The challenge

It's impossible to not get caught up in the excitement of Atlanta's sports scene. With six professional sports franchises, high-performing collegiate teams, and top-notch venues - it's thrilling to build technology sports solutions here.

Georgia Tech Athletics presents a free 24-hour hackathon in partnership with Your Ideas Are Terrible focused on innovation in sports and athletics. While open to any sports or athletics-related idea, three main focus areas 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 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 and supporting GT Athletic events. An app could keep sporting events top of mind and reward students for attendance and support. Example: http://superfanu.com
• Recruiting - Build a platform to find and evaluate talent based on GT needs. Subject matter experts (GT faculty, GT football recruiting, recruiting companies) will be invited to share insights to help you come up with a workable product to help GT recruit the best and brightest student-athletes.
• Softball Scouting Report – With GT Softball team support, pull publically available game play-by-play score sheet data to auto-build an opponent scouting report. GT Softball currently does this but it is a manual and laborious process and does not capitalize on data analytics.

The event will feature free food, prize bundles full of tech goodies, appearances from professional players and coaches, and a chance to meet with Management Teams to potentially enter into a POC agreement with one or more sports organizations.

Register on Eventbrite and on DevPost too.

What is a Hackathon?

A hackathon is a building sprint where teams of students and community members build new products or hack at an existing problem in 24-hours. The event engages design, development, and marketing talent, hears their ideas, prioritizes solutions, and prototypes/experiments to discover if the solutions work. Participants pitch final projects at the end of 24-hours to a panel of school and community leadership in hopes of winning prize bundles full of tech goodies, a chance to meet with management teams after the event to learn more about what it takes to pilot commercially, and one GT student will land a spot in CREATE-X's Startup Launch program.

Who should participate?

This event is open to both students and members of the Atlanta community. Engineers, developers, designers and anyone with experience or interest in sports and athletics are invited to attend.

What's in it for you?

• Build cool stuff in an awesome venue
• Eat, drink and be merry. All sustenance will be provided.
• Meet important people in the Atlanta professional sports industry.
• Prize bundles of tech goodies including VR headsets, drones, video games, DraftKings gift cards, game tickets and more.
• Garner interest from pro teams to move your concept forward and/or enter into a possible pilot agreement.
• One winning team with at least one GT student will be guaranteed a spot in CREATE-X’s 2018 Startup Launch program, which includes $20,000 in seed investment, $50,000 in deferred legal assistance, 24/7 access to CREATE-X collaborative workspace, 27 weeks of coaching, and access to a network of 50+ mentors from the industry.
• Keep what you build. If you building something of interest to Georgia Tech Athletics or one of the sponsoring professional sports organizations, you may be offered a contract to continue building your project and potentially run a pilot. All we ask for is right of first refusal.

Schedule

Saturday, November 3rd

• 12:00 - Arrival and Lunch
• 1:00 PM - Start hacking
• 5:00 PM - Dinner & kickoff
• Midnight - Fourth meal
• Stay as late you want. Toothbrushes provided.

Sunday, November 4th

• 8:30 AM - Breakfast
• 1:00 PM - Lunch, Public Expo + Judging
• 3:00 - Winners Announced. Prizes Awarded.