The helmet safety ranking used by the NFL and NFL Players Association has grown more stringent for the 2022 season as equipment quality has improved.

The annual helmet poster is based on each model’s ability to reduce head impact severity in laboratory experiments conducted by jointly appointed by biomechanical engineers. A total of 47 helmets were tested, including six new models.

Five of the six newcomers were coded in dark green, signaling a top performance rating, including the No. 1 overall helmet, the Vicis Zero2-R Matrix ID Trench. The Trench helmet line is the sport’s first position-specific model, created specifically for the demands of lineman play. The top four overall helmets were all made by Vicis, then four from Riddell, with Schutt also manufacturing several dark green-scored helmet models.

The barrier for inclusion in the top tier of performance has risen. Six helmets in the green last year have been relegated to the yellow “not recommended” group for the coming season. Those helmets only can be worn in 2022 by NFL players grandfathered in after wearing the same model in 2021.

Prior to the 2021 season, 27% of NFL players began wearing a better-performing helmet, with nearly 100% opting for a model from the top-performing tier. Concussions in the league over the last four seasons were 25% lower per year than compared to the three prior seasons. The 2021 regular season, which included an additional 17th game for every team, had its fewest concussions since the 2015 regular season. 

NL East sluggers Pete Alonso and Josh Bell headline a new group of clients for LongBall Labs, the baseball tech company whose tests help determine the best performing wood bats in each new batch. 

Founded by former Easton bat engineer Keenan Long, LongBall Labs has two main testing facilities in Chicago and Glendale, Ariz., where it uses proprietary technology to ensure hitters swing the bats with the highest potential for exit velocity. Each bat receives a RIPz score that signals its performance rating, with a usual shipment averaging up to 18 feet in variability of batted-ball distance. 

All-Star sluggers Mitch Haniger of the Seattle Mariners and Jed Lowrie, who is currently a free agent, were two of the earliest adopters. LongBall Labs declined to identify its entire roster of clients, but indicated it had about a dozen—including the newly added Alonso and Bell.  

Alonso, the New York Mets first baseman, was an All-Star and NL Rookie of the Year in 2019 and is the reigning two-time Home Run Derby champion. “I want to create an advantage by using the best tool tailored specifically for me,” he said in a statement. 

Bell was an All-Star that same year with the Pittsburgh Pirates before being traded to the Washington Nationals prior to last season. “With LongBall Labs, I'm excited to know what I'm swinging this year down to the decimal point,” Bell said. “No more guesswork. Just bats that will allow me to maximize my potential in the box.” 

1190 Sports, a commercial sports rights owner in Latin America, has a new partnership with La Liga Tech to deploy its anti-piracy services across 1190’s properties. The deal covers live matches and content from Brazil’s top two soccer leagues, as well as Chile’s international men’s and women’s sports competitions.

La Liga Tech will use artificial intelligence to monitor search engines, social networks, websites and IPTV services, while removing content found to be illegally distributed. Matches from the Brasileirão A & B soccer leagues are streamed globally on Fanatiz, which La Liga Tech will prioritize to protect against pirated streams.  

Spain’s top soccer league launched its La Liga Tech division in 2014 and thereafter began offering its content protection services to other sports organizations. La Liga Tech now protects nearly $10 billion worth of audiovisual assets. Other sports clients to use its anti-piracy services include Belgium’s Jupiler Pro League, MotoGP and Sky Mexico.

Tennis technology company Slinger announced that its upcoming smartphone-based biomechanics analysis app has been validated by researchers from Australian Catholic University. ACU’s Sports Performance, Recovery, Injury and New Technologies (SPRINT) research center tested Slinger’s movement tracking accuracy against renowned motion capture camera system Vicon.

Slinger’s mobile app to evaluate on-court body movements and swing analysis for tennis players is set for beta release later this month. Founded in Israel, Slinger acquired both Gameface.AI and PlaySight Interactive in 2021 to boost its video analysis capabilities before developing its upcoming app. Slinger’s original product is its automated tennis ball launcher, the Slinger Bag.

Vicon’s motion capture systems are used in MLB team bullpens and have been installed at venues such as Nike’s LeBron James Innovation Center in Oregon and the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas. ACU’s SPRINT Research Centre has previously provided sports science intel to the NFL and Sacramento Kings in the NBA.

