In this week’s SBJ magazine, my tech colleague Joe Lemire highlights the innovation and collaboration from NewtForce to power a pitching tunnel that’s providing more seamless insight. — Ethan Joyce
In today’s edition of Power Up:
- USABS taps Snowflake for data, AI
- Sportradar completes IMG Arena deal
- Inside Intuit Dome as a fan behavior lab
USA Bobsled/Skeleton taps Snowflake for data, AI platform
Three months ahead of the start of the 2026 Milan-Cortina Games, USA Bobsled/Skeleton (USABS) has signed a new partnership with Snowflake that makes the well-known cloud data platform the organization’s “official data cloud provider.”
Financial terms were not disclosed. Both sides negotiated directly and without agency involvement.
With the deal, USABS will utilize Snowflake Intelligence, a new enterprise agentic AI platform, to analyze performance data and inform strategic decisions. Snowflake Intelligence generates insights and natural language responses based on in-house data like race metrics, which USABS says it could use, among other potential applications, to assess the performance of different race crews.
Snowflake also gains certain sponsorship rights through the agreement, including logo placements on the U.S. national team’s bobsled and skeleton sleds, athletes’ podium jackets and select athletes’ helmets. Snowflake will additionally utilize the name, image and likenesses of USABS athletes who opt into the partnership for marketing purposes.
Snowflake is also an LA28 sponsor.
Sportradar closes deal to acquire IMG Arena
Sportradar has completed its deal to acquire IMG Arena from Endeavor, which adds rights to distribute official data from more than 70 rightsholders -- including Wimbledon, the U.S. Open tennis tournament, PGA Tour and MLS -- to its portfolio. The agreement was first announced in March.
Sportradar is not paying Endeavor in the transaction; instead, Endeavor is providing $225M in total financial consideration to Sportradar -- $103M directly to the company and $122M in prepayments to select rightsholders as a means of repairing deals that Sportradar deemed out of line with current market conditions (as Sportradar CEO Carsten Koerl intimated on an earnings call when the deal was announced). Worth noting: While the total financial consideration in the deal did not change from the initial announcement, the composition of it was adjusted slightly -- from $125M directly to Sportradar and “up to $100M” in prepayments to rightsholders.
More human behavioral engineering on tap in Year 2 of Clippers’ Intuit Dome
Two-hundred L.A. Clippers fans tucked into Chick-fil-A before boarding a chartered flight to Denver to see the Clippers take on the Nuggets during the NBA playoffs back in April. The entirety of each traveler’s trip was paid for by the Clippers organization as a reward for being the loudest fans in the Intuit Dome during the 2024-25 regular season, the $2.3B arena’s first.
Referencing both the free food and the task before them and their team, the fans chanted “Eat The Nuggets! Eat The Nuggets!”
The Clippers knew those fans were the loudest because of the extensive system of sensors embedded throughout Intuit Dome. The team created a formula for measuring fan impact and used that to select the 200 most boisterous fans for the Colorado road trip.
Those first steps led to this season’s launch of Wave Makers, a fan engagement program in which the Clippers reward fans for their fanaticism at Intuit Dome. Data was the team’s guide. Each Clippers home game contains five missions for Wave Makers to complete, including arriving early, making an opposing player clank a free throw or just being loud. Members get a push notification in the Intuit Dome/Clippers app the following day with their scorecard.
“Because of the tools that we have implemented in the construction of the arena, it sparked this idea that we could really gamify cheering and incent fans to be the sixth man and propel our team to win,” Halo Sports & Entertainment CEO Gillian Zucker told me last week.
The ways the Clippers can use the Intuit Dome to engineer human behavior with technology and rewards is endlessly fascinating. Most pro sports teams use loyalty and fan engagement programs for commercial purposes, but the Clippers’ focus, and owner Steve Ballmer’s obsession, is fan behavior. So, while this is Wave Makers’ debut season, some kind of program like it was dreamt up from the start of the Intuit Dome project.
“Steve is very much of the mindset that the technology that we put into the building should be constantly evolving, and we should figure out new ways to use it,” Zucker said.
Another example: Ballmer was peeved by how slowly fans made their way back to the seating bowl at the start of third quarters. The team signed a sponsorship deal with Candy Crush this past offseason and created a version of the hit mobile game that could be played on the Halo Board by everyone in attendance. During halftime, fans hit the gamepad buttons on their chair arm rests -- something they can obviously only do while in their seats -- in a communal, oversized game of Candy Crush. If enough people get back to their seats before the second half commences and put their candy on the board, the Halo Board figuratively erupts, shooting collectibles into the crowd from its mounted T-shirt cannons.
Last year, an average of 50% of the crowd was back in the bowl at the start of the third quarter. But through two home games this season, that figure hit 75%.
“The uniqueness of this building and the technology, it just creates a different experience for [fans],” said Zucker. “And that’s really our goal, to create an environment where it is so much fun to attend a game that you just can’t imagine attending an event without all these elements that continue to engage you with the team and each individual play and make you feel like you were having an impact on the outcome.”
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