In this week's SBJ Tech newsletter, we delve into the sports venue potential for sustainable tech company Intuitive AI and its waste-sorting product, Oscar Sort. Also, we highlight some tech-related learnings from SBJ Dealmakers panels. - Ethan Joyce
In today's edition of Power Up:
- Athlete's Voice: Youth Inc. founder Greg Olsen
- Orb Sport Smart Mouthguard launches
- MLB sees World Series pop on social media
Greg Olsen on expansion of Youth Inc. Podcast, technology in youth sports, working with Tom Brady
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You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete's Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.
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Former NFL TE Greg Olsen has stayed busy since retiring from the league after the 2020 season. He made a fresh name for himself as Fox Sports’ lead NFL color commentator over multiple years, and now anchors the network’s No. 2 booth following its addition of Tom Brady. In 2022, he partnered with former Panthers teammate Ryan Kalil, actor Vince Vaughn and LA-based venture firm Powerhouse Capital to launch podcast production house Audiorama, which has since spun off youth-sports-focused interview show Youth Inc . into a media company that is adding a digital commerce platform in 2025 and raised $4.5M earlier this year . On top of it all, he is also a dad and youth football, basketball and baseball coach.
“It’s hard,” Olsen said of juggling those responsibilities in a recent interview. “I try to coach one season per kid.”
The first episode of season two of Olsen’s Youth Inc. Podcast releases today with a new co-host in sports psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais. Earlier this week, SBJ Tech caught up with Olsen to discuss Youth Inc., working with Brady and sports technology trends that interest him.
On what to expect from season two of the Youth Inc. Podcast…
Season one was really almost testing the market. When we approached season one, our plan was, let’s cast a wide net, let’s have a big variety of conversations with all different aspects of the youth sports experience – whether it’s parents, coaches, Olympians, professional athletes, college, sports psychologists, performance coaches. Every aspect of what the landscape looks like, let’s have surface-level conversations, cast a wide net, and let’s test the interest level, let’s test which areas of the system people most gravitate to and respond well to.
It became very evident through those 40-some-odd episodes that there were certain areas that people had strong interest in. Season two is going to be a lot more of hyper-focused episodes that are more of a deep dive into different conversation with guests, but all have the same storylines.
For example, me and Dr. Michael Gervais, who’s one of the leading sports psychologists in sports from the youth level all the way up through professional athletes and Olympians – I met him when I played for the Seahawks and have gotten to know him – we sat down with a bunch of different guests. And while the conversations all covered different sports, different ages, different levels, different detail, they all had common threads around mental health, sports performance anxiety, best practices of parenting youth athletes, best practices for being a youth or college or professional athlete.
On how technology is changing youth sports …
It’s a great question, and obviously [with Youth Inc.’s digital commerce platform] we’re trying to tackle one of the big areas, which is a very complicated and fragmented e-commerce experience. We spend all week very much on our phones or on our computers with the ability to process buying in a seamless one-touch, whether it’s Fanatics, or Amazon, and all these big e-commerce platforms that we’ve all become very accustomed to. And then when it comes to, you know, buying a hoodie for your kid’s middle school football team, it seems like you’re jumping through hoops.
With sports performance and mental health, there’s a lot of good apps and programs that people are investing in that are right on kids’ phones, take them step by step through performance anxiety, best steps to handling pressure, the best steps of handling failure – and they’re almost bringing a mobile sports psychologist into the palm of their hands. There’s scheduling apps that best process how to pick the best baseball tournaments and best volleyball tournaments. [The technologies are] all geared towards – yes, capitalizing on a big market, capitalizing on a big opportunity financially – but more so just trying to make the experience better.
On working with Tom Brady at Fox …
It’s been great. We’ve had a good relationship, and obviously we’ve had a lot of conversations as he’s transitioned to this role. He’s been really good to work with, super humble and open-minded to asking questions and wanting to learn and realizing that when you start anything new – it’s no different than when I first started – you don’t know what you don’t know. I give him a lot of credit. He’s been very upfront and humble and honest about wanting to learn and wanting to get advice from other people. And you’re talking about the best guy who’s ever played the sport. So, it’s a credit to him. I’m sure if you asked him, he feels a lot better now than he did in Week 1, and he’ll feel a lot better in five weeks than he did yesterday, and that process just continues to get more and more comfortable the longer you do it. No different than how it was when we all first came in the [NFL] as players. There is a learning curve and there is a process of getting comfortable as time goes on.
On the keys to his transition from player to broadcaster…
Early on for me, what I tried to remind myself is: there was no learning curve for football. I knew football. The learning curve came through the technical part. The learning curve came through communicating on live broadcasts and communicating with producers in your ear and understanding replay sequencing and all the specific things to a broadcast were where I had to do a bunch of my learning.
To this day, I don’t know exactly all the camera angles, official names. When I ask for a replay, I’m probably calling it the wrong name, but they by now know what I’m talking about… At the end of the day, when you get your 20-second sound bite to get in there, talk about what you know. We’ve lived this sport our whole lives. We know it. We see it. Describe it to someone at home in a way that keeps it interesting, keeps it informative. The complexity of football is what makes it so special. But also you can’t talk like you’re in the locker room. You can’t talk like you’re talking to another 20-year veteran at the position. So, there is a little balance.
To sum it up, keep the football part. That’s the part you know. Don’t let the transition of the technical broadcast component paralyze you. At the end of the day, you’re talking football. Don’t complicate it. Talk what you know. Talk what you see. You can figure out the mechanics of a broadcast, figure out the mechanics of television along the way.
