Morning Buzz

Longtime Amazon SVP Jeff Blackburn is coming out of retirement to take over as Chairman & CEO of Tennis Channel. Blackburn will lead growth initiatives for the network and the expansion of its digital and streaming platforms. He will relocate from Seattle to Santa Monica, Calif., and work out of the Tennis Channel offices there, reporting to Sinclair President & CEO Chris Ripley. No search firm was used.

Blackburn spent 24 years at Amazon, beginning as a business development executive in 1998 after working on the company’s IPO as an associate at Deutsche Bank. Most recently, he served as SVP/Global Media & Entertainment, where he led the company’s streaming and content businesses, including Prime Video, and reported directly to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. He announced his retirement from Amazon in late 2022.

“There were many CEO opportunities that came around in the last two years -- and I said, by far, this is the job that I wanted,” said Blackburn, an avid tennis player through high school who went on to play football at Dartmouth. “[Tennis Channel] is an absolute jewel, and in the tennis world, it’s also incredibly important.”

In addition to its linear network, Tennis Channel also launched a direct-to-consumer streaming service late last year and operates the T2 FAST channel. These properties will be top of mind for Blackburn, given his experience in the streaming world with Amazon -- and tennis presents a unique streaming opportunity, given its around-the-clock, global nature and the volume of matches across the ATP and WTA Tour calendars.

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The PWHL is adding an eighth league-owned team in Seattle for the 2025-26 season that will join the league alongside the Vancouver expansion team announced last week. The team, whose colors will be emerald green and cream, will play home games at Climate Pledge Arena and train at the Kraken Community Iceplex.

The decision to expand to Seattle follows an RFP process the league launched in October. Seattle’s bid was led by Oak View Group, which developed and operates Climate Pledge Arena, and the Kraken. The team will join the league’s single-entity structure under the ownership of The Walter Group, which is headed by Dodgers co-owner Mark Walter.

Bringing Vancouver and Seattle into the league together ensures the expansion teams will each have at least one nearby opponent. The league has yet to determine whether it will divide the league into geographically aligned divisions or conferences next season. The next westernmost team, the Minnesota Frost, would almost certainly be included in a Western cohort, but the remaining five original PWHL teams in N.Y., Boston, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal are clustered in the Northeast.

“We think the number of Takeover Tour games and having Minnesota in the middle of the U.S. really will allow us to help bridge some of the travel and make it less taxing on the players,” PWHL EVP/Business Operations Amy Scheer said prior to the Vancouver announcement last week. “So, maybe for all the East Coast-West Coast trips, you won’t have to go direct, but you might have a Takeover Tour game in between, or Minnesota game in between. We spent a lot of time thinking about it and think we can manage it so it’s not so hard on the players.”

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The Dolphins and Ticketmaster have agreed to an extended and expanded deal that sees the ticketing company make its first foray into F1 sponsorship with the Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix (May 2-4) as the race’s exclusive ticketing provider.

Beyond ticketing all events associated with the Dolphins and Hard Rock Stadium, Ticketmaster will get access to Grand Prix sponsorship assets, including the presenting sponsorship of the event’s three-day Campus Pass, large signage on the Dolphins’ training facility -- just for the race; the rest of the year those sponsorship rights belong to Baptist Health -- and along the TV-visible North Beach Grandstand. Ticketmaster joins Hard Rock, Heineken, Autonation, and Verizon as enterprise-wide sponsors of the Dolphins.

“Those are really the deals that we like,” said Dolphins Chief Revenue Officer Jason Green, “where they’re partners across the whole enterprise and able to tap into the assets we have on a year-round basis.”

Additionally, the company will continue ticketing Dolphins games, all Hard Rock Stadium events, the Miami Open, and now the F1 race; the Dolphins and Ticketmaster have worked together for more than a decade.

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The Trail Blazers are partnering with N.Y.-based marketing agency Allied Sports to “help it secure a 2025-26 jersey patch sponsor,” with the goal to “find a sponsor with deep Portland ties.” Last season, local window company Brightside Windows “claimed the coveted sponsorship placement.” But with its year-long contract up, the Blazers are “searching for the next corporate sponsor to take up the prime jersey real estate.” Blazers VP/Commercial Partnership Sales Sam Morgan said that the team is looking for “‘a partner that has the Portland community in mind,’ and ideally, ‘a national organization that has some really strong roots in Portland.’” The Blazers recorded the largest year-over-year television viewership increase in the NBA this season, and Morgan said that showing potential sponsors those numbers will “absolutely give the team an edge versus other teams.” Neither Morgan nor the team said when a new patch sponsor would be announced, but with the 2025-26 NBA season starting in the fall, it will “likely come sometime this summer” (PORTLAND BUSINESS JOURNAL, 4/29).

