First place at the AWS World Sports Innovation Cup 2026. The final was on June 16 at the DFB campus in Frankfurt, the German Football Association’s headquarters, and I was on stage pitching with the team.
The cup is a global student hackathon run by AWS with adidas, the German Football League and Slalom. Teams of up to three, seven challenges across three difficulty levels. A teammate invited me, and we took the top level: “Connected Arena”, a real-time multiplayer fan experience with gamification, agentic AI on AWS and a full architecture write-up.
What we did differently from earlier hackathons: we didn’t start coding right away. After the kick-off at the end of March we set up a design thinking roadmap in seven phases. First, take the challenge and the judging criteria apart: technical innovation, implementation and market impact, roughly a third each. Then deep dives into adidas, into the league’s data, more than 140 million data points per match including skeletal tracking, and into the AWS services we could use on a 50-dollar budget. Plus more than 100 fan pain points, a competitor analysis, seven personas plus one, and an interview guide.
Only then did we build. The code lives in my teammate’s repo. We submitted at the end of May, after the deadline was extended.
Then Frankfurt. Final on site, pitch in front of the jury, first place. After the Bundesliga Hackathon in 2025, that’s the second football hackathon I’ve walked out of with the winning team. A pattern I can live with.
What I’m keeping: collect the problems first, then build. This time that’s exactly what worked.