Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with Jerred Mace, Founder & CEO, OnceCourt

🎙️ Podcasts By Dr. Kirk Adams: Interview with Jerred Mace, Founder & CEO, OnceCourt
https://drkirkadams.com/podcasts-by-dr-kirk-adams-01-21-2025/

In this inspiring episode of Podcasts by Dr. Kirk Adams, Dr. Adams talks with Jerred Mace of OneCourt about how haptic technology can make live sports dramatically more accessible for blind and low-vision fans. Adams shares his own "hands-on" encounters with the OneCourt device, feeling the raised layout of a basketball court and the vibrations of a synced, fast-moving play, and later experiencing baseball through touch by sensing pitch location, ball flight, and baserunners in real time alongside the radio broadcast.

Jerred traces OneCourt's origin to his University of Washington days, inspired by a video of a blind fan following a soccer match through touch and shaped by his personal experience growing up in a family where disability was "the norm." He describes early prototyping, building a multidisciplinary team, and the company's momentum jump after receiving a Microsoft AI for Accessibility grant in June 2023. The conversation also looks ahead: OneCourt is expanding team and league partnerships while designing a direct-to-consumer version, built to be more affordable and paired with sport "packages" like a streaming model, and invites listeners to join the newsletter and waitlist via OneCourt's website (onecourt dot io).

TRANSCRIPT:

Podcast Commentator: Welcome to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams, where we bring you powerful conversations with leading voices in disability rights, employment and inclusion. Our guests share their expertise, experiences and strategies to inspire action and create a more inclusive world. If you're passionate about social justice or want to make a difference, you're in the right place. Let's dive in with your host, Doctor Kirk Adams.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Welcome, everybody, to another episode of podcast by Doctor Kirk Adams. I am that Doctor Kirk Adams talking to you from my home office in Seattle, Washington, which is sunny Seattle this afternoon. And I have a guest with me today who is also from the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Jerred Mace, one of the principals of the fabulous company. OneCourt and say. Say hey, Jerred.

Jerred Mace: Hey, everybody. Super excited to be here.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Great. So I would like to to give a little bit of my history with one court. I first encountered one court over on the Microsoft Redmond campus in the reactor building at a gathering called Seattle Disability Connect. And there are about 120, 140 people there interested in disability inclusion, assistive technology accessibility. And there were a couple of startups demonstrating their products. And Jerred was there with the one court team, and I had no idea what it was. And I put my hands on a flat surface, probably about the size of an iPad with kind of a rubbery surface. And I was exploring it. And on it were the was the raised outlines of a basketball court, and I was born when my parents were in college at Western Washington University, and my dad was a basketball player there. He held the the single game rebound record for many years at 29. And he became a high school basketball coach. And I spent many, many hours in the gym and went to many hundreds of high school basketball games. And as I got older and went to work and had some disposable income, I always had a season ticket package to see the Seattle SuperSonics. So I've spent a lot of time around basketball, so I was pretty excited to see the outlines of a basketball court through my hands.

Dr. Kirk Adams: My palms flat. And then what happened was there was a play synchronized with a radio broadcast. Kevin Durant of the Phoenix Suns getting a rebound, the ball moving down the court rapidly side to side passing and Kevin Durant scoring, and I could feel that happening with vibrations under my hands. So I was very excited and have kept in touch with with Jerred as one court has progressed in the spring of 2024, I went out to the University of Washington, home of the Huskies, and sat with one court and team and some other blind people from the community and put my hands on the one court tablet again. And this time it was a baseball diamond, and there was a grid of small squares in a rectangle shape and that line of the baseball diamond and turned the radio on. It was the Seattle Mariners against the Tampa Rays playing in Tampa. And when the first pitch was thrown, I could feel where the pitch entered the strike zone. It was low and away. I could tell that. And the next one was high. And inside I can tell that.

