SBJ Power Up: Meet the SBA: Tech finalists for 2026

Good morning and welcome back to the work week. We now know the Super Bowl matchup -- Patriots versus Seahawks.

My colleagues will be flocking to the Bay Area before we know it, and I hope at least one of them brings me back a souvenir. — Ethan Joyce

In today’s edition of Power Up:

• See the 2026 nominees for SBA: Tech
• Athlete marketing platform Faves launches with $3M in funding
• IONSport adds executives to focus on pro, college business

Nominees for the fourth Sports Business Awards: Tech have been announced.

Spanning eight different categories, the 46 finalists were selected by in-house judging committees for their innovation, creativity, organizational excellence, industry influence, and leadership over the past year.

External judging panels will now determine the winners, who will be revealed Monday, May 18 at the Hard Rock Hotel in New York. A ninth award -- Sports Technology of the Year -- will be chosen from the winners of the other categories.

The SBA: Tech Awards kick off Tech Week, which features two days of programming and networking.

Athlete marketing platform Faves recently debuted with $3 million in funding from CMT Digital and Collider Ventures.

The software platform, which gained more than 400 athlete users through its six-month soft launch, enables athletes to consolidate their sponsorships, curate collections of their favorite items and receive compensation for payments made through affiliate links.

The Faves business model evolved beyond that initial premise and is now a distribution engine, providing demographic data on fan interactions and athlete appeal.

“Over time, we very quickly realized there was a much bigger opportunity with the product. It wasn’t really about the discovery — it was much more about the data that we could actually capture from the product,” Faves co-founder and CEO Thomas Salas said. “Brands are looking to invest tens or hundreds of million dollars into sport, but they can only invest into things they can measure and things that they can scale and they can prove the ROI for.”

Faves’ founders consist of college and pro athletes as well as those with experience in fintech. The sporting roots are largely in running, and many of the early bold-name athlete adopters — such as Olympians Emma Coburn, Cole Hocker and Colleen Quigley — all compete in track and field. NCAA athletes can strike NIL deals. Runner Sam Parsons was the very first adopter and grew so enamored with the product that he joined the founding team.

“This influencer and creator economy is booming,” Faves co-founder Luke Katz said. “There’s so much marketing spend and dollars going towards it, and we think that athletes could and should earn a bigger piece of that pie. So we’re going out to brands and we’re not only selling them all the benefits of our platform, but also on why they should be working with athletes more.”

Rather than have a Linktree sending fans to any number of destinations, a single click on a Faves link delivers a landing page with all the options. The goal is for Faves to also help facilitate connections between athletes and sponsorship opportunities.

“We’re giving a lot of the athletes the tools to not only connect with these brands, but to also actually run end-to-end partnerships with the brands through this measurable funnel,” Salas said.

IONSport -- a racket sports event management platform that aggregates scores/match data, tournament operations and fan engagement services -- has brought on two veteran sports technology executives to focus on growing new lines of business.

SMT’s former Chief Revenue Officer Jay Abraham is joining IONSport as the company’s Head/Global Events, a role in which he will be tasked with expanding IONSport’s offering to more high-level pro events. IONSport currently works with startup team tennis league INTENNSE and The Atlanta Cup exhibition in this category but is eyeing more.

George Opelka, SwingVision’s former Head/Global Sales (and father of the ATP’s 63rd-ranked Reilly Opelka), meanwhile becomes IONSport’s Head/College & Federation partnerships. He will work on enhancing IONSport’s college product -- the company works with more than three-quarters of Intercollegiate Tennis Association-affiliated programs -- and growing its presence among global racket sports federations, among which it works with USA Pickleball, the U.S. Padel Association and others.

Both Abraham and Opelka will report to IONSport CEO Dave Mowrey. Their positions are each newly created roles for the company.

• John Henry to receive SBJ Lifetime Achievement Award
• FIBA Europe exec hints Real Madrid could be first to NBA Europe
• College Football Playoff expected to stay at 12 teams
• UFC voice Jon Anik excited for tech, price point offered by new deal with Paramount+
• CVC Capital Partners looks to investors to repay Global Sports Group debt
• Talent Pool: Latest agency signings

• TechCrunch: Tech CEOs boast and bicker about AI at Davos
• UploadVR: Meta CTO Explains Layoffs & Strategy Shift: “VR Is Growing Less Quickly Than We Hoped”
• The Wall Street Journal: AI’s Messy Human Drama