In partnership with Your Ideas Are Terrible, Georgia Tech Athletics presents The Sports Innovation Challenge, a free 24-hour hackathon focused on innovation in sports and athletics.
During the challenge, teams will build new products or services to fix an existing problem, all within a day. Participants will pitch their final projects to a panel of school and community leaders to win prize bundles full of tech goodies including VR headsets, drones, video games, DraftKings gift cards, game tickets, and a spot in the CREATE-X’s Startup Launch program (which includes $20,000 in seed investment). Participants keep the IP of anything they build.
While open to any sports or athletics-related idea, three main focus areas will include:
- Athletic performance: wearables, data collection, performance analytics, optimization, injury prevention, apparel, equipment, talent evaluation
- Fan engagement: in-game engagement, deepen relationships/segmentation, communications, sales
- Operations: ticketing, game-day operations, parking, security, concessions, managing crowds entering and leaving the stadium, venue management
Georgia Tech Athletics has proposed a few specific challenges to consider tackling:
- GT Athletics Student Awards Program: GT students currently do not have a loyalty and rewards program for attending GT Athletic events.
- Recruiting: Build a platform to find and evaluate student-athlete talent based on GT needs. Subject matter experts (GT faculty, football recruiting, recruiting companies) will be invited to share insights to help teams come up with a workable product.
- Softball Scouting Report: Ideally, a reporting platform would pull available game score sheet data to auto-build an opponent scouting report. GT currently does this, but it is a manual and laborious process and does not capitalize on data analytics.
The hackathon will be held November 3-4 and will offer participants free food, meetings with professional players and coaches, and a chance to meet with team executives for potential agreements with sports organizations.
Who should participate?
This event is open to students, engineers, developers, designers and anyone with experience or interest in sports, athletics, and solving problems. There are no limits on team size, but 3-5 people are recommended. See here for full rules.
Here’s your chance to hit it out of the park. Register here!
Featured image via Georgia Tech Athletics/Karl Moore
