HIGH FIBER IN SPORTS REHAB

Googling the words “Are we too connected?,” sans quotation marks, results in 820 million results in less than one second, the majority from the “Living” sections of daily newspapers or philosophical “think” pieces in tech outlets like Wired or The Verge—by and large, they’re gloomy ruminations on the existential dangers of hyperconnectivity. But that’s not what 21 st century AV integrators worry about. For them, connectivity in a networked environment isn’t the problem—their challenge is to figure out how best to allow the end users to manage it all.

That’s what AV integrator Progressive Electronics, Inc. (Raytown MO), faced at Pinnacle National Development Center. When it opened earlier this year, the 80,000-square-foot, $75 million complex became the training and technology hub for Sporting Kansas City (Sporting KC), Kansas City MO’s Major League Soccer team. Following six years on the drawing board with architect Populous and design consultants Henderson Engineers, along with a year’s worth of bulldozers and masons from general contractor Grand Construction, the facility comprises five full-size soccer fields, known as the Pavilion, as well as the nearby Wyandotte Youth Soccer Complex.

The Pinnacle building itself, owned by the same group that owns Sporting KC and its stadium, is a warren of flexible rooms that can be used for players’ or coaches’ training applications. They boast largescale, 70- and 80-inch NewLine touch-sensitive displays that any sports department—or its associated college or high school, for that matter—would envy. Those same rooms can also be used for videoconferencing, with installed Shure ceiling microphone arrays and Panasonic PTZ cameras. In fact, Pinnacle was built, in part, with the expectation that US Soccer, the official governing body of the sport of soccer in the United States, would regularly use its facilities—among them, two locker rooms, three classrooms with flexible walls for courses and seminars, six breakout rooms, as well a cafeteria and two fields dubbed “the pitch lab”—as the site of year-round training for US Soccer coaches and referees.

The reception area, with one of three videowalls in the facility.

Rick Dressel, General Manager of Pinnacle, said that each of the building’s three main tenants— Sporting KC, US Soccer and Children’s Mercy Hospital, which operates a sports medicine center at the facility and which has naming rights to Sporting KC’s stadium—wanted to keep their training, administrative and rehabilitative activities at the cutting edge of technology.

“All three organizations wanted this to be state of the art in order to give them the same level of functionality, such as with video throughout and between both Pinnacle and Children’s Mercy Park [Sporting KC’s home stadium], at the highest technical level,” Dressel explained. He added that Sporting KC’s ownership group had already established dedicated network links between its downtown office and Children’s Mercy Park—a connection that was also extended to include Pinnacle.

Pinnacle National Development Center, the 80,000-square-foot, $75 million complex that is now the training and technology hub for Sporting KC, a Major League Soccer team.

“The connectivity between [the venues] was part of the plan from the very beginning, and it’s worked out fabulously,” Dressel affirmed. In fact, he continued, as part of Pinnacle’s business plan, US Soccer agreed to move its National Development Center (NDC, formerly the National Training and Coaching Development Center) from its offices in Chicago IL to Pinnacle, providing the US Soccer Coaching Department with its first-ever permanent home.

The arrival of Pinnacle has truly transformed soccer coaching. Previously, coaching education courses were held in various parts of the country, and they’d begin with classroom instruction in local hotel meeting rooms. Coaches would then have to travel to playing fields for training sessions, travel back to the hotel to eat and then return to the fields for afternoon sessions. By contrast, coaches now arrive at the NDC from a hotel less than a mile away, and they comfortably spend the entire day there. Practice fields, a cafeteria, classrooms, breakout rooms and locker rooms are all in the same venue.

One of the three classrooms with flexible walls. Pinnacle uses courses and seminars for player and coach training.

Networking Pinnacle with Children’s Mercy Park, located in Kansas City KS, was critical to making the overall project work for its broad range of users.

