UFL Kickoff 2025: Sophomore Season Will Add Player POV Cameras, Ball-Tracking Technology

UFL Kickoff 2025: Sophomore Season Will Add Player POV Cameras, Ball-Tracking Technology Spring football league's new technology-centric division focuses on innovation By Mark J Burns, SVG Contributor

Friday, March 28, 2025 - 7:00 am

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The launch of the UFL's second season this weekend will mark the debut of player-worn body cameras and chipped smart balls as the spring-football enterprise keeps its foot on the pedal of innovation.

We see our league as an opportunity to be a proving ground for technology, says Scott Harniman, SVP, technology, UFL.

Ahead of the 2025 season, the UFL announced FAST, a new technology-centric division geared toward innovation. The league was methodical and thoughtful with the companies it elevated into the FAST program, Harniman says, all with this unified goal across every work stream in the UFL to improve the game of football.

The UFL, ESPN and FOX Sports, and Mindfly are working toward deploying up to four body cameras in player-worn vests each week. (Photos: UFL)

In 2025, the UFL - now co-owned by RedBird Capital Partners, actor Dwayne The Rock Johnson, and investor/businesswoman Dany Garcia - will debut a player-worn body camera via a partnership with Tel Aviv-based Mindfly.

Having tested the technology during the later stages of the 2024 season, the UFL will put the body-armor vests on up to four players each week this season. Both FOX Sports and ESPN, the league's media partners, will have a weekly Mindfly game, Harniman said (there are no plans to place the Mindfly cameras on referees in 2025).

I feel like it almost creates that VR-type experience just watching it through this lens, says Harniman.

The UFL's Football Operations Group, led by Pro Bowler and former FOX NFL analyst Daryl Johnston, played an instrumental role in helping Mindfly create a physical product tailored for the league's players, Harniman notes.

TArlington Renegades safety Joe Powell wears the Mindfly body-armor vest. The camera in it will capture not only the player's point-of-view on the field but audio as well.

Mindfly's engineering and designer teams added multiple straps under the shoulder pads to make the vest tighter and also ensured that the crown on the front of the jerseys was screwed on as tight as possible. In a key tinkering session with Mindfly personnel, he recalls, the UFL's team equipment managers and league staff got us to the best product.

I think this will be the most impactful thing that we introduce from a FAST standpoint in the 2025 season, he adds, noting that the feedback from players - who are literally forgetting that they're wearing the technology - has been very positive.

The UFL is also partnering with SkillCorner to provide player-tracking data through computer-vision technology for all games in 2025. During the postgame, the all-22 camera feed will be delivered to the SkillCorner team, whose computer vision will analyze that data and subsequently provide the UFL with comprehensive player-tracking data and contextual data feeds.

We want to be able to showcase that our athletes are doing the same things that you see on Saturday and Sunday when we're not playing: running 21 miles an hour or the longest plays of 70 yards, Harniman says. Those things happen in our league. Our players are unbelievable athletes. We want to showcase them.

This specific initiative didn't require a significant financial investment in either sensor-based technology or infrastructure that needed to be installed at the league's stadiums, he adds. He and the league office envision the presenting the data digitally at first, whether through statistics on the league's website, push notifications via the UFL app, or in graphics on social media. he says internal discussions about how to present the data to fans are ongoing.

In addition, the UFL is collaborating with Sportable on integrating its sensor-based technology into smart footballs. Although the London-based sports-technology company also offers player-tracking capabilities, in the 2025 season, the league office is focused specifically on starting with the chipped balls. According to Harniman, players won't be wearing sensors in-game. A subset of game balls will have chips.

Through the ball-tracking technology, the UFL will gather data on distance traveled, acceleration, and the physical location of the ball. Sportable will be part of the UFL's offseason showcases, which will allow the company to put sensors on quarterbacks and gather granular data about how they're throwing the ball, including velocity, spin rate, and accuracy.

We think there's a high ceiling with what Sportable is able to do, Harniman says. We wanted to do it in bite-size chunks and make sure we're being purposeful with the data that we pull. We know that quarterback is a very important position in any league but especially in our league, so it made sense to start with the quarterback data and be able to compare some of these athletes and quarterbacks that may show up in our showcases versus our actual athletes that played in our UFL season in 2025. That's the goal.

Brad Cheney, VP, field ops/engineering, FOX Sports, hopes the ball-tracking data will be ready to present during live broadcasts by the midpoint of the season. We're very excited about being able to have the full real-time data set.

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2025/03/28/ufl-2025-sophomore-season-will-...
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