WHEN CONTENT WINS THE GAME
TO CAPTURE VIEWERS’ ATTENTION, SPORTS TEAMS AND LEAGUES ARE GETTING CREATIVE.
IF YOU’RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO SCORE A
ticket to catch a Savannah Bananas baseball game at the team’s 4,000-seat Grayson Stadium— the wait-list for a home game is now half a million people deep—you might see a player step up to home plate wearing 10-foot stilts or swinging a flaming bat. And the guy in the bananayellow Mad Hatter getup dancing atop the dugout? That’s the team’s co-owner, Jesse Cole.
The team, which has more than 30 million Tiktok followers, once competed in the Coastal Plain League, but dropped out last year to pursue its version of sports-based entertainment via exhibition matches. “We’re a circus that happens to have a ball game break out in the middle of it,” says Savannah Bananas director of entertainment Zack Frongillo. “We spend zero dollars on marketing. Our social media promotes our brand, which drives ticket sales, which drives merchandise.”
Not every team is quite so focused on content at the expense of competition, but the quest to engage fans at every turn is fueling innovation throughout sports organizations. Athletes Unlimited is rewriting the rules for professional sports. It features women’s leagues in softball, volleyball, lacrosse, and basketball where there are no team owners. Instead, teams are reshuffled weekly, injecting an element of pickup-ball spontaneity into elite-level competition. At the end of each season, the leagues crown individual champions based on overall season-long stats, and athletes share in the profits.
Togethxr is another entity raising the profile of elite women athletes—by elevating their stories. Founded by Alex Morgan and Sue Bird, among other athletes, the two-year-old media platform recently produced a documentary on WNBA player AD Durr’s return to the league after battling long COVID. Another of its
short films offers a candid look at Olympic gold medalist swimmer (and Togethxr cofounder) Simone Manuel’s diagnosis with overtraining syndrome (OTS).
To enliven the fan experience, the Famous Group deploys a real-time video-game engine that can overlay visual elements in a real-life stadium during a broadcast. The technology has transformed Atlanta’s Mercedes-benz Stadium into a racetrack to promote the carmaker’s EV lineup and inserted prowling panthers into the Carolina Panthers’ Bank of America Stadium. For the 2022 Stanley Cup Finals, it surprised jumbotron viewers by turning a Zamboni into a giant Chipotle burrito—then having a massive hockeygloved hand smash through the ice to grab it.
All of these companies seem to be guided by the same kind of question that Frongillo says drives the Savannah Bananas: “What have our fans never seen before?” —Jay Woodruff