Integrating Networks

Nathan York, Director of Audiovisual Systems at Progressive Electronics and the senior project manager on behalf of the company for the Pinnacle project, said the integrator was brought into the design process several years ago. The company then found that, nonetheless, it had to bid on the job publicly—and its proposal ultimately won. That process, as inscrutable as it seemed at the time, actually offered Progressive Electronics significant insight into what Pinnacle would need to be to its various stakeholders. It also helped get the AV integrator up to speed quickly. As York recalled, “We got the contract secured in late September 2017 and we were on site October 1. We had to get to work immediately, because it got big from there on.”

A controller in a training room cubby, with inputs for laptops and other external media sources.

What grew the most was the Crestron DigitalMedia (DM) matrix, which ultimately topped out at 128x128—necessary to allow AV-over-IP (AVoIP) signals from either Pinnacle or Children’s Mercy Park to be called up through the fiber networks laid down between the two facilities by the electrical contractor. Through the various networks— a dedicated AV network, Sporting KC’s own network and US Soccer’s virtual local area network (VLAN)—users can call up video footage from, for instance, US Soccer’s FTP site and have it appear on any of the three dozen Sony 43- to 85-inch displays installed throughout Pinnacle and its adjacent practice fields. Alternatively, the video footage can be displayed on the 17 NewLine 70- and 80-inch touchscreens installed in the three main training rooms. (Those have an integrated computer that permits users to access remote files directly through icons on the screens themselves.)

Inside both Pinnacle and the stadium, video and audio are handled using the HDBaseT connectivity standard, with Cisco switches used as the on- and off-ramps between the AVoIP and HDBaseT protocols. For instance, when moving AV between training rooms within Pinnacle, the data remains within HDBaseT; by contrast, when it travels between venues, it does so over the fiber network.

York said that the decision to use HDBaseT within the venues, which is managed by the Crestron control system, and to use AVoIP between venues, stemmed from resolving the desire to use the best solution for connecting between distant points—the stadium is a little more than a mile away—and wanting to use a technology platform familiar to Sporting KC’s and Pinnacle’s own AV and IT staffs. “No one knew where [the technology] might be six months or a year from now,” York explained. “They wanted systems they felt comfortable with, but that would be infinitely expandable—and at a reasonable cost.” That said, he continued, “Every system was [closely] reviewed to ensure the desired functionality during the time Progressive Electronics was involved with the project.”

Remote control for the PTZ cameras covering “the pitch lab,” whose output is sent over the fiber network to Pinnacle’s data servers and then back to a display in one of the Pavilion’s meeting rooms, where the players and coaches can replay and annotate the plays.

As complex as the types of networks involved might seem—three separate local area networks (LANs) and the HDBaseT distributed system—they were rather straightforward as compared with how end users throughout the two venues would be able to access the systems. “Everything is connected to everything else, through a 128x128 matrix, and while that’s what everyone said they wanted, it also creates a management problem,” York observed. “You don’t want an infinite amount of video trying to populate on someone’s iPad. We had to figure out how to limit access locally, as well as how to coordinate with the IT teams to let [hundreds] of devices talk to each other.”

It was a question—and an irony—that goes to the heart of connectivity. The conundrum was solved by programming endpoints on the systems. Indeed, according to York, staying on top of that was key to coordinating with the client’s users and IT technicians. “Their tech sources became our new best friends,” he remarked. “We ran every decision past them, keeping them constantly involved.” It also underscored another concern: namely, training. “We didn’t want to have to train a hundred people on the systems,” York declared. “We wanted to train two people and let them train their end users.”

Although the networked connections are the main story here, there are still plenty of “conventional” AV components to be found. The main training rooms, which have a total of six of the NewLine touchscreens, can be subdivided into quadrants, with two displays in two of the subdivisions and one in each of the others. Typically, content can be brought to them via an HDMI wallplate

Two of the six pendant speakers hung in the Pinnacle locker room, which keep audio close and intelligible in the highly reflective room.

output that connects to the 128x128 matrix of the HDBaseT system, which can further be used to access the larger video network, as well. Alternately, users can plug in their own laptops, use thumb drives, tune into the IPTV from the Pavilion’s field cameras or connect to any of the other training rooms to join activities in those. There are also NewLine touchscreens loaded onto four mobile carts, which enable them to be taken into non-traditional training areas, such as the Great Hall—Pinnacle’s spacious entrance area—where the staff held their first event (a Christmas party). “We were trying to achieve a high level of modularity here, with the mobile carts and the ability to segment the training rooms,” York said.

