Equipe

A FULL CALENDAR

This week, a new wave of mixed-use stadium districts is taking shape across college sports, with programs pouring hundreds of millions into restaurants, retail, and event space outside their stadiums. The construction is the easy part. Filling those districts the other 200 days a year is the real challenge, and it comes down to data, not concrete.

We're also gearing up for NACDA in Las Vegas next month and would love to grab a coffee with you while there. Also, check out the Monitoring Dashboard highlight and see how easy it is to monitor your data feeds with Equipe.

- Aaron

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📅 THE 200 OTHER DAYS A YEAR

THE DISTRICT IS BUILT. NOW WHAT?

A new wave of mixed-use stadium districts is taking shape across college sports. Wake Forest is putting $250 million into The Grounds. Iowa State expects CyTown to deliver $184 million over 30 years. Tennessee, Oklahoma, USF, Kansas, and roughly twenty other programs are in some stage of planning, approving, or pouring concrete on districts of their own.

The pitch is clear. Take an underused parcel of land, turn it into restaurants, retail, housing, and event space, and capture revenue from the people who already love the program, plus everyone else who happens to live nearby. In a revenue-sharing era where every dollar matters, a few million in passive income can buy a quarterback or buy out a coach.

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THE REAL NUMBER IS 200

Hidden in the Athletic's reporting is the line that should be guiding every district strategy. RVX Principal Sean Decker, speaking about the Neyland Entertainment District, framed Tennessee's challenge this way, "there's 200 other days a year we'll program consistently on our side to drive folks there."

Football fills six or seven Saturdays. The district has to fill the rest.

Iowa State is already living that reality. After hiring a company to schedule events for CyTown's amphitheater, those conversations turned into stadium concerts. Luke Combs played Jack Trice last month. Post Malone and Jelly Roll are coming in July. The Cyclones went from zero stadium concerts to two or three a year, with each show netting roughly $1 million.

At Florida State, College Town's busiest month is April, not November. Graduating seniors, baseball and softball crowds, and campus tour traffic drive more business to Madison Social than football weekends do.

The lesson from the programs furthest along is consistent. Mixed-use districts pay off when they stop relying on football to fill them.

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OUR POV: A DISTRICT IS ONLY AS GOOD AS ITS ACTIVATION

Building the district is the easy part. Filling it 200 days a year is the hard part, and it is fundamentally a data and activation problem, not a real estate one.

A Friday night block party, a watch party for an away game, a comedy show on a Tuesday in March, a concert in July, a youth tournament weekend, none of these will fill themselves. Each one needs a specific audience, reached through the right channel, at the right moment, with the right offer. And each one is competing for attention against every other entertainment option in the market.

Imagine a development officer who can pull every donor within thirty miles who attended a basketball game last season and send them a pre-sale link to the Tuesday comedy show. Imagine a marketer who can identify every fan who bought merchandise in the last ninety days but has not been to a game this season, and invite them to the Friday block party. Imagine a ticket rep who can see, in real time, which season ticket holders also dined in the district last month, and build a loyalty offer around that overlap.

Most programs cannot do any of this today. Ticketing data lives in one system. Donor data lives in another. Merchandise, parking, F&B, and venue entry each sit in their own corners. The fan who bought a jersey on Saturday and ate at the district restaurant on Sunday shows up as three different people across three different platforms.

That is the gap between a district that breaks even and one that becomes, in Decker's words, "the center of gravity in a market."

The programs that win the next decade of mixed-use development will be the ones that treat their data foundation as seriously as their construction budget. The concrete is the easy part. The fan record underneath it is what turns 200 other days into 200 other revenue opportunities.

💡 PRODUCT HIGHLIGHT

THE AUDIENCE BEHIND THE AUDIENCE

In most athletic departments, the most valuable fan segment is the one you can almost describe but cannot quite build. The high-propensity ticket buyer who has not been in the building this season. The major-gift prospect who has gone quiet. The fan who showed up to two events this month but never opened your last campaign. The questions are easy to ask out loud and almost impossible to answer in a system designed for simple lists.

Equipe Segments now supports inclusion and exclusion filter groups, each with configurable AND/OR logic, so the audience your team has been talking about can finally be the audience your team builds. Chain together the records you want in, layer on the groups you want out, and let your filters match the complexity of the actual question.

Inclusion and exclusion filter groups: Stack multiple groups of filters for who belongs in your segment and who needs to be carved out, all in one living audience.
Configurable AND/OR modes: Set the logic independently for inclusion and exclusion, so scenarios that used to require a workaround can be built directly in Equipe.
Refreshed Segments experience: The whole workflow has been redesigned end-to-end for a cleaner, more intuitive build.

Now when you have those questions, you can get them answered in Equipe.

🏢 FROM EQUIPE HQ

WE'RE GOING TO NACDA

Equipe is heading to NACDA, June 7–10 at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

Nick Benson, Sajan Gutta, Aaron Glidden, and Cameron Korb will be on the ground in Las Vegas and would love to connect with anyone who's thinking about what better data infrastructure could mean for their program.

Space is filling up quick. Please reach out soon if you're interested in a free 30-minute data conversation over some coffee while at NACDA. Book directly with us here.

🗞️ WHAT ELSE WE'RE READING

FANS, FLOCKYARDS, FRAME RATES

The footprint of fandom keeps expanding beyond the field. The Ravens are adding a permanent premium structure outside M&T Bank Stadium for game days and concerts alike, the NBA is treating video games as the front door to 99% of its fanbase that will never step foot in an arena, and AI scheduling is quietly reshaping how leagues balance broadcast, travel, and competitive demands.

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📅 Six Saturdays vs. 200 Other Days a Year