What is the SportsTech stack?
Sports Technology has gained so much popularity in the las 5 years with applications for multiple touch points in the sports industry. To understand it better we talk about what Sports Technology is, categorisation of the solutions being built, who they are for and the impact they have on us.
What is Sports Technology?
Sports Technology is a catgeory that focuses on leveraging technlogy to provide value to every stakeholder in the sports domain. Technology has been an enabler to make things faster and reliable for so many indsutries and sports is a fairly new domain that is open to use technology and improve.
Training to become a professional athlete is not the only way to get in to sports, there are areas like athlete performance, coaching, stadium & infrastructure, fan engagmenet and eSports that help us stepping in to the sports industry. We talk about these categories where innovation and technology are used to add value and take it to the next level.
Sports Tech Categories
Some of the categories in sports that have adopted tech solutions are the following:
Athelete Perfromance
An athlete is a key individual in any form of sport and operating at a peak performance level is expected from him/her to remain competitive and to achieve their goals. Maintaining this level before, during and post game is very essential for an individual athlete and the team at large. There are many solutions that target before/during/post match scenarios and help the athlete and the teams.
Tracking and providing feedback during training is important to understand strengths and improve in areas of weakness, several video and sensor based solutions help with this.
During the game tracking data points is essentail to prepare for future, estimate load, prevent injuries and strategise.
Post game analysis is mostly helpful to strategise for the future and reduce the risk of injuries.
Coaching
Video analysis in coaching has picked up during the lockdowns of covid and is seeing increasing engagment in in-person and remote video coaching and analysis. Given the accuracies and reliability of the computer vision and AI models, many solutions are being built that help the coach track multiple data points and assist in making better decisions and personalised recommendations.
Stadium Tech
COVID has seen a decline in fan participation at sporting events and also created a new category to develop solutions that maintain hygeine and safety protocols. Stadium tech is a category that deals with food pre-ordering, ticketing, social distancing and improved fan experiences. With restrictions slowly being lifted off we are seeing fans waiting to go back to the stadiums for the best sporting experience and stadium tech solutions enable the fans get the best experience while maintaining safety and heygeine.
Fan Engagement
Touching back to the pandemic, fan egagement has seen a complete 360 degree shift from distant and untargeted fan engagmene to a directed, value-driven fan engagement models. Blockchain and NFT’s are frameworks enabling solutions that dirve fan engagement and in turn revenue for the teams and athletes. From personalised event tickets, fan interactions to collectibles there is a lot of innovation happening in this space
Betting
Data tracked and analysed in the above mentioned categories forms a conduit to consumers that want to stay updated on the latest sporting trends and the betting platforms that want to attract consumers on to their platform with data and statistics.
Future of Sports Technology
We are seeing a surge in applications using Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, IOT, Blockchain and NFT’s. The future of sports and technology will also see solutions in the metaverse catering to some of the stakeholders like fans, athletes, stadiums and teams. We will have to wait and see how this will be adopted.
We strongly believe in sports technology and are building HomeGround which is an AI platform that helps aspiring cricketers get access to quality coaching for as little as $3 per month right on their smartphone without a need for sensors and wearables.