Eugene, OR is best known as the birthplace of Nike and home to the University of Oregon. Nike was born in the early 1970s founded by two men named Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight. Through the years Eugene has come to be known as the capital of the sporting and outdoor apparel industry.
I suppose it would be more fitting to refer to Eugene as the name it is most commonly known by in the sporting world, TrackTown USA. According to the TrackTown website, the place is “always an incubator of innovation” and has spurred the development of modern jogging and the contemporary running shoe.
However, come mid-October Eugene might be known by another name: HackTown USA. From October 14-16, the University of Oregon will be hosting the first Sports/Tech hackathon called “QuackCon.” It is anticipated that there will be roughly 200-300+ college students from around the U.S. who will attend and participate in the hackathon which will promote different types of sport innovations.
“Basically what a hackathon is is an event where students come together and they have an allotted amount of time, usually between 24-48 hours,” said Joseph Livni, a Sophomore computer and information science major at the University of Oregon. “In that period of time they [the hackers] have to basically create something tech oriented.”
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IDEO, an innovation and design firm, as well as Major League Hacking are the two major partners of the hackathon. Both will assist in the creative process by providing ideas for design as well as equipment to assist the hackers. Along with the partners, the creators of QuackCon are excited to announce one of the tentative judges for the event: decathlon world-record holder, 2012 Olympic gold medalist and 2016 Olympian, Ashton Eaton.
Eaton and others will be judging the tech oriented products which are within the realm of sports.
“There’s two themes with this hackathon,” said Kate Harmon, the Undergraduate Program Manager for the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Oregon. “The students will be prototyping around athletic enhancement as well as audience engagement.”
So how exactly are the hackers supposed to come up with ideas for these products? Well, who knows what needs to come from an athletic product better than an athlete?
“One of the unique values is that we’re going to have University of Oregon athletes from different sports and the participants will start off by interviewing them,” according to Harmon.
Once the participants have talked to the athlete they will then have a better idea of where to focus their attention and identify problems that are most easily fixable. Harmon put the importance of having real athletes providing input into better terms, “I think one of the values with this hackathon is that most hackathon’s will come in with ideas and people execute them. Sometimes those ideas lack relevancy.”