Notre Dame joins NBCUniversal’s SportsTech Partner Consortium
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The University of Notre Dame has joined Comcast NBCUniversal’s SportsTech, an innovation accelerator for companies merging sports and technology, as the program’s first collegiate partner.
Originally simply a tech accelerator out of its Atlanta facility, NBC Sports Group quickly realized that applications were over indexing towards sports-focused tech companies, prompting a shift in the primary focus of the program.
“We thought that was a fantastic idea, one because we knew it would give us some insight into innovation that was happening in the sports-tech ecosystem,” NBC Sports Next President Will McIntosh said. “What we also quickly realized is between NBC Sports league partners, we felt we could actually pull partners in as well, because much like the tech that we would be interested in for our own needs or purposes, we thought the leagues and teams that we partnered with would would feel the same way, and that happened to be true.”
Leveraging its prior relationship and with Pete Bevacqua, NBC Sports Group’s immediate former chairman who now serves as director of athletics at Notre Dame, McIntosh said priorities finally aligned between the two entities.
“It was perfect, somewhat serendipitous, but I think Pete being in that role, understanding NBC Sports, understanding this program made it very easy for it to all come together,” McIntosh said. “Notre Dame, just in and of itself, I think it’s going to help us attract even more entrepreneurs and startups to this accelerator.”
The partnership also works for Notre Dame, an institution that invests heavily in its student-athletes, facilities and fan engagement.
“It really comes down to our partnership with NBC, which is so unique in the landscape, to continue to find ways to be connected, but also find ways to be forward thinking and prepared for the future,” Notre Dame’s deputy athletics director of business strategy Yulander Wells said. “With that comes the need to continue to be innovative, to think about ways that we can continue to get better as a business, and find ways that our partnership can be activated more substantially. This is one of the ways to do so.”
Per the release announcing the partnership, Notre Dame was scheduled to get involved with the fifth SportsTech cohort starting in March 2025, but the quality of participants in the 2024 cohort inspired the team at Notre Dame to dive into the partnership immediately.
“Because this is new, we wanted to see what was out there and it meets one of the strategies that we have, trying to figure out ways to be innovative,” Wells said. “We’ve already gotten involved. We’ve already been able to provide some feedback to several companies that are in the cohort and we’ve had several different employees in our athletic department participating in that.”
The involvement of staff from across the athletic department is a valuable part of the partnership, Wells said, because companies are able to get well-rounded feedback from the organization as a whole.
“We’ve engaged several different staff members, from our fan engagement team, our analytics team, our sports performance team, our business office team, to engage in this process,” Wells said. “That’s part of professional development and learning for them.”
At minimum, Notre Dame’s commitment to the program and the partnership involves working on at least one pilot project per cohort. Already, for the fourth cohort, they’ve worked with a number of the startups.
“Being able to see all the different technologies out there because we have a lot of different units within our athletic department, makes the most sense for our organization,” Wells said. “It gives us visibility, allows us to partake in a lot of different aspects and see everything that’s coming to the forefront of these startups that NBC has chosen.”
The university joins some of the top sports and tech brands globally as part SportsTech partner consortium including the Premier League, NBC Sports, NBC Sports Next, Sky Sports, Comcast Spectacor, Golf, NASCAR, PGA TOUR and three US Olympic sports organizations.
“A university might be the biggest beneficiary from this, because almost every thing that every company we bring into a given class does, would have applicability. That’s what’s exciting about this,” McIntosh said. “If they’re focused on in-venue innovation? Notre Dame has stadiums and indoor sports facilities. If it’s about improving the experience for the viewer at home, Notre Dame has partnerships with us and others to broadcast and stream their games. It could be wearable technology to improve athletic performance.”
McIntosh speaks about the unique position Notre Dame is in as a SportsTech consortium partner.
With access to interact with innovation at infancy, the partnership could also give Notre Dame a competitive advantage over its collegiate sports peers.
“It’s really an opportunity for us to be connected with a lot of different companies that are on the cutting edge of some technologies that maybe we want to look at as we look at media, business, performance analytics for our student athletes, just to make sure we’re aware of the different technologies that are out there,” Wells said. “This SportsTech partnership is all about trying to find ways to integrate partners so that the partners have success together. With these startup companies, that’s where we think we can find some advantages and find some future forward things that we can participate in before anyone else.”
