “join” flyers and then chat with other people who are taking part in the activity, as well as send a personal message to the person who posted the flyer. You can see in miles how far any given flyer was posted from where you’re standing. While Flyer is exclusive to Chicago, Hayes and Leshner will be policing the app to make sure no one solicits illegal services.

As with many digital start-ups, “Flyer” wasn’t the first name the developers picked. Business cards bearing Flyer’s earlier incarnations (Wavelength, Chattr) are scattered across the office floor in Leshner and Hayes’ Wicker Park apartment, where they’ve been living while developing the app.

They’ve got a big brainstorming board, on which an ever-evolving creative process is documented in chalk. The phrase “make your neighborhood yours” is scrawled in pink under an algorithm Hayes developed, and an x- and y-axis are plotted in the center of the board showing how Flyer is different from other social networking tools.

“Facebook is really for people you’re already friends with,” Leshner said. “We’re looking for an experience where it can be people you’re already friends with, or it can be people that are within walking distance in your neighborhood,” Leshner said.

That’s “as opposed to something like Craigslist where it’s the entire city and it’s not targeted,” Hayes added.

Leshner and Hayes are financing Flyer themselves for now and hope to roll out the app in other cities soon. San Francisco and New York are top priorities.

“Right now it’s a labor of love,” Leshner said. “If we had this idea two years ago, it wouldn’t have worked. The timing’s right for us to push the boundaries.”