“Slinger wanted to know if it could accurately track landmarks on the body as they move through a defined space,” SPRINT’s Dr. Grant Duthie said in a statement. “The big shift has been into camera-based systems. It is truly mind-blowing to think what AI will do two decades from now.”

David Beckham and Lisa Leslie are the latest sports stars to become brand ambassadors for blockchain-based companies making products for the “metaverse.” Beckham will help launch NFTs for the DigitalBits blockchain while Leslie joins LootMogul, a trivia gaming platform that sells NFTs of star athletes.

Beckham, the soccer icon turned owner of MLS club Inter Miami, will use his social media platforms across Meta’s Instagram and Facebook, as well as China’s Weibo and Douyin, to promote DigitalBits to his global followers. Beckham’s NFT collections will be exclusively available on DigitalBits, which has other deals with esports organization Dignitas and Italian soccer clubs Inter Milan and A.S. Roma.

Leslie is a three-time WNBA MVP and the current head coach of the Triplets men’s Big3 basketball team. She’ll serve as a business partner to LootMogul, which aims to create digital sports arenas. LootMogul partnered with The Sandbox virtual world platform in January.

Formula 1’s McLaren Racing has named Cisco an official technology partner through an expanded relationship between the organizations. Cisco will work towards upgrading McLaren’s internal race-day communications to run on WiFi 6E (Extended), which offers twice the bandwidth of WiFi 6. 

“Formula 1 being one of the fastest growing sports in the world is an incredibly lucrative space for Cisco to be involved,” said Ashley Marusak, global sports sponsorship lead at Cisco. “But it’s also a really natural place because technology innovation is so woven into the fabric of F1 racing. They’re constantly innovating to give each of the teams the slightest competitive edge.”

Cisco's Webex video conferencing platform was used by McLaren’s staff for internal communications throughout the 2021 season and for fan engagement activations such as   a contest  in which fans were asked to design the team’s flag. McLaren will also consider ways to integrate augmented reality video conferencing through the Webex Hologram platform.

Cisco’s networking solutions will also be installed at McLaren’s headquarters in Surrey, England. Earlier this month, Cisco partnered with Real Madrid to install WiFi 6 at the club’s Bernabeu Stadium. The NFL’s SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas also run on Cisco’s WiFi 6 infrastructure. Matt Swartz, distinguished engineer at Cisco, will speak about venue connectivity at SportTechie’s State Of The Industry conference in New York on April 12.

“WiFi 6 is the first version of WiFi that had a specific focus on efficiency. Every other version of WiFi prior to that was focused on speeds,” Swartz said Wednesday. “At a racing event where there’s literally thousands of devices, you have a lot of these devices trying to contend for the network [...] contention is the biggest problem. So the efficiency aspects of WiFi 6 have been a game changer. WiFi 6E is taking WiFi 6 and extending that into the six gigahertz (GHz) spectrum. It’s like adding extra lanes to the highway.”

Ohio State quarterback C.J. Stroud and Oklahoma quarterback Dillon Gabriel are among a handful of college football players wearing Riddell’s new Axiom helmet during spring practices. The smart helmet has a built-in impact sensing system that transmits data from head collisions to Riddell’s software in real-time. 

Coaches and trainers can view head impact data via Riddell’s InSite Analytics platform, such as the load impact of each hit and the specific area of the head (front, top, right, left, back) on the receiving end of each contact. Coaches can also identify which players are hitting with their head most often during practices. Other D-1 college football programs testing the Axiom helmet this spring include West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Kansas, Texas and Texas A&M.

Each Axiom helmet is custom fit for an athlete through Riddell’s 3D scanning app Verifyt, which scans 285 points on a player’s head. The generated image is then used by Riddell to personalize the helmet’s interior pad thickness and shape to match a player’s head. Gabriel, a junior QB expected to start for the Sooners, was filmed getting his head scanned for the Axiom helmet.

“This is quite a leap forward in helmet technologies,” Thad Ide, Riddell’s SVP of research and product development, told Yahoo Finance in January. “It really is a confluence of a lot of groundbreaking things that we’ve been working on in the past four or five years that are all coming together in one package now.”

