From Ice to Innovation: How Hockey Happens with Colin Loveless of the Vegas Golden Knights

Something that the team uses that I can speak on a little bit. It's a system called Exos. It's one of the coolest things I've ever seen. It takes a game feed, just a video of the game, and it can spit out analytics for player possession, time zone possession time, shots on net, where the shot was from, all just from a basic overhead video feed. And so they take that again, analytics, they take that and use that to crunch the data for something that we used to have to have a person, you know, sitting and kind of watching the whole film and making notes on it. Gives a lot of time back to the coaches.

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You want tech and tacos, Tacos in tech, you know we got it. Hey.

And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech podcast. I'm your host, Neil Bloom, and I am thrilled to have Colin Loveless of the Vegas Golden Knights on the pod. Hey, Colin, thanks for joining us.

Hi there, Neil. Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.

No, I'm excited to have you personally. Huge hockey fan. So excited to nerd out on the back end, backside of what makes hockey run, which is you. Honestly, as systems administrator making sure that everyone and everything is connected. So I'm excited to dive in here. You want to give us the super high level of just like your area of purview and some of that that you work on.

Sure. So a lot of people don't know this. There are only four of us total taking care of the, the whole shebang there for Vegas Golden Knights and all the other IT under Foley entertainment. So day to day we do everything from user support, you know, end user help to, you know, more deep stuff like network administration, cybersecurity, kind of everything that comes with operating the Internet for an organization. It's in the macro level. It's not too much, too different from, you know, from any other organization.

All right, well we're going to dive deeper into some of that because there is a lot of magic that goes into to make sure that both the fan experience and the player experience is, you know, pro level, that's for sure. But you know, you've had a long journey up to this point and of just recently won a top tech Las Vegas award to showcase all that you've put into your career. Can you take us back a little bit? Like how did Colin find his way here at the top of the entertainment world?

That is actually an interesting story. My whole life I've kind of been drawn towards the jack of all trades, master of none mentality. Some people would just call it adhd, but for me it's been more of a mindset. I'd rather work on a broader broad range of things. Mentally that's kind of what brings me joy, is to learn a bunch of new things rather than to dive very deeply into any one topic. So that being said, my first job was as a volunteer firefighter. I was, I'll say, lucky enough to grow up in a county in Southern Maryland where all fire and EMS were volunteers. So my grandfather was a firefighter, my father was a firefighter. So I thought, I'll be a firefighter as well. My first ambition was to be a career firefighter. But as it turns out, a lot of people want to do that and jobs are actually pretty short in that category. It's a long waiting list and you have to be ready to drop everything. So after that I started working as a cook. I've done everything from working as a cook, working as a scientist in a lab. I taught music for a couple years. Seven years ago I moved to Las Vegas and That's where my IT career really kicked off. When I first moved here 2018, I actually worked two years in arena conversions down at T Mobile arena, which is where the Vegas Golden Knights play conversions, is responsible for swapping the arena between events. So say you have a hockey game Friday night in that concert on Saturday, right. It's their responsibility to convert the whole arena over. So all this to say, I didn't always work in it. I was always a huge nerd growing up. Definitely a geek in high school, video games, HTML code, the whole nine yards. But I didn't make a career out of it until I moved here to Las Vegas.

Interesting. And so seeing how, I mean, one, how'd you even the stadium flipping overnight? Like, tell us a little bit about that. What's the magic that goes into it? What's kind of the secret sauce to make a fast turn? Happens flawlessly.

So one of my favorite things to tell people, because I feel like a lot of people don't know this at most arenas, I don't want to say all because I can't speak for everyone, but at most arenas in the season, so we're in hockey season right now. If there's another event that's going on at T Mobile Arena, a concert, UFC happens at T Mobile arena all the time. There's actually a big fiberglass puzzle that gets set down over top of the ice. It takes about four days, four or five days to make an NHL grade sheet of ice. So melting it every time is just not an option. So that's the first step in any conversion. It takes about an hour and a half. With a good crew, you put down this big fiberglass puzzle over top of the whole rink, and then you're able to build whatever it is on top of that. Basketball, the ring doctor gone. Excuse me. For ufc stage and a chair set for concerts, whatever it is. So a lot of manual labor, a lot of physical, you know, physical tasks. It was definitely the most in shape I've been since high school.

I bet. I mean, just think, well, obviously one ice is the priority, so you get that for sure. Does that even mean there's like connected devices to the ice to make sure the quality stays and everything? And so therefore there's even an IT infrastructure on just the ice aspect as well, too, certainly.

