SBJ Tech: MLB All-Star MVP was a fan tool

Hey, and welcome back to the SBJ Tech newsletter after our off week.

Did I get any reading done on my recent beach trip? No, absolutely not. But I did spend a lot of time splashing around in tide pools and floating past the breakers with my kiddos.

Andy Dwyer from “The Office” has a quote I think about often: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good-old days before you’ve actually left them.”

I’m in the good-old days, aren’t I?

Congrats to Queues for becoming a back-to-back MLB All-Star. OK, maybe I’m taking some liberties here.

But as both the Braves and Phillies are clients of the occupancy-tracking startup, Queues has supported the last two All-Star weeks with its sensors, which have broken into sports as a useful back-of-house tool to manage lines and divert traffic around shopping spaces in stadiums.

The work around Citizen Bank Park with MLB and its marquee event came with a significant milestone for Queues: its data stepped into the batter’s box in a fan-facing pilot with MLB, allowing attendees to go through the Ballpark app to see where the longest and shortest lines were at the New Era Phillies Team Store and its main concourse concessions area.

CEO Samuel Porta said the discoverability in the Ballpark app led to next-level engagement on the Queues platform, which isn’t surprising when you consider that more than 111,000 people passed through the multiday event.

“Whether it be end of this season or going to the next, we expect a good handful of teams will have this be something that fans can use,” Porta said.

Queues, which deploys sensors that only measure an area’s congestion (no identifying data is taken on fans), latched on with the Braves last year and started spreading through MLB with other relationships like the Royals, Phillies and Padres. The startup closed a $3 million Series A round earlier this year, led by Nashville Capital Networks.

The fan-facing component is the next wave of Queues, giving fans the clearest paths toward quicker transactions. Working with T-Mobile for the PGA Championship in May, Queues deployed similarly in the PGA app.

While the fan-facing nature means more user traffic, Queues CTO Caleb Lee noted that the company’s software handled it seamlessly, which he said is a benefit of both he and Porta being technical founders.

“We build all our systems to be super robust, and we always expect for the ‘worst case, but best case,’” Lee chuckled. Worst case here means a lot of traffic. But that also becomes the best case — more retail and concession items moved.

There’s an onboarding conversation that always comes from prospective Queues clients about going with fan-facing intel: the concern that a fan opens their app and sees red (meaning long lines everywhere). But at MLB All-Star Week, Porta said fans were met with steady views of green — like in the photo above. Porta and Lee are hopeful that the MLB All-Star and PGA Championship work sets up a growing ... queue *looks around sheepishly* ... of marquee events for the company to support in the future.

AtmosAir Solutions sees much more opportunity in sports. The air quality solutions provider, which purifies indoor spaces across many different business verticals, isn’t new to the industry. My SBJ colleague Terry Lefton first wrote about them in 2015. But there are many more prospects out there, and the company is ready to seize them.

The clearest signal of the ramp-up came with the hiring of longtime sports exec Troy Miller, now the company’s VP/sports division, with experience ranging across sportswear (Champion and Sportswear), team/venue operations (as director/sales for the Colts and the then-RCA Dome) and tech (as senior director/business development and head of sports strategy/North America for MediaKind).

AtmosAir has installed its air purification systems in more than 100 pro and collegiate venues, spanning player locker rooms, practice facilities, or, in some cases, throughout a whole venue and/or team business offices, like the company’s activation with the Stanley Cup champion Hurricanes and the Lenovo Center.

Miller told me that AtmosAir wants to grow the client number “throughout pro sports not only here in the U.S., but globally as well,” Miller said. “We also see the NCAA as a huge opportunity.”

Before I go further, let me help you center your brain on this. Think about the HVAC system you have at home, and then think about those air filters that you’re supposed to replace regularly (I’ll admit that while writing this, I realized it’d been too long since my last replacement, so I took a break to change those out).