Three-time NBA champion Andre Iguodala has invested in a $28 million funding round raised by Players Health, which provides insurance and risk management services to youth sports organizations. Iguodala’s Mastry Ventures and insurance company SiriusPoint led the investing.

Sports organizations use the Players Health software platform to document athlete injuries, report instances of abuse, facilitate background checks for coaches and share educational training with coaches. The company’s current clients include U.S. Youth Soccer, NFL Flag Football, I9 Sports and USA Cheer.

“Because of the data we collect, we have a better understanding around how that organization is managing risk,” Players Health CEO Tyrre Burks told SportTechie last year. “We can tell if they’re a good organization to insure or not based on their behavior and how they manage their risks on a day-to-day basis. We advocate to our insurance carriers, as a broker, we advocate their program, and we negotiate for discounts for them because they implement our risk services.”

Based in Minneapolis, Players Health will use its funding to expand its athlete safety and insurance offerings. Also contributing to the funding round were existing investors RPM Ventures, EOS Venture Partners and Will Ventures. 

The NFL has partnered with StatusPro to make a league-licensed virtual reality simulation game, the first such VR title to be released by any major sports league. A startup founded by former football players Troy Jones and Andrew Hawkins, StatusPro uses authentic player tracking data to create first-person experiences. 

“From the beginning, we have been wanting to immerse the fan in a view of sports they haven’t had before,” Hawkins told SportTechie. “VR helps with that immersion. It puts you literally on the field, in the locker room, and it feels like a field trip into a world that you’ve never been a part of.” 

StatusPro already makes extended reality simulations for elite training with six NFL teams as clients and has partnered with Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson, the 2019 league MVP. The new game will be supported on Meta’s Quest and on PlayStation VR, but its release date and additional gameplay details will be announced later. Meta’s Quest headsets held a VR Foo Fighters concert after Super Bowl LVI and previously partnered with the NFL to launch Super Bowl-branded digital clothing for avatars in the metaverse.   

Miami-headquartered StatusPro raised a $5.2 million seed round last August with investments from KB Partners and funds tied to three NFL franchises: the Green Bay Packers through TitletownTech, the San Francisco 49ers through 49ers Enterprises and the Cleveland Browns through Haslam Sports Group. In November, StatusPro added strategic investments from LeBron James, Drake, Naomi Osaka, Maverick Carter, Jimmy Iovine and Paul Wachter. 

Jones, the CEO, was a Division I quarterback at Western Kentucky and Akron. Hawkins, the company president, played six NFL seasons as a wide receiver with the Browns and Bengals. They describe its product as “athlete-led technology.” 

“People ask us what it’s like to be the quarterback of a high-level football team with 70,000 screaming fans? Or what was it like to play in the NFL?” Hawkins said. “There’s not really a baseline to tell you all the details. What it sounds like? What it's like to be on the sidelines? What you feel like in the tunnel? Anybody who wants to experience those is what we're trying to bring to the table.” 

The Big Ten Conference and analytics consulting firm Data Clymer are partnering to develop a cloud data platform the league can use to engage fans and grow its business. 

 This deal follows the December 2021 creation of the Big Ten’s data and analytics department. In a statement, commissioner Kevin Warren described this new agreement as “a foundational component” of that vision. Nate Schnader, the Big Ten’s SVP & CIO, will speak at SportTechie’s State Of The Industry conference April 12-13 in NYC.

 Data Clymer works with a number of major sports and retail clients, such as the Las Vegas Raiders, Minnesota Vikings, San Francisco Giants, Macy’s, GoodRX and Peet’s Coffee. Its product are designed to enable holistic views of customer behavior and preferences. 

FlexIt has been named the official virtual fitness partner of the NHL’s Florida Panthers. The team will host two in-person workout classes for fans on game days outside its FLA Live Arena that will be led by FlexIt trainers. 

FlexIt’s mobile app has a premium subscription that lets people stream fitness sessions led by notable trainers who’ve worked with professional athletes and celebrities. FLA Live Arena will also debut a “FlexIt Flexcam” during Panthers home games.

Former NBA player Jason Terry joined FlexIt last month as the company’s head of athletic performance. The Panthers join the New York Knicks and Golden State Warriors as other pro teams to partner with virtual personal training apps after both those NBA teams struck deals with Future.