Dr. Kirk Adams: And then the ball was struck and I could follow the path of the ball out into the outfield where it was caught. And then later on, when there are runners on base, there was vibrating indicators at the base to show me where the base runners were. So I didn't have to memorize that and keep that in my mind like I usually did when I listen to a game. So I'm a big fan, big fan of one caught and privileged to be involved with the company. And pleased to have Jerred here today and just would really love Jerred to hear the origin story. How how did you get started? You're you're you're young folks strong affiliation with the University of Washington. Making the world of sports more accessible for us who are blind and low vision. And like I said, like I like I said before we started recording, I'd love to hear where you've been, where you are now, where you're planning to go. What's working well, for you any challenges you you may be having and how can people get involved? And I'll I'll I'll hand you the talking stick, and I'll reserve the right as the host to pop in with a question now and then.

Jerred Mace: Yes. Please do. Well, thank you, Doctor Kirk, for that introduction to our work and of course, your close relationship with us. It's pretty special to see, man, how long you've been involved and how much has happened since then. So yeah, thank you for for going through that. I was I was amazed to hear you remembered some of those those match ups in particular. So that's awesome. I also didn't know that story about your dad. That's very cool. At Western. So you're happy to give a little bit of a background on one court and who I am and what our company is set out to do. Basically it was 2021 when we got started. And of course, that was, you know, well into the Covid years. And I was a junior at the University of Washington. So I was studying industrial design there. And I came across this video of a blind person at a soccer match, and they were sitting in the stands with a woman who was watching the game, and at the same time moving his hands across a game board to represent the action. And that really stood out to me, you know, as a designer who was interested in user experience and fan experience, but also as someone who grew up in a household where disability was very much the norm, you know? So both of my parents have disabilities, and my vision experience has changed quite a bit over time. You know, when I was a kid, for example, with surgeries and other things, like I had to find a way to adapt to sports and of course everything else is, as I think many listeners will appreciate, like adaptation is kind of the name of the game and you know, that translated to the world of sports for me.

Jerred Mace: So it was gravitating towards sports like wrestling where touch was primary or, you know, sitting really close to the TV to kind of pick out player positions and details like that. So I think I've always had an understanding of of what it meant to experience the world a little bit differently than some of my peers. And I think this light bulb moment of, wow, here is someone truly experiencing and accessing the game in a new way that that I had not thought about. And I just started considering, like, how can we bring that experience to everybody? You know, because it's one thing to rely on a friend or family member to describe the game or to, in this case, manually, you know, move their hands across a board. It's another to experience the game independently and to form your own Own interpretations. And, and I think there's a lot of power that comes with that and a lot of joy as well. So it's been an amazing journey so far. But but our original hypothesis was simply, how can we create sports that are accessible through touch? And it's where we got started. So yeah. Any anything come to mind off of that?

Dr. Kirk Adams: Well, yeah. So you had the concept of making sports more accessible through through touch. But then what what happens. Do you design a prototype? Do you make it a school project? How does it go from a thought to a thing?

Jerred Mace: Yeah, it's a great question. We started, I should say I started I worked for about six months by myself, and that was kind of a mistake. But I was researching. I was learning about this looking at other work that had been done. There were some, like, really interesting off hand projects and also work that was similarly situated that I thought could inform this concept. But I it was about six months into it that I presented it publicly at school for the first time. It was at the UW Science and Technology Showcase. And I remember going into that event, it was it was kind of a research poster style event where, you know, you you put together a poster and present it to a group and different people, you know, ask you questions and whatnot. And I didn't expect much of it, but I was really excited to be there and just kind of share this with the world. And to my surprise, it went really well. People were really excited.

Dr. Kirk Adams: And so this was a concept. You hadn't built anything?

Jerred Mace: Yeah. No, I had done some like basically rough sort of behind the curtain prototyping of, you know, taking existing vibration motors, for example, and just trying to understand, like vibration a little bit more deeply than I had at that time. So they're very minor exploration.

Dr. Kirk Adams: And do you use the term haptics?

Jerred Mace: Yeah we do.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.