Audio is conventional and basic, but effective nonetheless. QSC ceiling speakers in the training rooms dot those spaces’ dropped-tile coverings, and they’re managed by a Q-SYS processor. Meanwhile, two Shure ceiling arrays pick up sound in two of the training rooms; they’re connected to Pinnacle’s building network and into the main network via a Dante card in the DM chassis.

There are also three videowalls in the new facility: one each in the Children’s Mercy gym, the Great Hall and in front of the stage in Pinnacle’s interview room. Content is accessible from the same sources that the training rooms use. (The videowalls were purchased directly by the client, and they were installed and integrated by Progressive Electronics.)

Two of the six pendant speakers hung in the Pinnacle locker room, which keep audio close and intelligible in the highly reflective room.

Efficient Networking

The time frame for planning the connectivity between Pinnacle and Children’s Mercy Park traversed what could be considered a generation or two in a typical networkproduct lifespan. That’s a fact of which Dan Keller, Lead Audio-Video Designer for Henderson Engineers, the project’s design and consulting engineering firm, is always keenly aware. “That’s something you have to watch out for in any networked project,” he said, noting that products such as the interactive NewLine displays might not have been available early on in the process, and that they were added to Pinnacle’s specifications during the course of development.

The design team also looked carefully for efficiencies between the new Pinnacle facility and the preexisting stadium, Keller confirmed. For instance, pointing out that the stadium already had a Cisco Stadium- Vision cable TV headend installed, the team designed for its output to be sent across to Pinnacle over the fiber network that was being installed between them. “We looked to leverage as much existing infrastructure as we could, and we found we could share the IPTV at the stadium with Pinnacle, which was a significant cost savings,” he added.

Networking plays an integral and important role in the team practices, as well. On the pitch lab—the two practice fields (one with artificial turf, the other with natural grass) that straddle the Pavilion—scrimmages are recorded by a Panasonic PTZ camera whose output is sent over the fiber network to Pinnacle’s data servers, and then sent back to a NewLine display in one of the Pavilion’s meeting rooms; there, the players and coaches can replay and annotate the plays. Keller noted that the cameras are part of an 8K Solutions system field package.

“We recommended [that package] to Sporting KC after experiencing success with 8K Solutions first at the Walter Athletics Center, Northwestern University’s new multi-sport performance complex outside of Chicago, and also at the Twin Cities Orthopedics Performance Center, the state-of-the-art training facility home to the Minnesota Vikings,” Keller explained.

Thom Morrow, Progressive Electronics’ Director of Technology, supervised the networking aspect of the Pinnacle project and oversaw its programming. That’s something that, he said, consumed the better part of three months on site, although the process was helped by Sporting KC’s expansive existing VLAN and its installed base of Cisco switches, for which he credits the team’s IT infrastructure guru, Derek Ferguson. The time invested paid off both operationally and in terms of costs, Morrow affirmed.

“We were able to integrate the new extended network with the existing Cisco StadiumVision headend at the stadium,” he said, echoing Keller earlier, “[and] we didn’t need to add hardware control behind each display in Pinnacle. Instead, the displays can be tuned using the Crestron system and internal modulation.” However, Morrow added, that was a significant undertaking because of the lack of documentation available to guide the programmers—a situation analogous to the notorious reams of hidden programming in Apple operating systems. “It’s in there; you can do it,” he said. “But you have to figure out where to look, or whom to ask about it.”

If there’s a takeaway from this large networked project, it’s that connectivity can create its own kind of “tyranny of choice”: too many options available through systems programming that, in an earlier era, might have been corralled by either the bulkiness of hardware solutions or their cost. What AV integrators are finding, York said, is that there are many more ways to create functionality when everything is on a shared network. “The trick,” he concluded, “is to find out what works best for each client.”

By Dan Daley