AtmosAir’s installation sits on the supply side, taking the air that the system is pushing back into the building and infusing ions so that dust particles, germs, smoke from pyrotechnics and other microscopic particulates are more easily swept out. On the monitoring side, AI helps the system react to moments when more or less cleaning support is needed in the environment.

CEO Steve Levine, who’s led the company for 20-plus years, has a pretty easy pitch: There’s literally no downside to clean air. And the perception of that benefit has only grown in this post-COVID-19 reality. But with sports making a greater mixed-use push, and more football builds (like, say, the Chiefs project that we shared news on earlier Wednesday) are being enclosed, there’s much more potential to enhance the lives of all who enter sports venues while making a bottom-line impact as well.

“The highest costs in a sports organization is usually the salaries are No. 1, but No. 2 is the amount of energy they use,” Levine said, highlighting that building code requires a certain amount of outside air to enter any space, which creates the spiking in energy billing. “... We’re going to affect the air and conditioning that air in a big way, whether it’s electric, whether it’s gas, whether it’s water. We’re going to affect that in a big way.”

TMRW Sports hired industry veteran BRENDAN DONOHUE to become its first president of flag football, where he will lead the company’s professional flag football league along with the NFL. Donohue, best known for 28 years in basketball with several NBA teams and the NBA league office, had been managing director of Elevate Talent since January 2025.

OWL AI hired HILARY BROWN as VP/partnership sales. Brown will lead OWL’s commercial partnerships across leagues, federations, broadcasters and sponsors as the company scales its AI platform from marquee events into an operating layer for sport. She reports to CEO JAY PRASAD.

Cosm Detroit named Chartwells Higher Education Dining Services VP/Operations JASON KING as GM.

JOHN LASKER, one of the architects of ESPN’s direct-to-consumer strategy, is retiring from the company after 27 years. Lasker, who serves as SVP/ESPN DTC, will remain at ESPN through the end of September.

Marketing tech platform SportsBiz elevated longtime sports sponsorship exec MICHAEL ROBICHAUD to president. Robichaud originally joined the company in late 2024 as chief strategy officer.

Whoop named former longtime Nike exec DIRK-JAN VAN HAMEREN as CMO. Van Hameren spent more than three decades at Nike, including serving as EVP/Olympics, EVP and CMO and as Global VP and GM of Nike Sportswear. The company also picked Coca-Cola Company VP/Strategic Communications for North America KRISTEN MOSS as its first chief communications officer.

FuboTV appointed former Disney exec ALISA BOWEN as its next CEO. Bowen will succeed co-founder DAVID GANDLER, who was terminated.

The Magic promoted JAY RIOLA to chief strategy and business officer. Riola (a 2022 SBJ Forty Under 40 honoree) will lead efforts across gate revenue, strategy, technology and innovation. He is entering his 21st season with the team.

• RAJ Sports signed a wide-ranging sponsorship with AI-infused customer data platform Treasure AI that will include assets and technology deployments with the NWSL’s Portland Thorns and WNBA’s Portland Fire, my tech teammate Rob Schaefer breaks down here.
• The ATP rolled out an activation last week with Spotify, branded “Tour Sounds,” which features playlists curated by tennis pros, Schaefer also notes.
• Popular sports app provider YinzCam used AI and World Cup data to ship novel features to its users every day over the first few weeks of the tournament, SBJ’s Joe Lemire reports.
• Sponsorship management platform PlayMaker Software is beta-testing a conversational tool called PlayMaker AI.
• Paciolan launched PAC SMS Marketing, an integrated text messaging channel that client schools can access in the existing Paciolan Marketing Automation platform, writes SBJ’s Grace Kut.
• Whoop founder and CEO Will Ahmed said the wearable technology company had “lots of players” using its health-tracking device at the World Cup.
• Canadian technology company Mobii Systems Group, which supplied LIV Golf’s “Any Shot, Any Time” features during its broadcasts, is suing the league for unpaid invoices and lost revenue amounting to more than $1 million.