Jerred Mace: Yeah. Haptics is probably the main term we use. But you know, vibration can sometimes get across more easily. But we definitely mix it up. But it was at that, it was at that event that I, I sort of recognized that this concept was likely to have value outside of just my brain. And it was amazing to see my peers and my mentors kind of come around it. And we I actually ended up we got a grand prize at that event, which was unbelievable. So that not only gave me the encouragement and the confidence to pursue it, but also a little bit of funding, right, to to go out and start prototyping and things like that. But the I remember I mean, the immediate afterthought after that, I closed that event was, okay, it's time to form a team because I think six months in, I had just hit a wall and realized my limitations as a designer, right? Like, I'm I'm not going to do everything that's required to accomplish this mission. And that's a good thing, right? Like, you don't want you're too slow otherwise, right. So you need a team of people who bring our diverse perspectives and, and technical experiences to, to really solve a big problem like this. So that's what we did. We we found a team at UW, mostly students in and around the entrepreneurship program, but really across the university. So and that team is still together today. You know, we've got we're a team of nine now, but, gosh, what is it? It's it's six. Six of that nine have been there really from the beginning. And we've got such a strong team of, of co-founders as well. So Yeah. Brought on another through Nick Durand and Andrew Buckingham, all of which represent different areas of our business. So, you know, hardware, software, business development, really foundational areas. So that's where we really got cooking.

Dr. Kirk Adams: And then you have the team together. You're still all in school.

Jerred Mace: Yeah. This was so this would be 2022 by that point. And we were in the beginning. It was kind of large round table meetings. You know we'd we all had outside obligations. But we were interested in this and we'd meet every week to discuss it. And we were planning, you know, some of our initial goals were just to like, let's explore this, let's participate in some of those student competitions. So we did a lot of those early on. And yeah, let's explore the concept further and and see if there really is anything there. And on on the product side, what that looked like was exploring the idea of vibration as a means to communicate motion because, you know, it's it's kind of an abstract idea. And we didn't know if vibration or haptics was going to be that the solution that we we needed. We just knew it was one potential avenue, and we had identified maybe two. There were two major approaches, but haptics was kind of the leading hypothesis. And the initial testing was really, can we, can we animate this in a way that's intuitive and, you know, really that's it.

Jerred Mace: Can you can you understand what it means for a vibration to move and how do you actually execute that? So yeah, our earliest prototype was it was sort of a tennis concept of experiencing motion back and forth. And it wasn't two dimensional at all. It was very basic. I mean, it was built over a weekend and mounted to a piece of plywood. Okay. So it was like it was a very, very rough proof of concept, but I think each prototype along the way we just answered or asked another question. And I think we pretty quickly realized, okay, we're on to something here. You know, haptics can be used to experience sports through touch, and I think that gave us a lot of confidence in the technical approach. And of course, working closely with users in our community getting out there, doing customer discovery with sports teams and broadcasters and just understanding sports as a landscape to was was a big initial hurdle. And we can definitely dive more into, you know, the data and understanding how that came into the fold because it's a it's a big part of what we do.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. So I guess my next question is at what point did it go from a, a roundtable discussion and the simple tactile pong game on a piece of plywood to a company.

Jerred Mace: Yeah. I think, you know, that transition happened pretty closely timed with our transition out of university. Okay. I think, you know, there was a lot of anxiety, I think personally and across the team of like, okay, what's next? You know, like are we there's clearly something here. You know, we had had some competition wins under our belt. We we participated and won an award at the Dempsey Startup Competition and the Holloman Health Challenge and the the Social Venture competition. So we had some some funding, a little bit of funding at this point, but.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah, some social proofing.

Jerred Mace: Yeah, exactly. And the product was getting there as a proof of concept, but it was really as we were graduating, there was definitely a moment of like, is this a viable next step for our early careers? And I think those those doubts were squashed really quickly and perfectly timed. In June of 2023. So as we were graduating in that month, it was the same month that we were awarded a grant from Microsoft. So we participated in the AI for accessibility grant program.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Oh yeah.

