The Pesci Sports Gameday App was built to help athletic departments take ownership of the live event experience. Rather than treating gameday as a collection of disconnected moments—tickets, concessions, promotions, and post-game analysis—the platform unified these touchpoints into a single, branded system owned by the university.
As Partner and CTO at Pesci Sports, I was responsible for technical direction and delivery across the platform. My role focused on shaping the system architecture, aligning product decisions with business goals, and coordinating execution across mobile, web, and data layers while working closely with athletic departments and external partners.
Business context
College athletic departments operate as revenue-driven organizations. Beyond fan engagement, they are accountable for ticket sales, sponsorship value, operational efficiency, and post-event performance analysis. Many existing solutions addressed individual needs in isolation, but few treated gameday as a connected system.
The opportunity was to create a platform that worked in real time, inside the venue, while also generating measurable value for marketing, sales, and operations teams. The result needed to serve fans without adding friction, while giving departments control over data, promotions, and monetization.
The platform
The Gameday App was designed as more than a mobile experience. It combined a fan-facing application, a web-based administrative dashboard, and a supporting data infrastructure that connected activity inside the stadium to business outcomes.
For fans, the app centralized access to tickets, live scoring, in-venue ordering, and interactive engagement. Features such as geofenced promotions and gamified interactions were only available while physically present, reinforcing the value of attending the event rather than consuming it remotely.
For athletic departments, the administrative dashboard provided tools to manage promotions, vendors, and sponsorship placements in real time. Engagement data tied fan behavior directly to ticket holders and in-venue activity, creating a feedback loop that informed future events, sponsorship strategy, and revenue optimization.
Role and execution
The work required close coordination across product, engineering, and external data partners. Rather than operating as a traditional top-down CTO role, my focus was on maintaining coherence across the system—ensuring mobile, web, and data layers evolved together and that stakeholder requirements translated into executable roadmaps.
I led architectural decisions, guided cross-functional delivery, and worked directly with athletic departments to balance ambition with operational reality. Quality assurance, deployment readiness, and scalability were treated as core product concerns, not downstream tasks.
Outcome
The result was a white-labeled gameday platform that transformed live events into owned digital ecosystems. Athletic departments gained a unified system for engagement, operations, and revenue, while fans experienced a more connected and intentional gameday experience.
The project reinforced a core principle of my work: complex platforms succeed when experience, systems, and business incentives are designed together rather than in isolation.