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Stadium Tech Report

October 29th, 2026

Editorial

Designing stadiums for women: what actually creates value?

CPKC Stadium has become the reference point for a new generation of women’s sports venues. As a user-centered architect, my instinct is to look at its success and search for evidence that designing expressly around women created value that others can reproduce. The results are impressive enough to invite imitation, but before others follow, it is worth understanding what really...

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Stop hiring AI interns: your venue deserves better

Nine years of running AI agents across hundreds of venues has taught me one thing: the technology is never the hard part. Every week, I sit across from a stadium executive holding a list. Twenty items, sometimes thirty, are on their AI wish list. While the list is always ambitious, it’s almost never organized around what the venue actually needs....

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5 takeaways from Converge summit

The organizers of STR Converge framed two days of discussion around the iconic movie "Miracle," then spent those two days arguing against the moral most people draw from it. The miracle is the story we tell. The Soviet national hockey program that won nine world championships without indoor arenas is the story we should study. As STR Publisher and summit...

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What Vince Lombardi can teach us about stadium technology

Football has spent much of its history becoming something the previous generation did not recognize. The forward pass was an intrusion. Television was viewed as a threat to ticket sales. Giant video boards gave fans a reason to look somewhere other than the field. Smartphones piled on. Even Madden, a video game built to imitate football, became sophisticated enough to...

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What is a frictionless fan worth?

A new J.D. Power study of airport passengers offers stadium operators a useful way to think about the economic value of reducing friction inside a venue. The 2026 North America Airport Satisfaction Study, released Sept. 16, surveyed 24,710 passengers and found that travelers who rated their airport experience as perfect spent an average of $47.60 in the terminal, $20.22 more...

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Technical debt is like a hidden tax on stadium business

How much is it costing yours? Stadium owners spend enormous amounts of time tracking construction budgets, operating expenses and capital replacement plans. There is another technology cost they rarely measure: technical debt. The term originated in software development, where it describes the future burden created when organizations make technology choices that solve an immediate problem but make systems more difficult...

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