SPORTx Connect: ASU
The Arizona State University Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), collaborated with SPORTx at ASU to develop a student-athlete NIL outreach platform called SPORTx Connect. SPORTx Connect is a serverless, AI-powered web application that helps student-athletes leverage their Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) to pursue meaningful business and career opportunities.
The platform guides athletes through three distinct stages. First, athletes discover brands and locate verified contacts. Next, they draft outreach in their own voice, followed by rehearsing their pitch in a live voice interview. Program administrators also have an admin dashboard for program oversight.
This tool was originally conceived within the SPORTx offices at Mountain America Stadium, and the AWS CIC team helped bring the prototype to life as a functional platform, creating opportunities to further expand the program’s impact among student-athletes at ASU and beyond.
Built on AWS serverless services, SPORTx Connect uses Amazon Bedrock to provide its AI capabilities alongside containerized agents on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore for real-time search and voice interactions.
SPORTx at ASU is a sports innovation initiative at Arizona State University, anchored within the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute. Connecting athletics, academia, and industry, SPORTx advances student-athlete, student, and community entrepreneurship and innovation in sports. Through its SPORTx Venture Studio built with GoDaddy, the program provides entrepreneurial education, mentorship, digital tools, and access to funding opportunities that empower student-athletes to build personal brands, launch ventures, and prepare for life beyond sports. Through its partnership with GoDaddy, the Venture Studio serves more than 7,000 student-athletes across 500+ institutions nationwide.
Problem
Student-athletes looking for NIL, business, and career opportunities face a process that goes beyond identifying a brand or organization. They must locate verified contacts and prepare personalized outreach. After making contact, they need to communicate their ideas and values clearly during live meetings.
Managing these steps usually requires using multiple separate tools, demanding significant effort from athletes who already juggle busy athletic and academic schedules. General web search tools often return unverified contact information, while preparing for outreach and live meetings requires tailored preparation.
The project team focused on building a single platform that streamlines the process from discovery to pitch and interview practice. Designing the user experience was an important challenge. The platform needed to capture detailed athlete profile information for AI personalization without making onboarding feel like a lengthy task. The solution relied on familiar mental models and background automation to keep onboarding simple for busy athletes.
Student Spotlight
Full-Stack Developer, ASU AI CIC | Connect with Sean on LinkedIn
The most exciting part of working on SPORTx Connect was helping guide student-athletes through the NIL journey -- from discovering companies and contacts, to drafting outreach and rehearsing interviews. As a full-stack developer, I helped build the pipeline end-to-end, leveraging Bedrock AgentCore and external APIs for AI-assisted search, B2B database queries, and live avatar rendering. Throughout the process, I learned how central personal branding has become for student-athletes, which ultimately informed everything we built. I really appreciate the SPORTx team for the opportunity to create a platform with real impact. Excited to see where they take it from here!
UI/UX Designer, ASU AI CIC | Connect with Sandrah on LinkedIn
What I found most interesting was translating the original mockup into an actual working prototype that helps athletes look for NIL deals. I loved redesigning an internal AI coach tool to fit SPORTx's needs and turning it into something that helps athletes prepare for meetings and interviews. I owned UX end to end. That meant auditing the old mockup, mapping out the flows, and turning meeting conversations into real build prompts that became a working prototype. I was also responsible for making sure SPORTx's brand vision for the product came through in the design. I used agentic AI to convert mockups and meeting notes into information architecture and design decisions. A key takeaway was that bad UX usually isn't about bad screens; rather, it's about decisions that don't prioritize the actual user journey. A good example: figuring out how to capture the necessary details from a first-time athlete without losing them in a long onboarding process, while still setting things up so they'd come back. I also had to make sure onboarding leaned on mental models athletes already had, instead of making them learn a whole new system. Stakeholders continuously emphasized that athletes are busy, so we needed to capture thorough information up front and automate or streamline wherever we could, so it never felt like extra manual work on their end.
Venture Catalyst, SPORTx Connect Project Lead | Connect with BJ on LinkedIn
Representing SPORTx in this collaboration was a remarkable opportunity. Being able to play a role in bringing together programs that not only shared our goal but also upheld the values we have worked hard to preserve in our work with athletes, has been an honor, to say the least. My primary role was to communicate SPORTx's needs and vision, which meant representing, as accurately as possible, what would best serve our intended audience: collegiate athletes. This involved generating ideas, providing creative feedback, and coordinating communication among the athletes, the AWS Cloud Innovation Center team, fellow SPORTx team members, and other stakeholders. I am excited to continue building this platform as Head Developer as SPORTx prepares to bring the tool to market.
Approach
The ASU AI CIC team built SPORTx Connect on a fully serverless AWS architecture using AWS CDK (TypeScript) for infrastructure and Python for AWS Lambda functions. The core application operates through the following stages:
- Athletes complete onboarding through a conversational wizard that collects their sport, university, and goals, persisting profile data to an Amazon DynamoDB table.
- A containerized agent on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore queries the Perplexity API via an AgentCore Gateway to identify target organizations, while the Prospeo API locates and verifies direct contact emails and LinkedIn profiles.
