Our Athletes Voice series gives athletes a forum to talk about how technology has impacted their careers and their lives away from sports. This week, retired golfer Justin Leonard talks about the technology he used during his career, the athleticism of modern pros, and the online fitness startup, BackForever, that he helps advise *** Justin Leonard’s 45-foot birdie putt at The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., sealed a dramatic comeback for Team USA at the 1999 Ryder Cup. Nine years later, his two wins and one tie at the 2008 Ryder Cup helped the U.S. pick up its 25th tournament victory. Leona ..read more

This is the final story in our series about the analytics boom in tennis. Part 1 examined the use of performance data in match preparation. Part 2 looked at wearables, tracking technology and training. This story projects how technology will shape the future of the sport. * * * * * The revolution of Big Data has prompted all sports to face a statistical reckoning and reexamine long-standing beliefs. For baseball, it was the sacrifice bunt. For basketball, it was the mid-range jumper. For football, it was always punting on fourth down. Those historically common plays didn’t hold up under the mi ..read more

The NFL has partnered with DraftKings on a new multi-year deal that will see the two collaborate on content and daily fantasy games. As part of this agreement, DraftKings becomes the league’s first official daily fantasy partner, though its rights are non-exclusive, which leaves room for competing fantasy brands. NFL branding will appear across DraftKings’ suite of daily fantasy products and content platforms. The two will also collaborate on content and product offerings for fan engagement that will be applicable to users of the DraftKings DFS app and have integrations across NFL Media proper ..read more

Dignitas has raised a $30 million Series A funding round and completed a merger with Clutch Gaming. The two esports organizations will now operate under a newly formed parent company called New Meta Entertainment. The investment round was led by Ferrtita Entertainment and Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, the two majority shareholders in Dignitas. HSBE originally bought Dignitas in 2016. Tilman Fertitta had acquired Clutch Gaming by buying the NBA’s Rockets in October 2017. HBSE also owns the NBA’s 76ers and NHL’s Devils. New investors that contributed to the $30-million raise include ..read more

Stadium signage has been a part of the sports experience for decades. With the rise of digital signage, however, that experience is about to fundamentally change. It’s estimated that programmatic ad spending will total nearly $60 billion in the U.S. this year. So it stands to reason that it’s not a matter of if but when the sponsorship industry will embrace programmatic real-time bidding. Enter the Sports Signage Exchange… As sports sponsorships adapt to emerging technology in the digital advertising industry, sponsors will be able to reach desired factions of a team’s fan base via digital, s ..read more

Amazon and the NFL are debuting a new live pregame show for Thursday night games that will stream exclusively on Prime Video. The show is called NFL Next and will air prior to all 11 of Amazon’s Thursday Night Football games. The tech giant’s 11-game slate begins this Thursday, Sept. 26, when the Philadelphia Eagles visit the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field. Former NFL defensive end Chris Long and sportscaster Kay Adams of NFL Network will host the show alongside stats expert James Koh and veteran sports journalists Hannah Storm and Andrea Kremer. Storm and Kremer will also be returning to ..read more

The way we watch sports is rapidly evolving. Last season was the first in which NFL fans could live stream all local and primetime games for free—no cable authentication required—via the Yahoo Sports app. This season, games are also live streaming through the company’s fantasy sports app. Yahoo’s parent, Verizon, originally signed a five-year, $2 billion streaming deal with the NFL in 2017. A year later, the average user spent 41 minutes watching NFL games per visit on the Yahoo Sports app. According to NFL chief information officer Michelle McKenna, the league had hoped for even greater consu ..read more

We live in a data-rich world. More than ever before, today’s sporting ecosystem generates huge amounts of raw data from every fan interaction in stadiums, on social media, and every touchpoint in between. And while that data can be the key to unlocking great fan interactions and measurable returns on investment for sponsors, the sporting industry is faced with a problem: it’s virtually impossible to rely on information from many different systems, partners and stakeholders without putting it all into a single, coherent place from which to generate insights and make decisions. Download Data Wa ..read more

Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2019 — A roundup of the key sports technology news you need to know, including SportTechie’s own content and stories from around the web. The New York Mets are partnering with CLEAR, a biometrics identification company, to debut automated self-checkout concessions kiosks at Citi Field for the remainder of the 2019 regular season. The kiosks will be located behind section 130 and will enable fans who are CLEAR members to scan their food and beverage items before scanning their fingerprints at a self-checkout machine built by Mashgin. The machine will then charge the items to ..read more

During sea trials in January ahead of the inaugural SailGP season, Olympic champion Tom Slingsby and his Australia crew set a record of 49.7 knots in their F50 catamaran, a 15-meter sailboat that is powered by a 24-meter wingsail and a hydrofoil that lifts much of the boat’s surface area out of the water so it slices through waves like a shark’s dorsal fin. Seven months later, Slingsby’s crew set a new record off the southern coast of England—and touched the much-anticipated 50-knot threshold—in conditions so extreme that three other boats violently nosedived and the U.S. boat capsized.  Last ..read more