So at the moment, we're actually tenants in T Mobile Arena. MGM is the owner and operator. But for example, here at Lee's Family Forum, we own and operate this building. So I believe Simcoe is the system that we use. But absolutely, there's a ton of remote monitoring that goes in because so say the ice is covered by the big fiberglass puzzle. But maybe one of your compressors goes down so you start to. The temperature starts to rise. You need to know about that immediately. Because if that ice melts underneath the, the fiberglass puzzle, the deck, the ice deck, as we call it, not only is that a huge safety and structural issue for anything that's sitting on top of that, but as I said, it takes four or five days so to build that sheet of ice. So it's a very bad thing if you lose a sheet of ice completely. So you want to try and fix that as soon as possible. So that remote monitoring is a huge part of it. Yes.

Yeah. Wow. So you had a bunch of physical labor, but also technical labor and technical expertise you had to learn. On the flip side, what made you want to kind of go in house to the team side and go in specifically on the technology piece.

Yeah. So that's kind of the awesome final step of that. That's that long winded story I was telling about my origins there. I did that arena conversions job for a couple of years with a good attitude, even though I felt like, you know, in my heart this isn't really what I want to be doing. But it was a good job. It paid well, lots of hours overtime sometimes. So that good attitude made it so that during my annual review, my supervisor asked me, he could tell, you know, what do you really want to be doing? And I said, hey, I've always had kind of an affinity for technology. Grew up around computers. You know, it's. I was born in 1993, so I, I grew. I was just old enough, I am just old enough to have used dial up DSL modem and now, you know, high speed fiber. So it's. I've really grown up with the Internet. So I told him so. And the very next day, because I had had such good work ethic and kind of showed myself worthy, he put me in front of the IT director at T Mobile arena for an interview and said, yeah, we're sad to lose you, but you're going to do great. And yeah, I got to work that job for three or four months before the pandemic hit and we all got laid off. But as I'll go into in a little bit, that, that four months was enough to get some serious networking done. And that's kind of how I made it over to the team side from the building operation side.

Amazing. Wow. Take us through that. A little bit of just because now you've. I feel like Jack of all trades, but also journeyman of all sides of the business right from then to now. I mean, first of all, Covid affected everyone. And the ability to one, be a jack of all trades and find career progression forward is commendable in that regard. Take us through kind of the path to now from there.

Sure. So pandemic happens. We were actually mid NCAA men's basketball tournament. There were four games that day. I think we played one of them and they told us, hey, go and set up an emergency press conference. So from the IT side, of course, that's telco and. And all that. They announced that everything was being suspended, the tournament was being suspended, everything at the arena. Basically the stay home order was coming out. Right. So that was. It was kind of an immediate and total furlough is how they referred to it. And so that was that. So spent a few months unemployed and I was actually reached out to by a company called Vision Technologies here in Las Vegas. They take care of the school system. Clark County School Systems Network. So all this to say I learned a lot about layer one and two networking, their kind of fiber types. It's a very large network. It's either the third or fourth biggest school district in the country. I think it was third and recently fell to fourth. So all this to say it was a perfect storm for when my supervisor Harvin reached out to me. We had met during that brief time at T Mobile Arena. IT as VGKR tenants there, they have some network, we have some network elements that kind of sit on top of T Mobile Arena's network infrastructure to provide our network to coaches and staff when we're there. So he reaches out and says, hey, we're opening this new arena, the one that I'm sitting at now, Lee's Family Forum. And you have the perfect blend of arena operations and IT knowledge and network administrating knowledge. So we would like you to join the team and help us to get this building rolling. So really it was a every step of the journey, even when I was just basically lifting and putting down heavy objects for arena conversions. That was all. Those were all pieces of the puzzle that came together to make me the perfect fit for where I landed. Now so truly stick with the process type of story.

Laying the physical and metaphysical fiberglass covering over the ice to keep you moving forward towards career progression.

Absolutely right.

Yeah. Amazing. So what is everything? What's your job fully encompassed now, I would imagine, you know, always more things to do and more. More. Not enough hours in the day. But what are all the aspects that go into running multiple Teams.

Yeah. So as I was mentioning right before we kick the. Kick the segment off here, it's my title is systems administrator and I've heard it called the most feared job in IT because it's very all encompassing. There's a lot of different things that it can mean, and at different places, it means different things. For me, it means everything from. We try to offer what we call a white glove service to our users, right. They have, you know, very demanding jobs, ticket sales, sponsorship, things like this. They need their technology tools to work. Their job is already hard enough trying to sell tickets and sponsorship deals to folks. You know, prices for events are high these days, so it's a tough job. They need their tools to work, so we try to provide a premium service to them. One of my favorite examples for us is we don't use a ticketing system. We try and take care of things right away. And luckily we're still at an organizational size where we can do that. We can provide individualized white glove service to folks. So there's that aspect of it, the user support. Anywhere from the account executive that started yesterday to the vice president of building operations. These folks all need their technology tools to work. We also take care of the network as the company grows. We're not just in Las Vegas anymore. We have several hotels on the West Coast. Even in town here, we're a bit separated, I think City national arena, where the headquarters of the Vegas golden knights, it's about 25 minutes up the road. So all of these sites need to talk to one another as well. As the company grows, resources need to be shared. So making sure that we're able to share those corporate resources safely across those distances is another big part of the job.