- AWS Lambda calls Claude Haiku via Amazon Bedrock to generate tailored outreach messages for email and social channels, using a Bedrock Knowledge Base for template context and an Amazon Bedrock Guardrail for NIL compliance.
- Athletes practice their pitch in a live voice interview streaming over SigV4-signed WebSockets to Bedrock AgentCore using Amazon Nova Sonic, while Amazon Nova Lite analyzes the transcript post-session to generate feedback scores stored in Amazon S3.
- The application deploys through a shell script executing AWS CodeBuild to configure Amazon API Gateway endpoints, IAM roles, Secrets Manager secrets, and AWS Amplify hosting without requiring local toolchain installations.
Industry Impact and Problem Solving
SPORTx Connect brings company discovery, verified contact lookup, message generation, and voice rehearsal into a single web application. This reduces the need for student-athletes to manage multiple separate tools when pursuing NIL, business, and career opportunities. Because the application uses a serverless architecture, it scales automatically with usage and incurs near-zero cost when idle. Embedding Amazon Bedrock Guardrails into the workflow helps support NIL compliance efforts, filtering out prohibited topics like gambling, alcohol, adult content, or tobacco, while supporting staff in maintaining appropriate compliance oversight.
At SPORTx, we're focused on empowering student-athletes to think and act like entrepreneurs, building the skills, confidence, and connections to create opportunities beyond their playing careers. What started as a rough concept and early prototype was transformed through our collaboration with the ASU AI Cloud Innovation Center and AWS into a tangible, functional tool that student-athletes can begin putting into practice right away. This experience demonstrated the tremendous potential of emerging AI technologies to complement our existing education, mentorship, and resources, helping us deliver more personalized entrepreneurial support to student-athletes at scale.
- Jeff Kunowski
Founding Director, SPORTx at Arizona State University | Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn
Potential for Wider Application
Although initially developed to support student-athletes pursuing NIL and business opportunities, the rehearsal system can be adapted for broader educational, entrepreneurial, and career development applications. The interactive coaching model can help students prepare for job interviews, internship interviews, academic presentations, and professional meetings. The project documentation outlines deferred features for future development. These include a formal WCAG accessibility audit, additional language support starting with Spanish, an expanded administrative view for individual student lead details, and direct synchronization with external CRM systems like Salesforce or Airtable.
Supporting Artifacts
| Github Link: | Click Here |
Next Steps
SPORTx's next step is to move SPORTx Connect from prototype to real-world application deliberately. We plan to begin with a limited beta among the athletes we already serve, expand to a pilot with partner programs and their student-athletes, and then move toward a national rollout as we validate accuracy, usability, institutional compliance considerations, and the quality of the opportunities and connections the platform helps create.
Today, athletes are often limited to the brands they already know or the few that approach them. Our vision is to build toward a vetted, nationwide network of businesses that enables SPORTx Connect to surface trustworthy local and regional partners that fit each athlete's values, sport, and community, giving athletes everywhere access to opportunities that were previously out of reach.
The project has also broadened our thinking about AI. We started off just by wondering: how can we help collegiate athletes find brands that genuinely fit them? The experience revealed a much larger opportunity to use AI to reduce friction across the entire process of pursuing NIL, entrepreneurial, and career opportunities, from discovering partners to drafting outreach to rehearsing meaningful conversations that open doors.
We see SPORTx Connect as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, human guidance. It has the potential to become an impact amplification tool that makes expert guidance more accessible and lets athletes, coaches, and compliance staff focus their time where human relationships, judgment, and mentorship matter most.
As we work toward broader deployment, our commitment remains the same. SPORTx is values-first and athlete-first, and every feature, partnership, and data source we add will be measured against one question: does it serve the athlete? As we learn from real athletes using the platform, those lessons will guide how SPORTx continues to thoughtfully integrate AI to broaden our impact across the nation.
About the ASU CIC
The ASU Artificial Intelligence Cloud Innovation Center (AI CIC), powered by AWS, is a no-cost design thinking and rapid prototyping shop dedicated to bridging the digital divide and driving innovation in the nonprofit, healthcare, education, and government sectors.
Our expert team harnesses Amazon’s pioneering approach to dive deep into high-priority pain points, meticulously define challenges, and craft strategic solutions. We collaborate with AWS solutions architects and talented student workers to develop tailored prototypes showcasing how advanced technology can tackle operational and mission-related challenges.
Discover how we use technology to drive innovation by visiting ASU AI CIC or contacting [email protected].
About SPORTx at ASU
SPORTx at Arizona State University is the university's sports innovation engine, anchored within the J. Orin Edson Entrepreneurship + Innovation Institute. By connecting athletics, academia, and industry, SPORTx empowers student-athletes as entrepreneurs and accelerates the development of sports-related ventures.
Through its SPORTx Venture Studio built with GoDaddy, the program provides entrepreneurial education, mentorship, digital tools, and pathways to funding that help athletes build personal brands, launch businesses, and develop skills for life beyond sports. The program also connects emerging sports ventures with ASU expertise, real-world testing environments, and strategic industry partners to advance innovation and create new opportunities across the sports ecosystem.
Learn more about SPORTx and its initiatives by visiting sportx.asu.edu or contact [email protected].