SBJ Power Up: A look at the performance tech stack powering Unrivaled

In this week’s SBJ Tech newsletter, we highlight the USL’s new official ticketing provider, Vivenu, and dive more into the official launch of RightsHelper, a new software product from TWG Global. — Ethan Joyce

In today’s edition of Power Up:

• Unrivaled’s tech-forward performance group seeks to set the industry standard
• SBJ gets first look at TOCA Social’s U.S. debut
• Cosm Atlanta venue to open in June

The Unrivaled season is a three-month sprint, but the size of its performance staff and tech stack are robust enough for a yearlong schedule -- and they are making an impact beyond their own league.

Susan King Borchardt, who has been a fitness consultant to Sue Bird, Kelsey Plum and Breanna Stewart, joined Unrivaled as its director of performance and recovery. Borchardt’s first call was to Lindsey Elizondo, an athletic trainer and physical therapist with the Magic, who joined as director of medical.

“We crafted this idea -- her coming from the NBA, me working with some of the higher-level individuals privately in the WNBA -- and just saying, ‘This should be the standard,’” Borchardt said courtside before the semifinals in Brooklyn. The championship between the Phantom and Mist is tonight in Florida.

Their department has a headcount of about 25 and is supported by an extensive array of technologies, such as Plantiga insole sensors, Kinexon wearables, Springbok Analytics MRI scans and VALD devices for the weight room. Katie Buria, head athletic trainer at the Dream, is Unrivaled’s director of sports science managing the relationships with the tech providers.

“What we’ve seen is that will raise the bar everywhere else that we go,” Elizondo said. “So if we set that bar here, that’s going to feed upward into the W, it’s going to feed into the NWSL, it’s going to feed into all of these other sports and force the hand of this is what it takes to perform at this level.”

The athletes have full ownership of their data and can choose whether to share it with their WNBA teams and personal coaches. Unrivaled didn’t have exact figures available but indicated that the majority of players opted into using the tech, with Borchardt calling it “part of our culture.”

“This is a very player-driven league, and they care about player safety and wellness. The treatment has been top of the line,” said Breeze G Paige Bueckers, praising both the staff and the tech, such as “the data and what we look like on the court with our Plantigas or our [Kinexons] or our chips that measure our asymmetries -- little stuff like that goes a long way in basketball.”

Plantiga has made women’s sports a priority, with its CEO Quin Sandler saying of the work with Unrivaled, “Together, we’re not just collecting movement -- we’re helping build the future of applied sports science for women.”

Her teammate Cameron Brink, who suffered an ACL tear in June 2024, had her first Springbok scan -- which uses AI to turn an MRI into 3D muscle data -- while rehabbing with Unrivaled last year and then again before this season.

“Once you have a big injury, you want to learn how to optimize everything, so all these tools really help,” Brink said. “It is really reassuring to get MRIs done like that and just a full body scan. From here you can see how you’ve grown and improved and what areas you still need to work on.”

Elizondo noted the unprecedented position Unrivaled is in by collecting all of this data since the league’s inception. By having access to data for every player, the performance group can identify trends and understand the demands of the elite 3-on-3 game, which are different than 5-on-5. That helps them train the players with more specificity and develop more targeted treatment and recovery protocols.

Tracking longitudinal data enables Unrivaled to share baseline metrics for each player, and for rehabbing players, it helps reinforce the value of the hard work. Borchardt saw it firsthand with one athlete recently.

“For that athlete to have those two visual pictures to be like, ‘Wow, this is actually really working’ -- that was so motivating,” she said.

Unrivaled CEO Alex Bazzell emphasized the league’s player-first, development-minded vision as a reason why it has invested so deeply in the personnel and products to make the performance team what it is.

“These players are thinking long term, and the expectation is not just your compensation but resources of off the court,” Bazzell said. “Our staff and who we hire, those are the ones that the players need to trust. You have to build trust in a 10-week period, too. That’s not easy.”

TOCA Social will open its first U.S. venue Friday with a 20,000-square-foot facility at Grandscape in The Colony, Texas, as the soccer-themed entertainment concept expands from the U.K. into the North Texas experiential venue market.

The venues portion of the business is owned and operated by TOCA Football Inc., which manages 37 indoor soccer training centers, five of which are located in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

SBJ joined TOCA Social and TOCA Football owner Eddie Lewis for a first look at the facility’s technology and games.

