This project dives into the journey of our entrepreneurial startup with the Founders Lab Thesis Program. In the global sports business industry, we knew that there was something missing. While conducting market research, there was little data and information about sustainability initiatives that engaged sports fans, especially in college sports. Not to mention, there was no sustainability information provided on any existing platforms that sporting teams use for ticketing and advertising. So, for our startup, we decided to create a website called SustainSports which gives fans the opportunity to inform themselves about sustainability initiatives at sports events (https://sustainsports.webflow.io/). These fans can also earn points and rewards for practicing sustainability activities at home. In short, SustainSports serves as an educational, interactive, and informative website that connects users to sustainability initiatives, community activities, and exciting rewards, while encouraging users to continue such environmentally-friendly practices in their daily lives. In chronological order, this thesis paper will examine the process we took to create SustainSports and demonstrate our efforts that properly allowed us to defend it one academic year later. From meetings with renowned sports enthusiasts and professors to interviews with ASU students and sports fans, we have listened to and taken in diverse perspectives to understand the perceptions of sustainability in the global sports industry. When we realized that there was a significant gap between sports and sustainability - both important elements of American society and culture - we knew a change needed to be made. Hence, SustainSports came to life, offering users a fresh opportunity to be more aware of their sustainability surroundings, while simultaneously enjoying the sports they know and love.

The sports universe has been around for over a century and yet the at home sports viewing experience has seen little change. Even though our society has seen monumental innovative, technological advances, watching sports at home has not undergone any changes and may soon find itself a thing of the past unless something changes. When the COVID-19 pandemic arose, a problem surfaced of revenue loss and decreasing fan retention leaving teams and leagues stumbling for solutions. RYZE offers a never before seen product that can revolutionize how sports fans watch and engage in sporting events. By taking the lucrative concept of “battle passes” from the video game industry and placing it in the sports industry, RYZE hopes to increase overall fan revenue, retention, and engagement. A clear market size and wide range of potential customers, RYZE looks to help fans stay engaged while also earning prizes. With competition ranging from fantasy sports to virtual reality, RYZE has competitive advantages that give it potential to become a sports fan’s go to product when thinking about their favorite team. RYZE has gone from a propelling question to a bright idea and then to a prototype along with a full pitch deck and hopes to engrain itself in college athletics, MLB, and other professional sports leagues.

Historically, the predominant strategy for evaluating baseball pitchers has been through statistics created directly from the offensive production against the pitcher, such as ERA. Such statistics are inherently relative to the abilities and competition level of the opposing offense and the field defense, which the pitcher has no control over, making it difficult to compare pitchers across leagues. In this paper, I use cutting edge pitch-tracking data to develop a pitch evaluation model that is intrinsic to the attributes of the pitches themselves, and not influenced directly by the outcomes of each individual pitch. I train four different classifiers to predict the probability of each pitch belonging to different subsets of outcomes, then multiply the probability of each outcome by that outcome’s average run value to arrive at an expected run value for the pitch. I compare the performance of each classifier to a baseline, examine the most impactful features, and compare the top pitchers identified by the model to those identified by a different baseball statistics resource, ultimately concluding that three of the four classification models are productive and that the overall intrinsic evaluation model accurately identifies the sports top performers.

The goal of my thesis is to discover what fans, specifically students, want to see at the games and what different marketing efforts will encourage them to attend these games more frequently. I will also be analyzing what different factors of the game impact attendance the most to minimize these obstacles for consumers. I look at past research and trends when it comes to attendance, determining which factors and attributes of the game influence the students the most. Students are a portion of the target audience for the Diamondbacks which is the audience I will be focusing on. I conduct research to find the overall interest in sports and find out what influences students to attend games. The student ticket program with the Arizona Diamondbacks is available to all students over the age of 18, and I will find out how knowledgeable students are about this program along with their level of interest. I will then determine what steps the Diamondbacks should take next to combat the decreasing attendance levels.

The NBA yields billions of dollars each year and serves as a pastime and hobby for millions of Americans. However, many people do not have the time to watch several 2-hour games every week, especially when only a fraction of the game is actually exciting footage. The goal of Sports Summary is to take the ``fluff'' out of these games and create a distilled summary that includes only the most exciting and relevant events. The Sports Summary model records visual and auditory data, camera angles, and game clock readings and correlates it with the game's play-by-play data. On average, a game of more than 2 hours long is shortened to a summary of less than 20 minutes. This summary is then uploaded to the Sports Summary website, where users can filter by the type of event, giving more autonomy and a more comprehensive viewing experience than highlight reels. Additionally, the website allows for users to submit footage they would like to watch for processing and later viewing. Sports Summary creates an enjoyable and accessible way to watch games.

Video playback is currently the primary method coaches and athletes use in sports training to give feedback on the athlete’s form and timing. Athletes will commonly record themselves using a phone or camera when practicing a sports movement, such as shooting a basketball, to then send to their coach for feedback on how to improve. In this work, we present Augmented Coach, an augmented reality tool for coaches to give spatiotemporal feedback through a 3-dimensional point cloud of the athlete. The system allows coaches to view a pre-recorded video of their athlete in point cloud form, and provides them with the proper tools in order to go frame by frame to both analyze the athlete’s form and correct it. The result is a fundamentally new concept of an interactive video player, where the coach can remotely view the athlete in a 3-dimensional form and create annotations to help improve their form. We then conduct a user study with subject matter experts to evaluate the usability and capabilities of our system. As indicated by the results, Augmented Coach successfully acts as a supplement to in-person coaching, since it allows coaches to break down the video recording in a 3-dimensional space and provide feedback spatiotemporally. The results also indicate that Augmented Coach can be a complete coaching solution in a remote setting. This technology will be extremely relevant in the future as coaches look for new ways to improve their feedback methods, especially in a remote setting.

Video playback is currently the primary method coaches and athletes use in sports training to give feedback on the athlete’s form and timing. Athletes will commonly record themselves using a phone or camera when practicing a sports movement, such as shooting a basketball, to then send to their coach for feedback on how to improve. In this work, we present Augmented Coach, an augmented reality tool for coaches to give spatiotemporal feedback through a 3-dimensional point cloud of the athlete. The system allows coaches to view a pre-recorded video of their athlete in point cloud form, and provides them with the proper tools in order to go frame by frame to both analyze the athlete’s form and correct it. The result is a fundamentally new concept of an interactive video player, where the coach can remotely view the athlete in a 3-dimensional form and create annotations to help improve their form. We then conduct a user study with subject matter experts to evaluate the usability and capabilities of our system. As indicated by the results, Augmented Coach successfully acts as a supplement to in-person coaching, since it allows coaches to break down the video recording in a 3-dimensional space and provide feedback spatiotemporally. The results also indicate that Augmented Coach can be a complete coaching solution in a remote setting. This technology will be extremely relevant in the future as coaches look for new ways to improve their feedback methods, especially in a remote setting.