Jerred Mace: Yeah. And that.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Thank you Microsoft.

Jerred Mace: Yeah.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Funded some really great projects. I know of a couple.

Jerred Mace: Yeah. They're incredible. The team over there. Jenny you wanna I mean, they're an amazing group of people that have really, you know, uplifted our work. And I mean, without that grant, I would I do question, like, would one corp be in the same position, like it would have been a much different road, I think, if we hadn't had that support early on. So that enabled us to transition to full time. So we took it on right after graduating. And that's really, you know, we started to obviously accelerate our progress from there. Given that that was what we were focused on just about every single day.

Dr. Kirk Adams: And that's probably I guess that's probably about the time I encountered you over at the Microsoft campus or some some somewhere in that time frame, fairly fairly new in your journey as a company. And then really interested in the input. You mentioned getting input from sports franchises and sportscasters and you know, I know as I've subscribed to your newsletters, you certainly have involved the blind and visually impaired people in the journey. So would would love to hear about how you engage the various stakeholder groups.

Jerred Mace: Yeah. I mean, let's talk about the data first. I mentioned that earlier, like one of the really big bets that we took as a company early on. And full credit to my co-founder, COO Bellini, he made this, he made he had this insight. And really it was a question of how are how are we going to power this experience. You know, like you could imagine someone drawing on an iPad and having that be the input. But or and we also imagined, well, we could build data infrastructure ourselves, right. We could try to set up cameras and try to pull out the, the ball location of the player location from that computer vision. But I think we realized pretty quickly that, wow, the the teams and leagues are already investing in data infrastructure. And maybe we can divert a technical risk into a business opportunity. So it was more so about working and partnering with the leagues to access their data, which by no means was easy to do, but it has proven that that was the definitely the right decision one, because of course they're the rights holder. So they actually have the right to they own it. They distribute it. But also because those relationships have.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So how do you go about that? I know for instance, I know saw a wonderful write up of blind individuals enjoying a Portland Trailblazers game with one court. So how do you go about that ring? Ring? Portland trailblazers, it's Jerred. I've got this idea to. Yeah, to make your games accessible for blind people. And you know, how how do you approach that?

Jerred Mace: Yeah, I know our sales team led by enthused like they they did a lot of cold outreach, you know, LinkedIn and and going to events. And I think just building a presence and meeting people and you know really just basic customer discovery and building relationships. And I think we we in the beginning, we tried to make it as easy as possible for a team to give us a chance, you know, like you know, so we were pursuing a pilot, right? In which case.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.

Jerred Mace: If it's unsuccessful, we never have to talk about it again. You know, put this in the in the history books and you never have to look at it and you never have to announce it, etc.. So I think by, by de-risking that it gave the teams because of course sports properties are risk averse as any business should be. Right. Like you, when you have a strong reputation, you don't want to put that on the line by working with some. Yeah. Unproven technologies and startup. So I think that was certainly an understandable position. And I think we were able to get ourselves in the room and prove that, yeah, this was a little bit more than just a hypothesis. Like there was something here. And we demonstrated that value in a pilot and converted that into, you know, full season deals. And that's where we're kind of getting today on the B2B side has been tremendous growth and adoption and seeing sports teams across different leagues. So we've had, you know, interest from many, many different leagues, but were presently supporting four different sports football, basketball, baseball, soccer across different leagues. So most present within the NBA we've got ten teams this year okay. So that's up from.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So so so rattle them off. So I know the trailblazers and and Major League Baseball the Diamondbacks. So who are who are the franchises.

Jerred Mace: Yeah I'll do my best. Yeah okay.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So if you miss any we'll forgive you. It's probably on the website.

Jerred Mace: Please forgive me. So okay Portland Trail Blazers Sacramento Kings, LA Clippers, Phoenix Suns, Denver Nuggets, Atlanta Hawks, Orlando Magic Brooklyn Nets Oh boy. Let's see Milwaukee Bucks and then the last one I actually cannot announce yet okay. But that one's.

