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

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

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

Listen for free

View show details

About this listen

 🎙️ 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 ...
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.