Happy Monday! Hope you enjoyed the closeout of the Winter Olympics like my family did this weekend. Our Friday movie-and-pizza nights the last couple of weeks had turned into Olympics-and-pizza nights, and I’ll miss that variation. — Ethan Joyce
In today’s edition of Power Up:
- Why the Big 12 is betting big on ASB GlassFloor for conference tournaments
- Less invasive anti-doping blood draws gain momentum at Milan Cortina
- NBA Launchpad graduate SportIQ completes $6.2M Series A investment
Why the Big 12 is betting big on ASB GlassFloor for conference tournaments
The highest-profile test yet of ASB GlassFloor’s vision for the widespread adoption of its glass-paneled, LED-embedded basketball courts in the U.S. is imminent.
Next month, the Big 12 will become the first domestic sports organization to use the futuristic floor in live competition — its women’s (March 4-8/9) and men’s (March 10-14) conference basketball tournaments at T-Mobile Center in Kansas City.
For Big 12 Commissioner Brett Yormark, the deployment is more than two years in the making. He was first alerted to ASB GlassFloor’s technology in 2023 by Benedikt von Dohnanyi, the CEO and co-founder of ASB Arena and Event Services AG, an ASB GlassFloor subsidiary, who Yormark knew during his time running Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment.
“It really had to do with, when was the right time for us where we could focus on it and make sure that we introduce it the right way?” Yormark told Sports Business Journal. “Now seems to be an ideal time.”
The Big 12 will use ASB GlassFloor’s LumiFlex court model in what Yormark said is intended to be a three-year partnership, so long as the court performs well. The floor streams video and other animations in 4K resolution, with ASB GlassFloor’s “GlassCourtOS” software application able to change floor designs and logos with the tap of an iPad.
“This is changing a floor that’s been the same way it’s been for a hundred years,” said Chris Thornton, ASB GlassFloor’s CEO of the Americas. “But it takes first movers to do this on the scale that the Big 12 is doing it.”
Testing the waters
Indeed, all eyes will be on how the conference leverages ASB GlassFloor’s unique capabilities, and how stakeholders from athletes to corporate partners to fans respond. Yormark likened its potential to when sports venues transitioned from predominantly static signage to LED boards. Based on simulations of NBA games, sports sponsorship-focused data firm Vision Insights found that the LED floors unlocked an average of 37% of additional broadcast exposure time for brands compared to a static court.
But potential remains just that — potential — until it’s proved out in a live environment.
“We’re educating [our existing partners] on, now, what flexibility is afforded to them,” Yormark said. “Then there’s new sponsors. And I know this sounds a little odd coming from me, but we’re going to pace ourselves there, because I don’t want to overly commercialize it in Year 1. It should really all be about the experience, the fans, our student athletes.”
Two-and-a-half weeks out, the Big 12’s plans for the court were still “early on,” Yormark said, although he teased elements like changing court themes during different rounds of the tournaments. The longer-term lens through which he views the Big 12’s partnership with ASB GlassFloor allows them to take a deliberate approach.
“We’re going to learn a lot in how this court behaves and what the possibilities are,” Yormark said. “And then really look to ramp it up in the following years.”
Safety first
To the question of the court’s safety, Yormark pointed to how it has been vetted by other pro and college teams at a 35,000-square-foot testing facility in Orlando. ASB GlassFloor furnished it with one LED and one wood court in partnership with the NBA (which also put the glass court through testing by a third-party engineering firm, Rimkus, that found it performed “at or near” the level of wood in key measures). More than two-thirds of NBA teams have visited the testing center, as have more than a dozen college programs, including teams or representatives from more than half of the Big 12’s 16 schools. (SBJ also recently toured the site for a tech demo, a full account of which is to come in the SBJ Tech newsletter.)
Yormark visited the ASB GlassFloor facility in December and said he and his administrators engaged with athletic directors, coaches and NCAA President Charlie Baker before making the decision to use the floor. The NCAA does not have specific guidelines for basketball that govern the material a playing surface must be made of, but the organization confirmed to SBJ through a spokesperson that the Big 12 contacted its secretary-rules editors to verify the glass court’s legitimacy and that it is “legal by the rules in the NCAA Men’s and the NCAA Women’s Rule Books.”
“I’m confident the court’s going to perform extremely well,” Yormark said. “There have been professional teams, college teams practicing on the court for quite some time. You hate to see any injuries happen — and there were a couple of injuries this past weekend on traditional courts across the country — so those things happen. But I’m very confident the court will perform at a very high level and our fans and, most importantly, our student athletes are going to love it.”
