SBJ Tech: How Kitman Labs is helping USL’s health efforts

I start this newsletter with a guttural shout that I hope you read aloud in high volume: LET’S GO CANES!

It’s been amazing to watch the growth of hockey in my home state, and this Carolina Hurricanes fan base is so different now than it was when the club won its first Stanley Cup in 2006.

I fell in love with hockey (which I never played) thanks to Hurricanes great Rod Brind’Amour, who has now helped the team win as a captain then and as coach this week.

I’m going to rewatch the clinching game with my 4-year-old sometime this week to make sure a new generation of Hurricanes fans is being cultivated properly.

First things first: Let’s understand the nuts and bolts of a new deal shared exclusively with the SBJ Tech newsletter between the USL and Kitman Labs, a 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech Companies from SBJ’s second cohort in 2024.

This multiyear agreement (financial terms were not shared with SBJ) will equip all 25 clubs in the USL Championship with Kitman Labs’ Performance Medicine Solution. The product serves as a hub of electronic medical records, built on top of Kitman’s iP: Intelligence Platform, an operating system created for team and player management.

Last year was Kitman Labs’ first linkage with the USL, working with the women’s Gainbridge Super League as the league-wide performance medicine provider. According to President/Competition and Administration Brett Luy, there was immediate recognition by the USL to push this into the men’s side, too.

“Their experience working with some of the country’s top professional sports leagues made it a seamless transition for our clubs to adopt,” Luy said. “The ability to centrally aggregate and manage medical data is a key driver in the continued growth and success of our medical program.”

Why it matters

What makes this significant for the USL? For starters, it receives access to an ecosystem that’s deployed all over the world by teams and leagues across numerous sports. Kitman Labs counts the Premier League, MLS and NWSL among its more than 2,000(!) clients.

Even more important, it gives the league a player health-managing asset as it eyes the launch of its future top division, USL Premier. The organizing body wants to stand it up by 2028, giving the USL a soccer pyramid structure on the men’s side that enables club promotion and relegation, mirroring that of the biggest leagues in the world. USL Premier clubs will also use the Performance Medicine Solution when the time comes.

Stephen Smith, Kitman Labs CEO, shared that regardless of the sport, the needs of teams and leagues are complex. But especially on the medical side, without a unifying system, so much clerical work is required to input that data that comes from team physicians.

Maybe a player sees their own specialist. Maybe an international tour produces an injury where someone needs to be seen at the closest medical center in a different country. For the USL Championship, this is an effort to start avoiding that logistical data nightmare.

“The ambition that they have — the professionalization that they have — this is the same type of behavior that we see from the billion-dollar leagues, and that’s probably the most impressive thing for me,” Smith said.

The growth of the product

The USL will benefit from significant time and money investment by Kitman Labs to produce a solution that provides the clearest picture of athlete health. Smith estimated that nearly five years and $25 million went into enhancing the Performance Medicine Solution, which is highlighted by constant boosts to the user interface and 80-plus integrations with hospitals and healthcare systems so far to create smoother information pathways.

While Smith has built Kitman Labs since its 2012 founding, he’s noticed a growing reliance on outside medical care for professional athletes. Now consider that work, multiplied by 25 for each soccer club and even more for larger rosters like football, and that’s a staggering number of inputs for the poor soul who has to be the medical record go-between.

And recently, Kitman Labs has partnered with Google Cloud and Gemini Enterprise to create My iP, a visualization tool inside of its iP: Intelligence Platform to help a user visualize the data that Kitman Labs ingests with a boost of automation. A coach can look at the bigger picture of team health and availability, or a data scientist can build out dialed-in dashboards to sift through mounds of stats and measurements.

That was announced toward the end of May, and is the latest mile marker when it comes to Kitman Labs’ constant pursuit of the clearest picture of an athlete’s health.

“We decided that it wasn’t good enough in this industry that athletes didn’t have the same capabilities,” Smith said. “And we decided to invest and bring that same type of technology to the world of sport.”

If you need a reminder of how grueling a game day can be for a tech exec, let Russ Trainor lay it out for you. “I’d always know how my day would be because if I started getting texts at 5:30 in the morning, I’m like, ‘Oh, this could be a long day,’” Trainor chuckled.

Most recently, he spent 16 years with the Broncos, rising to SVP/information technology until leaving the franchise in mid-2025. I made him recall some of the heavier demands of his mental bandwidth to provide more context:

• Constant testing ahead of a game to avoid issues (it is tech at a large scale, after all, so there’s always a potential for chaos).
• Managing the network and all its devices — a figure that has only grown with cloud infrastructure.
• Double-checking that not only do the fans have a good experience but also that the team’s in-game tech needs are supported (like sideline tablets and other necessary sideline tech).

Trainor’s new role, as CTO of OneRevel, will try to ease some of that struggle from his past life. The Salt Lake City firm is seeking to link the management of crucial game-day audio-visual elements like digital signage, IPTV and LED scoreboards. Sports clients for OneRevel include the Delta Center and its two occupants (the Jazz and Mammoth), the Rams, Warriors and Union.

Trainor started June 1 and will remain based in Denver. He’ll eventually build a team over time to help support clients. The OneRevel-Trainor relationship first started while he was with the Broncos as a client of the firm.

Between his time with the Broncos and AMB Group, Trainor has seen many innovations that have led to progress at warp speed. Along with helping clients keep up with those, he can also add some experience to many facets of OneRevel’s business to improve the client experience, not only providing context to the day-to-day workings of a team-side employee but also helping in negotiations by offering that experience as a former OneRevel client to both sides of the negotiation table.

OneRevel was founded in 2009 by CEO Matt Dopp and President Brian Fitzpatrick. Some of their latest work includes the construction of a new OneRevel platform, Trainor said, which was built in an effort to unify more of the game-day management that started Trainor’s past days so early.

“There’s already a roadmap they have, and they have a honey-do list on the features and functions they want to give to the customers,” Trainor said. “We’re using some of the AI pieces and parts internally to make us more efficient, but also on the customer-facing side ... from uploading content themselves to seeing what the screens look like to proof-of-play reports and those kinds of things. We’re excited about what the system can provide them.”

• Sports Illustrated Tickets is expanding its official fan experience sponsorship deal with Krafts Sports + Entertainment to include coverage of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, three of the Patriots’ markets through the NFL’s Global Markets Program.
• The Commanders, who are building a new $3.65 billion stadium in D.C., issued a request for information to identify AI capabilities, integrations and collaborations that could influence a wide range of stadium functions and commercial activations for both the stadium and the mixed-use district that will surround it, writes SBJ’s Bret McCormick.
• My SBJ Tech teammate Joe Lemire reports that Swsh, a photo-driven fan community platform built for live events, raised a $4 million seed round that Roger Ehrenberg’s Game Changers Ventures led.
• Scorability, a college recruiting platform that started with football, expanded its offerings to include seven new sports.
• MOGL, an AI-powered athlete influencer marketing platform, introduced, Athlete Paid Social, a feature for brands to run campaigns directly on athlete social accounts, similar to programmatic media buying, Lemire also writes.
• Puma is using the World Cup to debut the Ultra Nitro 7, its newest soccer cleat, my SBJ colleague Chris Smith breaks down.
• Did you see State Farm’s social commentary from Stan (the company’s branded stanchion pad) during Game 4 of the NBA Finals? AI helped create it.
• Personalized nutrition app Hexis raised a $2.1 million seed round led by Apex Capital, which previously led its $2 million preseed round in 2024, Lemire also highlights.