This week’s SBJ magazine provided a five-year look-back at the COVID-19 pandemic. I spent a little time reflecting on that initial societal crash. I was covering the ACC Tournament when the world shut down. It was surreal to watch a trophy presentation for Florida State while I stood on the court with colleagues, having no idea how dramatically our lives were going to change.
We were wiping down our mail and groceries. I visited my grandmother and talked to her through the window by her favorite rocking chair. There was so much fear, and frankly, so much that went badly. It’s a bit cathartic to chronicle the innovation that came to the fan experience because of it (you can read more on that below).
John Macrina doesn’t really have a new job anymore. He’s been the NCAA’s VP and CTO since last June (the first in the organization’s history), leading the governing body through a digital transformation that’s touching its member institutions, athletes and larger business ecosystem.
But it’s funny how the calendar sometimes works. Macrina will cross the one-year anniversary finish line soon after going through the NCAA’s biggest event of the calendar year: March Madness. Macrina told me just before the tournament that he’d be watching many of the components around the games, wherever people are watching, to enhance the fan experience going forward.
“How can we better improve the fan ecosystem?” Macrina said. “What can we offer them, either from an in-venue experience or from a digital experience on their phones or laptops?”
Macrina has already gotten through a couple of significant mile markers. For starters, his group is responsible for maintaining the applications that the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee uses. Macrina also oversees the deployment of tech infrastructure that populates the various working sites.
For perspective, Macrina’s larger team will support command center operations and the Final Four championship sites for the men’s and women’s tournaments. In total, it’s a collective 100-plus staff members across eight sites and 20 workspaces.
“The areas that we’ve really been able to help is around cost efficiency and cost savings,” Macrina said of this year’s tournament tweaks. “We’ve been able to optimize some of our contracts with our partners that support our operations. That’s really the big area this year.”
A three-year plan
Macrina came to the NCAA from TelevisaUnivision, where he worked for 11 years, rising up to SVP and global head of enterprise technology. His career has also featured stops at NBCUniversal and pharmaceutical manufacturer Bristol Myers Squibb. With that experience, Macrina mentioned, comes an ability to help the NCAA scale its information technology and enhance existing and future enterprise projects.
A key success of his NCAA time is the initial phase of a three-year technology roadmap, which includes strategic planning around the NCAA’s information technology and understanding the benefits tech could bring across its entire business architecture. The NCAA is also growing its fan database, crucial to understanding the choices fans are making around events like March Madness but also support its emerging sports in growth.
“There’s a lot going on, and there’s a lot that we’re a part of,” Macrina said. “But it’s all driven from goals and business priorities -- everything kind of trickles up.”
For this week’s magazine, the SBJ staff provided a five-year retrospective on the sports industry’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mainly, among all the struggle and hardship, some key innovations emerged that remain crucial aspects to the ecosystem today.
I wrote about the impacts on the fan experience, which truly saw a warp-speed shift to many of the frictionless components we use today -- like the QR code, cashless transactions, facial authentication and the various grab-and-go providers that have found homes in venues nationwide.
While pursuing that story (which you can read here, as well as the entire package), I asked each interviewee about innovations from their respective companies that either came out of the pandemic or were reinforced during the pandemic.
Here are their answers about those innovations, all of which are contributing to a better fan experience in sports venues today:
Facial recognition provider Wicket found a place with teams as they looked for ways to streamline the fan experience. Couresty of Wicket
Ben Miller, head of sports and entertainment for Amazon Just Walk Out‚ on the scalability of the stores and the various sizes they now appear: “If you had asked me back then ‘what’s the future of Just Walk Out markets?’ I would’ve said they were going to get bigger and bigger. What we really didn’t anticipate was how fans would rapidly adopt this in a bunch of different formats [from full-sized stores on main concourses to smaller options in upper levels].”
Cameron Fowler, CEO of Digital Seat Media, on the incident-reporting module the company still deploys today: “Fans can scan the tag, and since they’re programmed down to the seat, we immediately know where they are in the venue. So, they’re not having to look around and find a phone number on the wall to text and then receive a text back that goes, ‘OK, where are you?‘”
Sandeep Satish, chief commercial officer at Levy Restaurants, on tech stack flexibility around integrations and partnerships: “What cashless led to was opening the door to not only evolve the service style and technology but the appetite for a broader set of integrations. ... It’s our still strong belief that you don’t just associate with one technology provider. We are strategically agnostic in the space for a lot of different reasons as to the evolution of innovation.”
Brandon Scott, VP/sales for Mashgin, on the self-service provider’s ease in allowing event operators and workers to upload new items to the kiosk’s system for fans to purchase: “I was on the ground [as a Levy employee]. Trying to get staffing, trying to get products -- procurement was challenging. I think from a Mashgin standpoint, we realized the value and what we have in ease of use.”
Jeff Boehm, COO of Wicket, on tech being able to recognize a group of tickets associated with one scan of the account holder: “That was only possible with facial [recognition] the way we did it because to this day, if I have eight tickets on my account, I still need to show all eight of those tickets -- whether it’s NFC or bar code or whatever it is. So there’s a distinct advantage to the way that we’ve integrated with Ticketmaster.”
SBJ announced the nominees for our 18th annual Sports Business Awards. Tech-focused nominees include Genius Sports for the Best in Sports Betting, as well as Cosm and TGL for Sports Breakthrough of the Year. See all the finalists here.
MLSE Digital Labs created an augmented reality experience to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Vince Carter’s 2000 Dunk Contest victory, my SBJ colleague Joe Lemire reports.
Sportradar will add rights to distribute official data from Wimbledon, U.S. Open tennis, the PGA Tour and MLS through its acquisition of IMG Arena from Endeavor, SBJ’s Bill King reports.
TGL added seven sponsors for its inaugural playoffs, which began earlier this week. You can see the full list in this story from SBJ’s Josh Carpenter.
Lemire also reports on the tech behind this video game-like replay of Cubs SS Dansby Swanson’s diving play during an exhibition game against the Yomiuri Giants in Tokyo on Sunday.