Rutgers has retained TurnkeyZRG and formed an advisory committee to “finally begin the process of hiring” a new AD. Rutgers has been without a permanent AD since Pat Hobbs resigned last summer “before an investigation into an inappropriate, consensual relationship with one of the school’s coaches.” The AD hiring process has been “slowed by university president Jonathan Holloway‘s decision to step down” on July 1, with the search to replace him “believed to be nearing a resolution.” Interim AD Ryan Pisarri has led the department since Hobbs’ resignation, guiding Rutgers through a “crucial moment in college athletics as the era of pay-for-play takes hold.” The search advisory committee will “provide institutional guidance and insight to the firm throughout the process” (Newark STAR-LEDGER, 4/29).

StellarAlgo is stepping up its relationship with the NHL, now working with the league and five unnamed franchises to create a lockstep approach in using data of existing and new fans to create more personalization between consumers and product.

StellarAlgo CEO Vincent Ircandia pointed to this work as the next phase in a three-year working relationship with the NHL, which started with an initial step of categorizing data in a more actionable way. The Canadian-based startup’s customer data platform specializes in fan segmentation, allowing sports clients (200-plus for StellarAlgo, including eight league deals) to carry out more personalized experiences for cross-sections of fan bases.

“We’ve now got that great league data organized on the NHL side,” Ircandia told SBJ. “We make it really accessible to see those fan opportunities, and now we’re going to be connecting that data through with these five teams. ... We think it‘s going to be pretty exciting for the NHL to be able to seize key moments during their season.”

While the league is not naming which teams are participating in this, Ircandia indicated to SBJ that it‘s a mix of existing clients and new potential additions. StellarAlgo entered the 2024-25 season with six team relationships and will likely add more through this new wave of activation.

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Nike and Rebel Girls have partnered to launch a content series aimed at Gen Alpha girls featuring top female athletes.

With the goal of inspiring girls to be confident through sports, the series launches with a new original book on three-time WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson. Research shows girls are twice as likely as boys to drop out of sports by the age of 14, with low body confidence as the top reason.

“A’JA WILSON: The Best is Yet to Come‚” has a foreword by Dawn Staley, Wilson’s collegiate coach at South Carolina. Nike will distribute the book for free at select stores as well as have a digital download on the Rebel Girls website.

Rebel Girls will complement the book with episodes of its podcast, “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls,” and “Get to Know” video series.

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The CW and Professional Bowlers Association have entered a two-year media rights deal, beginning in 2026. For 10 consecutive weeks, the broadcast network will air two-hour windows on Sunday afternoons, adding to its growing sports portfolio.

“The PBA events on Fox do better than [some] college football games,” said The CW President Brad Schwartz. Fox televised five major PBA Tour championships in 2024, and is set to air 15 title events this year. The 2024 World championship on Fox pulled in an average of 738K viewers.

The CW has the rights to 10 of PBA’s biggest events, including the championship. Financial terms were not disclosed. IMG Media negotiated the deal, which has been in the works for the past few months.

“When you try and find things that we can afford and build and give the power of broadcast to, there’s such a niche, passionate following for that,” said Schwartz.

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Mashgin has reached one billion total transactions on its self-checkout kiosks, with 400 million of those coming in 2024.

The company, which is now in 150 sports venues including the Bears’ Soldier Field and Texas’s DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium, has deployed throughout numerous industries (airports, colleges, hospitals) and seen large-scale deployment through its Circle K partnerships that started in 2022.

“Reaching one billion transactions is a clear mandate from fans that instant, convenient checkout systems like Mashgin are the future of concessions,” said Mashgin VP/Sales Brandon Scott. “We’re also well aware we didn’t reach this milestone on our own. It was thanks to constant collaboration with food service operators and stadiums that helped us sharpen our product to be the experience it is today.”

Mashgin uses computer vision and AI to recognize items for sale, allowing fans to grab what they want and place their selection on the Mashgin unit for quick payment.

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On the latest episode of SBJ Live, explore the rise of “social sport” as brands and venture capitalists seize the post-pandemic opportunity to drive participation and build community engagement, reinventing traditional sports and creating new spaces for authentic consumer connections. Speakers for this week’s show include Unrivaled Commissioner Micky Lawler, Open Venture founder & Managing Partner Kimberley Nixon and Break Sports founder Trisha Goyal. Those interested can tune into SBJ Live at 12:30pm ET Wednesday and listen in.

“After studying business in Chicago in the 1920s, this man obsessed with Sherlock Holmes was an investigator for a credit company.”