Wow, that's a lot for sure. And you bring up great points of just being able to help the team itself grow, which gives you more to grow on as well too, from venues and networks and all that regard as well to do split up like fan engagement, player experience, front office, back office, or how do you split up your own kind of areas of focus?

Yeah. So there are four of us total on the team. We've got two IT managers, Harvin Chavez and Kyle Merritt. Kyle sits up at City national arena and Harvin is my direct supervisor down here towards the Henderson area. And then we've got our security systems administrator, Brittany Rodriguez. She's actually last year's top tech winner from this category. She is our security wizard. She takes care of. She takes the lead on everything. Cybersecurity and makes sure we get user training out, we're updated on any threats that are coming out, mitigation for attacks that come in. It's an interesting trend. The better that VGK does, the better our record is. We see a similar correlated uptick in cybersecurity threats and incidents.

Wow. So what does that do from a one, you can't let the fans ever see that, obviously. Right. In a sense like this just has to be impervious. So what do you do to kind of build the fan experience so that it's everything is just kind of seamless? Like you never even think about tech in that regard from a fan?

Well, you hit the nail on the head. And not just the fans, but we try and make it that way for our users as well. Right. That's, you know, the last thing they need to be worrying about is, you know, is this phishing or not, you know, is this email legit? So we try and shield everyone from that as much as possible. And then for the things that we can't, that's what the user training is for. When it comes to fans especially, you hit the nail on the head. The fan experience that we aim to offer here in Las Vegas, you know, we're aiming to become the sports capital of the world. I would say it has to be seamless. People expect it to be seamless, rightfully so. So when it comes to things like service reliability, WI fi service reliability or even for our tenants in the Arenas in Lease family forum, which we own and oper, people expect a certain degree. Right. A certain echelon when they come to Las Vegas and we aim to meet that.

Yeah, you bring up a great point with it's already the top entertainment capital of the world now leveling up to be the top pro sports team capital of the world.

Might update the, you know, maybe the league updates the rules on video review. And so we're like, what are some.

Other trends that you kind of foresee coming in down the road here on the sports side for sports?

And you know, this is going to be a gimme answer kind of low hanging fruit, but AI, it has to be AI I'm fascinated all the time. I haven't seen it really break into the NHL yet, but you can watch any given Sunday, the NFL broadcast, you'll see them bringing up the analytics whether a coach should or shouldn't go for it on fourth down. Right. AI is doing that stuff. I think IBM is sponsoring it, whatever, whatever it is that kind of. And this is where I think people are thinking in the wrong direction on AI, people are thinking iRobot, right? I'm thinking more data analysis, big data analysis done very quickly. So I think one of the ways that we use AI is in our wireless system actually comes with an AI analytics tool built in that can do things like optimize the bands that you're using for various SSIDs, optimize the, you know, the APs now have the ability to talk to one another and optimize their power so that you're getting as little interference as possible. So it's got to be AI, but I'm not worried about it taking over, taking anyone's jobs. To me it's a tool, right. It's almost like the loom when it was invented or the printing press. It's only as good as the people using it, but it's should revolutionize everything.

Yeah, and the way you talk about it, you know, on, on live, on the Sunday broadcast, you know, it's a copilot, right, in that regard. But it takes having a data infrastructure, a data warehouse set up ahead of time to query that data, which means that you're running that for your own teams and therefore the opportunity for you is on the back end to just make that more. That data more and more enriched so that the AI can tap into more of that. So is that more of like an internal team strategy where you use internal team data, or is it at a, you think at an NHL or just a sport level that it's being pushed?

I think both. Honestly, I think the answer is both. We are always looking to utilize new technology to, you know, do better at our jobs or make our lives easier. You know, like I said, when it comes to big data, it's. It's about taking that human bias out of the situation as much as possible. Someone has to program the AI so there's always room for bias, but internally, yeah, we're always looking to use that data. I know our sales folks are always looking to process data for leads, things like that, but I do think that we're going to see it more and more prevalent in sports in the coming years for various uses. You know, the MLB is starting to test out robo umpires, right? So who's to say that we won't use AI to make that data better, stuff like that. But like you say, you have to have the infrastructure in place and there has to be somebody operating it happen by itself.