Stories from the Wall: Getting in the Game - Keeping Score and Minding Time

It’s not easy getting in the game, and winning is even tougher, but getting started involves taking chances while winning requires persistence.

And so it was with a company I cofounded many years ago, and how it became one of the premier scoreboards and scoring and timing technology providers in North America – from schools and arenas, all the way up to the pro’s – the NHL, NBA and NFL.  

The first opportunity came from the local OHL team, the  London Knights. They were playing in an old 4,000 seat arena south of the city, and they had an old, custom built center hung scoreboard, built with the standard light bulb technology all scoreboards were made with in the day.

Light bulbs burned out, sockets rusted, and wiring terminations often became loose or failed. Different electrical and electronic service companies around the city had taken turns keeping it operational, and eventually we were called as the others had all started to politely decline.

Before my arrival, the facility manager had the scoreboard lowered to center ice and a ladder next to it, so I could climb through a hatch door on the top. It was the first time I saw a scoreboard up close, and certainly the first time I got to see the inside of one.

This one had about 100 digits total (25 per side), and each digit was made of 20 lamps, meaning there were about 2000 light bulbs and sockets, and literally miles (a veritable rat’s nest) of wiring on the inside.

I was intrigued, as I am by all things electrical and mechanical, but I came to the conclusion that servicing and repairing it was not something I was comfortable doing. The lamps had a tendency to rust into the sockets, and they would sometimes break off in a person’s hands when they were trying to remove them. I could imagine someone standing on a ladder when that might happen and said “no thanks” because I didn’t want to be responsible for putting anyone in that position.

On the way out, the facility manager asked me if I had any ideas about who next to call. I said I didn’t, but then added, “if you ever want to do it with LEDs, give me a call”. He stopped in his tracks and said, “You can do that? How much would that cost?”

It turns out that my initial estimate was way beyond his maintenance budget – about 4 times higher, and 50% more than if he bought a new scoreboard. I had designed some digital production boards for a local automobile factory, based on a modular display technology I developed for Dutch Auction clocks a year or two before that, and it was easy for me to come up with an estimate for LEDs and material, and sketch out in my mind how it would be designed and built.

But the problem now was cost. The estimate I provided was not only 4 times bigger than his budget, it was also 50% more than the cost of a new scoreboard a competitor had recently quoted him.

I was intrigued, however, and open to consider ways to get it done.

It would take some imagination and some courage and I knew a project like that was likely to get some pushback from my own team. It would cost more to build than it would generate in revenue – without even considering the cost of designing new digits, a scorekeeper’s console, and programming it all – and there was no obvious market for it, considering the final price would be 50% more than existing competitors’ products.

I committed to doing it anyways.

The arena manager had his people strip the old scoreboard down to the frame and metal skins and arranged to have a team sponsor (a local auto dealership) give it a shiny new paint job. It all had to be done between Christmas and New Year’s Day, because that was a break in the team’s home schedule.

I did the design and layouts of the new LED digits in the evenings in the weeks prior, and I tried to keep the cost of the LEDs and other components below the budget the arena manager had for maintenance. I used a surplus controller (a “PLC 500”, a product we developed for high end Hyd-Mech saws) and wrote the firmware to make that useable as a scoreboard controller. I also did that after hours.

I harvested unregulated DC power supplies from prototype systems our UV3000 product had displaced a year or so earlier and incorporated a clever current limiting circuit (developed initially for our Dutch Auction clock systems) into each of the digit’s 7 segment driver circuits, so we didn’t have to use higher cost, regulated DC power supplies.

The four control boards that each controlled the 29 digits on each face were previously designed for the production board system installed at the auto factory down the 401.

Much of the new digit circuit board assembly was scheduled into production gaps, and I recruited volunteers (including my wife and father in-law) to help finish them. We had all the circuit boards ready to start installing Dec 26^th, when the company was shut down for the Christmas break. We had five days.

Retrofitting the LED digit boards into the shell went as planned. The ribbon cable harnesses had to be made on the spot, and that was time consuming, but it went well too. The other wiring, however, was taking far longer than I had anticipated. One side took me almost a whole day, and I had 3 other sides to do. The space inside was too small for more than one person.

Fortunately, there was one person back at the shop that chose to work over the break. His family had not yet joined him in Canada, and he was a wizard at making wiring harnesses. I removed the one harness I created for one side of the scoreboard and brought it to him in the shop. In a single day, he made the other 3, plus cleaned up the one I gave him.

I had about a day to test the scoreboard and finish writing and testing the firmware for the controller. The last couple of days were long days. My wife would come with meals and snacks, and she’d sometimes bring my daughter and a few friends. They’d have a nice skate while I worked frenetically, tracking down bugs, refining the operator console firmware, and fixing all the little problems that came up.

And finally, it was ready.

To say I had “opening night” jitters would be an understatement. I had trained the scorekeepers just hours before puck drop. There would be a full house that night, and there was a lot of buzz and attention about a new scoreboard; the old scoreboard had been problematic many nights the previous year, and a new one was much anticipated.

So much could go wrong.

The new scoreboard hung over center ice. With frosted dark red plexiglass lenses blending into the freshly painted black cube with white letters, it looked mysterious. Then when it was turned on, and the red LED digits shone crisply through the lenses, it didn’t look like any scoreboard anyone had seen before. And the fans and the players loved it.

There were a couple glitches in the first few games, but they had to do with scorekeepers getting familiar with it, or in one case, counting down in hundredths of seconds while only displaying tenths of seconds, which allowed game time to be stopped with less than 1/10^th of a second in the game, while the clock showed zero. All minor stuff, but we were under a microscope, and the local media of the day was quick to point out the little flaws rather than highlight what was a major accomplishment for the team, the company, and eventually the city as London soon became home to one of North America’s premier pro sports technology companies.

These days, I watch my grandchildren play their school and high school sports, and in the last few years, I watched my grandson play competitive basketball all across Ontario and Michigan. More often than not, I find myself watching scoreboards that the company continues to build and sell today.    

Getting in the game was tough. But it was worth it. From a courageous, impulsive decision, to having systems in major venues in all the pro leagues; from building a second building to spur on continued growth, to watching my grandson play in a high school gyms with a scoreboard I first designed when his mother, then just a toddler, skated around while I was still trying to make the first one work.

Entrepreneurship is a great adventure within the adventure of life. Here's what I think I've learned from it: it's not the final score that matters, it's how you spend your time.