Dr. Kirk Adams: We'll have you we'll have you back.

Jerred Mace: Yes. So that one.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So so if anyone if anyone's blind and visually impaired listening. And you live in those cities. You can go and enjoy one court.

Jerred Mace: Yeah. And it's free for fans that are attending. So you've got a ticket to the game. You simply go to guest services and ask, hey, I want to check out a one court device. You can use it for the duration of the game. I think it's a fantastic opportunity to try the technology and and also, you know, spend some time in with friends and family at a really fun event like nothing better than that.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So and and in addition to I mentioned the Diamondbacks, do you have other Major League Baseball franchises at this point?

Jerred Mace: So the Diamondbacks were the they were the first and only last season. So working on for next season. And then we we did some work for the Club World Cup. That was more of a pilot. And then we we did for NFL pilots this year. Okay. So there's yeah, there's definitely more to come in each of those leagues.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So I mentioned before we started recording, I just got off the phone with Anthony Ferraro, who I had not met before and I read about him in your one court newsletter, reached out to him on LinkedIn. He is a a a younger blind man, fairly new father, lives in new Jersey. He was a high school blind wrestler, as was I. He will be a Paralympic team judo team member in 2028. He's a musician, a motivational speaker, a multi, multi passionate person. It was great meeting him and I met him because of the one court newsletter, but he mentioned that he'd been in Seattle recently to do some work around FIFA, so I. You started out the concept started out because you saw a video of a deaf blind person enjoying soccer. And here in Seattle, for those who don't live in the area, soccer is pretty big here, the Seattle Sounders, it's quite an experience to go to Sounders game. And so I think there's probably a lot of excitement around the World Cup. And just wondering what your thoughts are around one court in the World Cup?

Jerred Mace: Yeah, it's a big question and we unfortunately don't have any news yet. We're still working on things. Yeah. But I, I was very encouraged by the pilot that we did with with in Seattle and we did two we did in Seattle and Atlanta. And Anthony was able to join us for that. He joined us in Seattle. So I'm really glad you connected him and honestly honored that you found him through us. He's a he's an incredible guy and we have so much respect and love for him, not only as a company, but just personally too. Like he's a he's a really great person. So definitely check out his Instagram ASF vision. Yeah. Or on TikTok. But I follow him on Instagram. But yeah, incredible guy. And he was he joined he's joined us for a few events actually. And Yeah, big, big friend of the company.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So then you You have the one quart devices available? More than a dozen sports franchises, it sounds like. And you're looking to add more and more. And then I know one of our recent conversations, you're thinking about making the technology available to individuals. So we'd love to hear kind of what what future plans are. What's next for one quart?

Jerred Mace: Yeah, you're exactly right. We are excited to be launching a direct to consumer product, and it's really been driven by the community. You know, since the beginning, fans have been asking, when can I use this at home? And I think that's a natural. Of course, like that makes sense because most sports are watched at home. So we're really excited about that opportunity and basically what it looks like for our team is a new design challenge, and it's one that we're in the middle of right now. Because, you know, when we look at there's different needs and priorities between our B2B business and this direct to consumer opportunity. One of the big ones is cost, right? Like as you look at you know, like sports teams and like an early technology, I think those customers have the ability to invest in larger scale technologies. Technologies that are more expensive. And that's just not possible at the consumer level. Right? So what we're looking at is flipping those development priorities and optimizing for cost while maintaining course quality and versatility. The kind of the other main objectives and it's yeah, we're like I said, we're in the middle of that design process right now. So we've.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Okay.

Jerred Mace: We have some awesome prototypes that are demonstrating the value of this. We know we're on the right track, and there's really a handful of remaining challenges to to solve. But yeah, we're expecting to launch a pre-order very soon. I don't have a launch date yet, but people should join our newsletter because that's or even better, our waitlist. If you want to be one of the first to have a device at home that's where you'll learn about it. So we're getting ready to launch it. It's kind of like the business model is kind of like buying a TV and a streaming service. Okay, of course you're, you know, you're buying a piece of hardware as you described it. It's kind of like an iPad. You, you know, it's very versatile in that way. And you can watch any sport you want. We're likely going to have three sports to begin with, the big three here in the US. So football, basketball and baseball, although nothing is, as I said, confirmed yet. Right, right. Yeah. And then there will also be the streaming. So you know, whichever sport package you are interested in, they can simply stream that through the device and it's not.