The technology used at TOCA Social is the same used at the training facilities which Lewis and TOCA Football began building in-house in 2016 after his professional playing career had ended. Powered by 35 patents, the proprietary tech consists of items like automated ball machines which deliver the balls to players during games, cameras and vision systems that track the ball’s speed and location, custom hardware like the check-in totem guests use to register for games, and the game boxes where guests play the venue’s five soccer-based games

The current five games TOCA Social offers were made by Remo Creative. More games are currently in the works. Current games see guests attempt to kick soccer balls at a screen displaying targets and animated objects while earning points. There are four difficulty settings for each game to help anyone from children to pros play to their skill level. The venue has 22 boxes, a few of which will be available to rent for corporate outings. In total, TOCA Social in Grandscape has a capacity of 1,100.

The venue features soccer-themed design elements, including a Dallas Trinity FC mural, framed jerseys of local sports stars such as Dirk Nowitzki and Mikko Rantanen, and a wall of MLS balls commemorating the company’s league partnership. A DJ booth, balcony and stadium-style seating area for watch parties reinforce the entertainment-focused concept.

It takes about 20 employees to work the venue on a busy night with a total of 60 on rotation at any given time. The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based company currently has 250 total employees with about 30 on its corporate side. The company also has a Dallas office.

TOCA Social has made inroads across the Atlantic Ocean with similar venues in The O2 in London, Birmingham Bullring in Birmingham, Westfield White City, also in London. The company also is actively working toward opening venues in Mexico and Paris. But, at least for now, Grandscape is already home to several experiential venues including Cosm, PopStroke and Fritz’s Adventure, making it one of the most competitive entertainment districts in the country.

“From a competitive socializing perspective, this [Grandscape] is kind of ground zero. If you do well here, you can do really anywhere,” said Lewis. “But at the same time, it’s very competitive here, so if you’re not ready and bringing your A-game here, you’re gonna get eaten up by a lot of other great businesses.”

With the Dallas–Fort Worth area set to host nine matches at the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the tournament’s International Broadcast Center, Lewis believes the region is a natural launch market for the concept.

“TOCA wants to be the brand that really connects fans and soccer players to their sport. We think fans have been kind of too passive for too long, and we think we’ve created a really unique way to make that fandom more active,” Lewis said.

TOCA Social will also have some outside help to make their vision come true. Cowboys K Brandon Aubrey invested in the Grandscape venue on top of a 10-year partnership with the MLS.

Experiential sports venues have proliferated in recent years following the success of concepts like Topgolf and PopStroke. With the World Cup approaching and soccer’s popularity rising in the U.S., Lewis believes TOCA Social can scale rapidly across MLS markets.

0 of 8

The Cosm dome coming to Atlanta’s Centennial Yards’ mixed-use district has an open date: June 10, the day of Game 4 of the 2026 NBA Finals, which will be the venue’s first ticketed event.

Adjacent to State Farm Arena and Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the 70,000-square-foot facility is Cosm’s third immersive venue to open its doors, joining locations in L.A. (Hollywood Park) and Dallas (Grandscape) that opened in 2024. Cosm’s venues feature 87-foot-diameter dome screens that show live sports in 12K+ resolution and combine with a surrounding sports bar to create what the company calls a “shared reality” experience. Additional sites in Detroit (later this year) and Cleveland (2027) are scheduled to open in the near future.

In addition to the NBA Finals and other domestic summer sports, Cosm’s open date in Atlanta closely coincides with the 2026 World Cup. Mercedes-Benz Stadium is hosting eight matches during the tournament, starting June 15.

Reached by SBJ, a Cosm spokesperson said, in part, that they “haven’t announced plans to show the World Cup at Cosm venues at the time,” and “if we have updates on bringing World Cup matches or programming to Cosm venues, we’ll be sure to share them.”

Tickets to an initial slate of sports and entertainment programming -- Cosm also airs movies like The Matrix and Harry Potter, as well as Cirque du Soleil, in its immersive format -- at Cosm Atlanta went on sale this afternoon at 1pm ET.

Its current summer sports schedule of events is as follows:

• NBA Finals: June 13 (if necessary)
• UFC: June 14
• College World Series: June 20, June 21, and June 22 (if necessary)
• MLB Home Run Derby: July 13
• MLB All Star Game: July 14
• WWE Summer Slam: Aug. 1 and Aug. 2

• Sportradar continues growth in latest earnings report
• Genius Sports reports revenue gains, net loss in latest earnings
• Whoop plans to hire 600 workers in 2026
• Prime Video to debut doc on McIlroy’s Masters win
• Parity study shows growing interest in Paralympics, greater support from women’s sports fans
• WNBPA issues statement of solidarity, rejects latest league proposal

• Washington Post: Anthropic’s AI tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran, amid a bitter feud
• TechCrunch: Jensen Huang says Nvidia is pulling back from OpenAI and Anthropic, but his explanation raises more questions than it answers
• Fortune: Sam Altman, Jensen Huang and the other AI kingpins only have themselves to blame for the scare rippling through the economy right now