While Yormark declined to discuss specific costs, he said the Big 12 is leasing, not purchasing, the court from ASB GlassFloor for the tournaments. ASB GlassFloor has one portable version of the latest model of its LumiFlex court available for use in the U.S., which it will install at T-Mobile Center ahead of the event. Thornton said the bulk of the “heavy lifting” there will take place over the course of one day, so the floor can be tested and practiced on beforehand (and that ASB GlassFloor’s standard install time for its portable floors is 6-8 hours).
During play, the commissioner will be watching television ratings on ESPN networks closely and gathering feedback from sponsors and fans. From there, future plans for the floor will be considered.
“The good thing is that all of our ADs will be there, and from time to time, everyone’s in the market for a new court,” Yormark said. “They are as anxious to see it as we are, to look at the long-term viability and what it might mean.”
Rob Schaefer can be reached at rschaefer@sportsbusinessjournal.com.
Less invasive anti-doping blood draws gain momentum at Milan Cortina
The anti-doping efforts at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics have included a less-invasive form of blood draw born from a collaboration between two American firms, Tasso and InnoVero.
While most samples taken to test for performance-enhancing drugs are collected via urine, some substances such as human growth hormone require blood for detection. Traditionally, that meant using a needle to draw blood from a vein, but Tasso developed a device that lances the shoulder and takes droplets from capillaries. InnoVero contributed a secure, tamper-evident receptacle for transport to the lab.
This new collection system was piloted at the Paris Summer Olympics and has received wider use in Italy -- a few hundred tests. The World Anti-Doping Agency contracts with the International Testing Agency to collect the samples on site.
“This is probably the most innovative collection technology that’s happened in the last 25 years,” said InnoVero CEO Gabe Baida, a former U.S. Anti-Doping Agency executive. “As you see the broader medical and biotech space grow, change and innovate, this is a really good example of anti-doping taking advantage of those innovations and implementing into their programs.”
Tasso was founded by a pair of PhD students at Wisconsin, Ben Casavant and Erwin Berthier, for broader healthcare applications, but the anti-doping applications emerged quickly as the industry sought more athlete-centric alternatives.
“Player unions and players themselves were very against the idea [of venous blood draws], not because they were against testing for doping -- players want that -- but actually it was a burden that did not seem acceptable,” said Berthier, Tasso’s CTO.
He added that the device is engineered for consistency of use “so it really makes things reproducible and a better quality blood [draw]. But more importantly, it’s practically painless when you do it on your shoulder.”
Tasso’s device collects about 0.5 milliliters of blood, which Berthier noted is sufficient for most tests. The International Testing Agency is also taking traditional venous blood samples but was provided with a few hundred Tasso kits. Outside of Olympic competition, Tasso is part of the regular USADA anti-doping protocols; more than once, photos of MMA fighter Conor McGregor have posted on social media with a device affixed to his shoulder.
When WADA first assessed Tasso’s capillary blood draw in 2020, it surveyed 108 athletes on three options: needle in the vein, prick on the finger or Tasso on the shoulder. (Both the finger and shoulder options are both referred to as the dried blood sport technique, or DBS.)
The result was not surprising: “When choosing, the great majority of Doping Control Officers and athletes, independent of gender and discipline, preferred the automated DBS collection from the upper arm over the manual collection from the fingertip, and both DBS collections over conventional sample collection methods (urine and venous blood collection).”
As Baida said, “If you’re getting ready to stand at the top of the giant slalom and go down a hill, do you want to know that you’re about to get a needle stuck in your arm? There’s a mental component to it as well that I think is really important that needs to get considered.”
Other methods are also under exploration. USADA has been working with Epicore Biosystems on using sweat as a different medium for testing. That collaboration helped resolve a high-profile contamination case, as reported by The New York Times. In that example, an athlete tested positive for a substance after sharing a compression sleeve with a doping athlete; the sweat patches were used to show it was plausible to transmit traces of a substance that way.
Epicore said in a statement to SBJ that sweat biomarker research will be published soon and that “USADA has kept sweat on the agenda as it explores future testing approaches where traditional urine and blood collection are less practical.”
NBA Launchpad graduate SportIQ completes $6.2M Series A investment
Smart basketball maker SportIQ has completed a $6.2M Series A round over two closings, mostly recently adding $3.2M in new funding from a group including KB Partners, Koppenberg Management and Match Ventures.
SportIQ makes a one-gram sensor that can be placed in the ball’s air valve to track its movement and rotation and other performance metrics. The FIBA-approved ball caught the attention of the NBA for its possible application to automated officiating and graduated from the league’s startup program, NBA Launchpad, last summer.
“NBA Launchpad and the automating officiating product help momentum, certainly,” SportIQ CEO Erik Anderson told SBJ. “Our consumer sales were stronger than expected, so the combined momentum helped a lot.”
SportIQ, which has dual offices in L.A. and Helsinki, is planning a new consumer product in Q2 of this year and has an early prototype for a smart ball in another sport, Anderson added. The new investment will support those efforts and market expansion.
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