On the NFL’s in-game authorization of Guardian Caps in 2024 …
I think anything that can continue to improve the health and safety of players while keeping the game the game is something worth looking into. So, I’ll always be a supporter of any of that.
I think helmet technology has come such a long way. I mean, I look back, I had my rookie year Chicago Bears helmet and when I look on the inside, let alone when I look back at what I wore in high school compared to what I wore at the end of my career, you talk about the technology growing and getting better with time. And then you factor in what the Guardian Caps are able to do and the extra layer. I know everybody wears them in practice. And I’m sure there’s some adjustment getting used to it. But I think everybody has the decision, what helmet they wear, whether they wear the Guardian Cap in practice or also in the games.
I don’t know if I would wear one. Obviously, I’m probably on the older side. By the time it was introduced I was like that ‘can’t teach and old dog new tricks’ kind of person. But for guys who wear it, I’m sure there’s a level of comfort, a level of protection. I wouldn’t be shocked if some of that technology Guardian is developing gets incorporated into some of the helmet design, and one day you get the combination of both things all wrapped up in one.
Orb Sport Smart Mouthguard launches sensor-laden mouthguards to improve athlete performance
The new Orb Sport Smart Mouthguard , which launches today, collects performance datapoints while also informing the user about the direction of impacts. While a few companies have developed sensor-laden mouthguards to track head impacts for player safety, Orb Innovations has taken a different approach, creating a smart mouthguard to improve athlete performance. Athletes in contact sports often can’t practically use wearable devices around the wrist or chest to track heart rate and movement.
Orb’s two athlete ambassadors are Falcons RB Bijan Robinson and legendary USA Hockey star Hilary Knight, who also plays for the PWHL’s Boston Fleet.
“I can track the data and see what I'm doing and not just have to ask a sports science guy, but I can have it for myself,” said Robinson, who began wearing the smart mouthguard in training camp. “It's helping me improve on the field every single week, and two, three years ago, I would never say that a mouthpiece would help me improve on the field.”
Knight said it’s been challenging to collect workload data before and hopes Orb can help her “train at a different level and also get feedback where you need to lay off the throttle a little bit,” she said. “I'm interested to see where I can take training with having different datapoints now in the mix and being able to work with my staff and team that helps me perform.”
For now, Orb is launching only in the U.S. where it expects to reach athletes in American football, hockey, lacrosse, boxing and MMA, to name a few. The impact data it does collect can be used for performance reasons.
“If you're in boxing, for example, and you notice you're getting hit on the right side of the head 80% of time versus the left side, maybe you need to look to improve your guard there,” said co-founder and CEO Robert Paterson.
Robinson noted that seeing a discrepancy in which side gets hit more often is helpful for two reasons. It helps him balance out the impact for safety reasons, but also an imbalance could be an indication that maybe his moves to evade defenders are getting too predictable. Film study could tip off a defender if a runner always jukes left, for instance.
“I never really thought about the game like that, which is pretty cool, because I feel you can implement new skill sets, new moves and new things for yourself in doing that,” Robinson said.
Orb Innovations was co-founded by Paterson and Thomas Quinn, who met as engineering master’s students at England’s Loughborough Univ. Paterson played competitive rugby but suffered several injuries while playing the sport, including a bad head injury.
Paterson kept thinking about rugby from a player welfare perspective and, knowing that many wearables were prohibited in combat and contact sports, he decided to “utilize the mouthguard as a platform to make it smart,” he said. “It was an idea that stems from my passion and my love for sport, my background in engineering, and then a merger of ideas to, go, ‘OK, there's a problem here that people aren't getting this access to data that they can in other sports.’”
Glidewell, a California-based dental services and technology company, acquired Orb Innovations in May 2023. One of Glidewell’s specialties, Paterson noted, is mass manufacturing of consumer dental products, which is helping with scale.
Unlike smart mouthguard competitors such as Prevent Biometrics, the Orb smart mouthguard does not offer live head impact monitoring, though Paterson said it’s a feature he expects to develop over time. World Rugby, for example, has a longstanding partnership with Prevent Biometrics requiring international athletes to wear the product with medical practitioners on the sideline evaluating any player who suffers an impact above a certain threshold.
The Orb Sport Smart Mouthguard is on sale now for $349 for the hardware plus a monthly subscription for the app (roughly $60 for the year or $8 monthly).
MLB's social media traffic up for World Series
Engagement on MLB’s social media platforms is up significantly year-over-year for the 2024 World Series. Through the first four games, MLB social media posts have generated a combined 37.1 million engagements (up 195% from 2023) and 487.6 million video views (up 186% from 2023). Most of those totals are from Instagram, with 22.7 million engagements (up 189% from 2023) and 248.6 million views (up 282% from 2023).
MLB has also concentrated on engaging younger fans through Reddit. Through a partnership agreement signed over the summer , advertisers can align with league content through video ads, AMAs and other formats on that platform. Reddit also can access and post videos directly from MLB, including game highlights and behind-the-scenes clips.
MLB’s total platform engagements are up 29.3% since the postseason began.
Other year-over-year World Series social media platform splits:
- Twitter/X: 2.3 million engagements (+317% vs. 2023), 79.4 million views (+252% vs. 2023)
- TikTok: 6.6 million engagements (+136% vs. 2023), 72 million views (+36% vs. 2023)
- Facebook: 4.9 million engagements (+325% vs. 2023), 61.6 million views (+176% vs. 2023)
- YouTube: 615,000 engagements (+192% vs. 2023), 26 million views (+251% vs. 2023)