SBJ Tech: Next League revs up UX at NASCAR

The Joyce household welcomed an unexpected visitor this week: the norovirus. I come to you incredibly humbled.

For all of you with small children: Here’s to hoping you can dodge as many germs as possible in these indoor, bug-spreading months.

NASCAR’s long-running relationship with technology solutions firm Next League has produced such fruitful results that an extension (and expansion) of the relationship was the next logical step. It’s a sentiment that Next League CEO David Nugent heard NASCAR’s EVP and Chief Brand Officer Tim Clark shared last week when the two met in Charlotte ahead of Wednesday’s announcement.

“We’re extraordinarily excited,” Nugent told me. And it’s understandable why. This latest chapter between NASCAR and Nugent spans 13 years and multiple companies. Long-term relationships in this industry can be truly transformative, especially around technology. Having a support structure that can react to the often quick-arriving shifts -- but also understands the nuances of how an organization operates -- becomes a big differentiator between those that accelerate through a learning curve or sit idle (to use a couple of car-related references).

NASCAR was a founding client of Next League when the technology solutions firm went live in 2021. The crux of that initial relationship focused on emerging technology, which carries over. But this latest agreement sees Next League become a leading force on tech and user experience for the league. It will also support team websites and eventually track websites as well, along with customer/fan integrations around key elements like ticketing, Fan Rewards (its loyalty program), and fantasy products. A notable project comparison is the app/site that Next League produced for TGL, which accounted for the virtual and physical playing aspects of the fledgling competition.

These processes had been handled internally before, and now, NASCAR will attack them in tandem with Next League’s expertise.

Clark said that Next League has been instrumental to NASCAR Digital Media (NDM), which started in 2012, and the growth experienced by the racing governing body.

“We have more than 50 different sites and apps on the NDM platform, including tracks, teams, and series -- and each of them will benefit,” Clark said. “It’s worth noting that we’ve seen record engagement on our platforms the past two years, so we’re building on a strong foundation, making changes not out of necessity, but out of a commitment to progress.

“Over the next few months, you’ll see new designs, UX functions, and a more streamlined operating model.”

Tapping 2 of Next League’s 3 areas of expertise

Nugent describes Next League’s expertise in the form of three tech buckets: media, marketing, and sports operations (related to athlete data). Those first two will be actively engaged in working with NASCAR going forward. “The experiences will be better -- I can say that across the board,” Nugent said. “So, for anything that a fan sees, we’re going to really focus on how do we make these experiences more powerful?”

Nugent’s working relationship with NASCAR spans his time with Omnigon and its rebranded identity, iX.co, which Next League acquired. Those additions brought back some of his former projects into frame of the entire NASCAR collaboration, like the NASCAR mobile experience built in NASCAR Digital Media’s early days. Through this now wide-ranging support structure, Nugent sees significant impact potential for both current and future NASCAR fans.

“They’re the experts in the sport, and they understand the tech they already have,” Nugent said. “We will collaborate with them, we’ll be an extension of their team, and we’ll come to the table again with things that maybe we see that they don’t see, and we’ll do our best to make that as visible as possible, because that’s a win.”

In last week’s newsletter, I mentioned my trip to Minnesota. The purpose of that visit stemmed from a kind invitation from the Wild to talk about AI and technology for a roomful of their corporate sponsors.

I wanted to share some highlights of that presentation with you for two reasons. One, it was a summation of my nearly three-year journey covering AI/tech in the sports industry, and two, I welcome some feedback on points to keep up with this ever-evolving space and how it affects the work we all do.

Let’s dive into key points:

Meeting people where they are

The Wild’s sponsorship roster features companies of various sizes and customer reach. So, my approach for the presentation was to provide insights that would meet everyone where they were on their respective AI/tech journeys. Whether that meant making it more approachable for the person who is still a little reluctant to lean on AI or providing a next-level unlock for a super user, I didn’t want to lose anyone.

AI is nothing without human creativity

Microsoft Copilot created the outline of my presentation. And I’ll be honest -- it produced a mediocre theme and structure that required a lot of smoothing from yours truly. My pleas for Copilot to produce something with Wild colors resulted in this weird orange-pink color palette. I used it as an example that AI can do a lot, but it needs the creativity of human beings to produce something special.

Remembering the normal flow of problem-solving

I think about a quote from NASCAR CTO John Martin all the time. He said it to me earlier this year when we talked about problem-solving, and how the general human process (see problem, learn, attempt to solve problem) in business and elsewhere has been upended by AI a bit. “It’s just interesting that it’s a technology trying to solve business problems, as opposed to business problems coming and asking technology to solve it for that,” Martin said. This quote reminds me all the time that you can’t go in thinking about the big changes that AI can make -- you have to start small, which helps in both making it approachable and also sparks low-risk creativity.

Practice, practice and more practice

I encouraged people to just practice using AI more. I will often Google my questions and then make myself ask Copilot or ChatGPT the same thing to keep enforcing the muscle memory. I also suggested they build a custom GPT that would help with one of their own personal work problems (like parsing through long documents for insights). I provided a go-to prompt engineering acronym. Many of you readers have offered your own five-letter guides (and all of them work!), but I often lean on SCOPE, something the Spurs’ Charlie Kurian suggested to me. It stands for situation, character, outcome, parameters, and extra information. I used that script to workshop a financial document analyzer that I use often.

This was my first attempt at anything like this, and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Like I mentioned above, please send the thoughts you may have here. And thanks again to the Wild for the opportunity.

• Agassi Sports Entertainment, a publicly traded racket sports-focused company co-founded by tennis legend Andre Agassi, will work with IBM on a multifaceted digital yet-to-be-named platform for racket sports players, targeting a mid-2026 launch, SBJ’s Rob Schaefer reports. Initial capabilities will center on AI-powered technique analyses for tennis and could eventually expand to pickleball and padel. 
• My SBJ Tech teammate Joe Lemire highlighted NewtForce’s new pitching mounds that are being deployed by Georgia’s baseball team in this week’s magazine.
• YouTube is sponsoring the Super Bowl LX Innovation Summit, my SBJ colleague Ben Fischer reports. He provides a breakdown of events coming to Super Bowl week in the San Francisco Bay area.
• USA Bobsled/Skeleton signed a deal with Snowflake that makes the well-known cloud data platform the organization’s “official data cloud provider‚" Schaefer also reports.
• On the youth sports front, AI-powered sports video provider Pixellot extended its agreement with PlayOn Sports for five years, furthering a collaboration that has already produced and streamed more than 3.4 million high school sporting events, Lemire also reports.