Sports Hack Day: A 48-hour sports-themed hackathon during Super Bowl weekend

While most people will spend Super Bowl Sunday sitting on their couches, a group of hackers, data crunchers and sports fans will be doing something a little bit different in Seattle.

Two nights before the Feb. 3 Super Bowl, developers and designers will come together for a unique weekend-long, sports-themed hackathon called Sports HackDay that culminates with a big Super Bowl watch-party.

Hackers will compete for two main categories — apps and data — for a chance to win tickets to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference ($600 value), among other cool sports-related prizes.

Behind the event are four organizers: Carter Rabasa, Jon Rooney, Jimmy Jacobson and Brian Goldfarb. Rabasa and Rooney met a few years ago in business school and were interested in the idea of themed hackathons.

“Add in some regional rivalry — Carter’s a Redskins fan from D.C., I’m an Eagles fan who grew up in Philly — and the cybermetrics trend in sports, and a sports-themed hackathon around cloud, API and Big Data analysis seemed like a great idea,” said Rooney, director of developer marketing at Splunk.

There will be lots of help on hand, as Splunk, Twilio and Google are sponsoring the event, which will take place downtown at the HUB Seattle. Local agency Plexipixel will help with design questions and there will be lots of information available like this 10-years of play-by-play NFL data.

“We’re going to try to provide the folks who come out with a bunch of resources they can use to get started and pull stuff together,” Rooney said. “”My guess is there’ll be a mix of slick mobile and web apps as well as some hardcore data crunching.”

You can participate by buying $10 tickets here. The weekend agenda is listed below.