Dr. Kirk Adams: I spend a lot of time on my couch, I'll admit it. Listening to sports on television. Yeah. And imagining what's going on. And listening to. I love to sit on my front porch. We can see Lumen Field where the Seahawks play from our front porch.

Jerred Mace: Oh, no kidding.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Love to sit there and listen to Mariners games on the radio. Yeah, love, love to have a one caught in my lap.

Jerred Mace: It's a great point. You know you mentioned audio. It's you know sometimes fans ask us like are you guys replacing audio. And that's definitely not the case. You know we view one cord and audio is like perfect pairs. You know in the same way that sighted fans are both watching and listening to the game. We want to be feeling and listening to the game and it just adds a whole nother layer. So it also what we've seen is that it reduces learning curve quite a bit. Right. Like.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah. So I can imagine trying to a fully blind person who's never seen a game trying to, trying to explain it. Yeah. Being a challenge.

Jerred Mace: Yeah. So it's, it's beautiful because you're listening. You know, you might be hearing the announcer say, oh, and there's a fumble by number 27 in the backfield. And you're also feeling that at the same time.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah.

Jerred Mace: Your brain is able to just very quickly understand and interpret what's happening. And I think that's a really powerful experience. So we are working on like audio integrations.

Dr. Kirk Adams: And I mean it was a it was a visceral experience for me. Listening to the Mariners on the radio, which I've done probably thousands of times, and to have the experience of, you know, feeling where the ball crossed the plate at the same time it was actually happening and at the same time. You know, the radio announcer was saying, you know, ball one. And I could tell, like I said, it was low in away.

Jerred Mace: Yeah, it gives you it's kind of that interpretive lens, right? Like, you're able to understand what's happening as it's happening and not waiting for someone to have to say anything oftentimes. Right.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Right.

Jerred Mace: So I do I totally resonate with that point.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Well, I applaud you for what you're doing. You are enhancing lives and experience and bringing joy and the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat to people's hands, which is awesome. And how can people connect? You mentioned the newsletter. You mentioned a wait list. How to how to people subscribe to the newsletter. How do people get on the wait list?

Jerred Mace: Yeah. So if anyone wants to get in touch, please go to our website. It's one quarter dot I o. That's o n e c o u r I o. And on that home page you can sign up for the newsletter. You can sign up for the wait list. You can sign up for both. I definitely recommend both, especially if you're interested in either buying the product for yourself or gifting it to someone else.

Dr. Kirk Adams: So nice. Now that would be a heck of a gift. If you have a blind sports fan in your life for sure. That that'd be a nice gift to open.

Jerred Mace: I think so, yeah.

Dr. Kirk Adams: Yeah. For me you can find me on LinkedIn. Kirk Adams, PhD. I do have a website as well, and I have a newsletter you can subscribe to. It's Doctor Kirk Adams. Com doctor Kirk Adams comm. And been a pleasure. Jerred. The time flew by. Looking forward to the next step in the one quart journey to success. And we'll have you back when the, the B2C program is up and running and check in on how that's going. And you and you and team continue to push forward. Really appreciate you having here today.

Jerred Mace: Hey, thank you, Doctor Kirk. Likewise. Can't thank you enough for all your support. And. Yeah, thanks so much.

Dr. Kirk Adams: You bet. We'll see you all next time on podcast by Doctor Kirk Adams.

Podcast Commentator: Thank you for listening to podcasts by Doctor Kirk Adams. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation. Don't forget to subscribe, share or leave a review at WW. Com. Together we can amplify these voices and create positive change. Until next time, keep listening, keep learning and keep making an impact.