I dispatch this after a full day of SBJ Tech Week programming in NYC, where I’ve kept my head on an owl-like swivel to find my next conversation. As this hits your inbox, I’m likely trying to convince my SBJ Tech colleagues to go out for potato croquettes at Dutch Fred’s. I had them in October and haven’t stopped thinking about them.
The Sports Business Awards: Tech ceremony on Tuesday night was a fantastic event, and it offered a chance for people around the industry to mingle. It also provided an opportunity to identify the people and companies creative substantive innovation.
The SBJ Tech team asked a number of attendees who in the industry they were watching as trend setters on innovation — whether it was a league, team or tech company.
Here are some responses.
Rick Alessandri: managing director, media and sports tech, TurnkeyZRG
“What Jeb Tery and Cosm are doing is going to be game-changing, because it’s a smaller scale model. The Sphere is phenomenal, but the cost of the Sphere is tough to replicate time and time again at $2 billion-plus. But what Jeb is doing, and maybe how it might retrofit into some of the planetarium model — bringing that experience to sports fans and creating that live event-like environment in a fan experience — that’s going to be something that [in] the next three-to-five years, you’re going to see those pop up in every major market.”
Walter Farfan: CIO of Peak AI:
“Everything at the moment will try and compete with [ChatGPT creator] OpenAI. So where is our work in AI? So where is our work in AI? I think one person having so much power is too powerful. If we look at humanity, it needs to be spread. And OpenAI have got such a huge advantage. … Companies I’m watching [are] everyone who … can innovate as quickly as they can.”
Corey Patton: CEO of Pramana Labs:
“Here’s two: Fanatics — I know everybody is writing about them, but creating the perfect, impenetrable Venn diagram of league and team partnerships, online retail and mobile betting is genius. Watching how they use their captive customer database to vastly reduce sportsbook customer acquisition costs, while being able to offer seamless and unique cross-selling opportunities inside a single platform, is fascinating. And Katalyst — leveraging EMS tech to generate strength, power and stability, without the load of traditional strength training, is a completely new approach to fine-tuning athletic performance. They have a golf focus right now, but I’m watching how they proliferate the technology for everything from repetitive injury prevention to surgical prehab.”
You’ll be able to hear more thoughts and conversations like this around the rest of SBJ Tech Week programming, especially at Thursday morning’s Sports Tech Connect and Breakfast at the Times Center.
The crowd takes in a session during the first day of talks at SBJ Tech Week
David Nugent’s founding vision for Next League focused on guiding sports organizations through technology decisions and deployments. With that consultation and activation also came a mission-focused undercurrent in its partnerships.
In the last year alone, Next League’s work has included a gift to the TMRW Sports Fund at Palm Beach State College, which provides scholarship and academic programming support as well as the creation of the Next League USOPF Endowment Fund, a $500,000 commit toward funding some of the living and training expenses for U.S. Olympic and Paralympic athletes.
“I have older kids now,” Nugent told SBJ. “You start thinking about the world in a different way, like what’s life going to be like for them? … Because of that, you start thinking about business in a different way.”
Nugent has watched a growing diversity develop around sports tech events throughout his career but still recognizes how inaccessible that ecosystem can be. And that is the basis for two initiatives around this SBJ Tech Week (and beyond) aimed to boost the presence and recognition of women in the sports tech space.
During the Sports Business Awards: Tech ceremony, Next League COO Becki Civello announced that the company will sponsor a new award starting next year, called the Next In Sports Tech: Rising Female Tech Leader award. The award will honor a rising female star in sports tech, ranging from league/team employees to tech companies operating in sports.
The announcement generated much buzz at the event, with both the applause garnered and conversation sparked afterward.
Next League has also committed a $10,000 donation to the Women’s Sports Foundation to support its equity efforts for women in sports. WSF CEO Danette Leighton said in a statement to SBJ that the contribution from Next League will “help us continue to build a future where all girls and women can play, compete and lead — in sports and beyond — without barriers.”
Nugent said he looks forward to Next League’s award coming online next year and the future chances to help diversify the STEM and sports industry spaces through the platform that SBJ Tech Week provides.
“This is a perfect opportunity for us to tell that story that we tell, and because it’s so broadly in sports because we’re not selling a product,” Nugent said at SBJ Tech Week. “It’s really just how can we strategically — and even from an execution standpoint, support sports organizations. It’s a really great platform for us.”
Next Level’s David Nugent discusses tech’s role in the Olympic movement with the USOPC’s Sarah Hirshland
SBJ Tech Week kicked off at the Hard Rock Hotel with a bustling SBA: Tech event, where we handed out eight awards out to the industry’s best and brightest. Here is a rundown of the winners:
- The WNBA signed a deal with Genius Sports for use of its Second Spectrum optical tracking cameras, becoming the first women’s pro sports league in the U.S. to have access to 3D player and ball data, writes SBJ’s Joe Lemire.
- The NFL, in partnership with AWS, announced the results of the sixth annual Big Data Bowl, awarding first place to a team behind the “Uncovering Missed Tackle Opportunities” project, notes Lemire.
- As part of a multiyear partnership with sports memorabilia specialist Memento Exclusives, the Aston Martin Aramco F1 team is producing and selling show simulators of its AMR24 car, reports Schaefer.
- NASCAR is developing an immersive experience that would enable fans to use extended reality technology to join ongoing Cup Series races in real time, writes Lemire.
- Next week’s BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells will be the first consumer-facing activation of Sportradar’s deal with Tennis Data Innovations to augment its betting and data streams, notes Rob Schaefer.
- The NFL is testing optical tracking tech from Hawk-Eye and others to explore whether modern tools can supplement or replace the first-down chains and officiating decisions judged by the human eye, reports Lemire. The system was tested in two stadiums this season, including Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas.
