How Niche Sports Can Use Tech to Go Mainstream
The panel looks at how advancements in technology could tip the scales for sports on the fringe.
Technological innovations have changed the way we consume sports, allowing us to access them on-demand, and helping us contextualize the feats before us in ways we never could before. But more importantly, they’ve levelled the playing field. Before, athletes and sports depended on mainstream networks and outlets for coverage, growing or stagnating based on the access they received. Now, mass exposure is simply a viral tweet or Instagram story away — which is exactly what happened for kitesurfer Kevin Langeree. In the past, he would have needed an expensive film crew to capture his exploits out on the water, something that wasn’t feasible for a niche sport like his. Instead, Langeree used a small camera that fit inside his pocket to film his his movie “Hidden Lines”, which turned him and his sport into overnight sensations. What niche sport or sports league do you think will benefit the most from the next advances in technology?
Ben Beecken, Grandstand Central Staff Writer
To some extent, we’ve already seen technological advances have a significant impact on sports that were once outside the fringes of mainstream consciousness — at least here in the United States.
Some recent examples have to do with something as simple as available high-definition satellite TV channels, DVR and social media. Look no further than the Olympics. Sports like handball and curling survived largely on their own cult following until they became must-see Olympic sports. Curling wasn’t added until 2006, and while handball has been around since the 1970s, something tells me that it wasn’t receiving primetime air during the later part of the 20th century. Now, the Olympics are broadcasted and streams in a variety of places, and the advent of DVRs has changed viewing habits significantly, too.
There are dozens of extreme sports — extreme enough that there are certainly folks that would argue they fall in the “sports” classification — that will see their followings increase in scope due to technology. It will start similar to Langeree’s kitesurfing example; there’s an audience for everything on YouTube, and if you’re doing something awesome, then someone will find you. (And if you’re good at it, lots of someones will find you.)
ESPN The Ocho made a return in early August with sports such as dodgeball (of course), darts, handball, roller derby and chess boxing (!) making it onto ESPN2 as part of an entire day’s worth of broadcasting. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why some of these sports were selected, but it shows that there is at least somewhat of an audience out there for all of it.
In terms of the more extreme fringe sports, anything in the family of kitesurfing would be a candidate to explode based on advancements in camera technology — you might have a fear of water, but there’s something about feeling like it’s you that’s windsurfing high above the ocean even while your feet are firmly on solid ground. If you have a fear of heights, maybe try watching first-person footage of a freestyle rock-climber dangling hundreds of feet above jagged rocks and what looks like near-certain death. Or, there’s the relatively new cousin of hang-gliding and parachuting: wingsuit flying.
It’s really the natural evolution beyond the X Games, which are now considered fairly run-of-the-mill but are also generally accepted as sports. To truly appreciate some of these newer, even fringier sports, we have technology that can make us — the viewers — feel as though we’re in the athlete’s shoes, wing-suit or hang-glider. Remember, cameras have been able to film some of these actions for years, but we’re now getting better and better cameras, and the ease of disseminating the footage is far easier in 2018 than it was in 2008.
The next step is taking these extreme sports and making them attractive to view in a virtual reality setting. Once VR technology becomes more prevalent — will there be a day when having VR technology in the home is completely normal and expected, as HDTVs are today? — it’s natural to expect that the more daring (and less stuffy) sports will at least vie for the attention of folks that would otherwise be watching the more traditional athletic events.
While technology has been used to enhance the viewing experience of the Big Five sports (think the catcher’s helmet cam in baseball, the “skycam” or ref cam in football, the goalie cam in hockey), the “wow” factor just hasn’t been there. After all, there’s something more exciting about tumbling through the air and experiencing real thrill and danger than simply watching someone catch a fastball.
Parker Goss, Grandstand Central Staff Writer
Aside from a token answer about how advancements in technology have already brought esports to a whole new stage and allowed games like League of Legends and DOTA to butt heads with traditional sports in viewership, I think the sport(s) that’ll most benefit from future advancements haven’t been invented yet.
The sports we’ve come to know and love have pretty ancient origins, with a certain fixed set of skills. With advancements in augmented and virtual reality, we’ll have the ability to introduce new necessary skills and use them as the foundational skills of new sports entirely. With the ability to manipulate the environment in previously unseen ways, I’d predict that the new sports that arise from these technologies are more cerebral than sports of the present, or at least in a different way. Augmented and virtual reality sports have the ability to commodify our perception and use it in a way that other sports can’t. These technologies have such a unique ability to immerse us into a world that hasn’t previously existed that it just really wouldn’t make sense to confine what they can do to games we designed eons before we could even fathom VR. People love pong; its a classic, but there is a reason they won’t be remastering it for the PS5.
While I’m absolutely looking forward to how new and unpredictable technological advancements will augment my favorite sports like baseball and football, they could make way for something else entirely.
Canzhi Ye, Former Basketball Analytics Associate at the Brooklyn Nets
The first thing that comes to my mind is that technology can not only be used to help athletes be better versions of themselves, but also to increase the excitement for viewers, akin to the kitesurfing story. There are some endurance sports that are usually not so exciting to watch that could very much be enhanced with advances in technology.
A great example would be cycling. I’m by no means an expert on cycling, but I watch the Tour de France every summer, and it would be pretty cool to see some overlays on the broadcast of how fast the athletes are peddling, or what the gradient of the road is, etc. This also gives the commentators so much more to talk about, and can maybe help newer viewers understand the sport quicker and more deeply. It would kind of be like how baseball broadcasts are enhanced by very granular information about each pitch. With advances in different sensors and ways to process video, the ways broadcasts can be improved are limitless.
Sandy Mui is the Facilitator of Special Projects at GrandStand Central. She takes pride in her background as a multi-platform journalist and more recently, as a digital campaigner advocating for gun safety in the United States. You can follow her on Twitter here.