In the past four years since starting the accelerator in 2021, the consortium has refined its selection criteria and also streamlined the stage a company has to be at to be considered for the program.
“What we found with the first few was that we have selected some companies that were almost too early in their journey to creating a product or business. We learned early on that the sweet spot is somewhere between seed stage and Series A,” McIntosh said. “More recently, we’ve just had such tremendous interest from a variety of companies, including some that were much more mature than we had ever anticipated working with, that it has caused us to be a little bit more flexible in that criteria.”
The four-month program is designed to help participants create a pilot project and partner with members of the consortium. If a company has not yet achieved a minimum viable product, it becomes challenging to do an effective pilot in that case, he said.
“It’s everything from executive coaching to helping them think a little bit differently about their business model or their product or their go to market strategy,” McIntosh said. “It’s helping them find either somewhere inside of Comcast or NBCU or with a partner like Notre Dame, an executive sponsor, that will work with them along the way, that will help them bring to life a project during those four months.”
Proximity to the innovation coming out of the accelerator also makes investment from Notre Dame a possibility, but not an obligation.
“Just because of the brand of Notre Dame and what it represents, we think there’s going to be a ton of enthusiastic entrepreneurs and startups that want to work with them,” McIntosh said.
The accelerator management company, Boomtown, narrows applications down from over 2,000 to roughly 50 companies. Boomtown then sends a synopsis on the shortlisted companies to a joint steering committee. The committee, made up of members from the partner consortium, then cuts it down further to 25 based on a number of factors, until they decide on a final 10.
“Is the company focused on some new technology that would help the broadcasting or streaming of sports and make it more engaging for consumers? Are they working on technology that might make the in-venue or in-stadium experience better for consuming sports?” are questions McIntosh said the committee considered. “If Notre Dame came to us and said, ‘We really like these two or three companies. It would be fantastic to get at least one, or maybe all of them in this cohort,’ that would go a long way to influencing what we would try to achieve.”
Wells said Notre Dame would be looking for solutions that help the athletics department function more effectively and innovatively and products or services that meet a dire industry need.
“I think it’s a multi pronged approach for us, there’s no single answer for it. Collegiate athletic departments are so much different than the pro-sports space and so there’s certain things that the pro organizations may find more valuable than we do,” Wells added. “Those would be just two of the multi-pronged approach, probably more that we can be thinking about, and that’s why we engage multiple people to be involved in this process of selection, as well as talking to our partners at NBC to figure out what is important to them as well.”
From the very first cohort, NBC Sports Next ended up acquiring Sports Engine Play, formerly called Rapid Replay, a youth and recreation sports streaming platform.
“During COVID, they allowed parents and grandparents to stream their kids’ activities from home when only a limited number of people were allowed to go,” McIntosh said. “We have leveraged what they’ve built to quickly become one of the leading live streaming and video on demand highlight platforms for youth and recreation sports leagues.”
In the last four years, SportsTech alumni have achieved more than 130 pilots, partnerships, and commercial deals with consortium partners.
“Acquisition of the companies is probably more of the exception, but there’s been a ton of follow-on investment and other investors getting involved in these companies as they succeeded and graduated from the cohort,” McIntosh added.
Members of the 2024 SportsTech class are billed to be in downtown Indianapolis come Aug. 27-28, to present their capstone projects at the Rally Innovation Conference organized by Elevate Ventures.
“This year’s founders will showcase their tech innovations, putting a spotlight on their scale-up traction during the program to garner new business opportunities across the broader sports industry,” McIntosh said.
As they look to the future of the partnership, Notre Dame Athletics Department welcomes the opportunity to inspire the next generation of innovators in the technology, sports and media fields.
“What we are really looking at as success for us and for those startups is the relationship,” Wells said. “For startups and for many organizations, establishing relationships, learning one another and gaining trust is the biggest part.”
Applications for the 2025 cohort opened in January and closed on July 15. The top 10 companies will be notified by late October and officially announced next February.