UNE students help beta test NFL app with product designer who hails from famous NFL family
The students met on Sept. 7 with Jimmy Rooney, whose family owns the Pittsburgh Steelers
One of Aimee Vlachos’s goals as an associate teaching professor at the University of New England is to give business students what she calls “unique experiences.” For 20 students in the College of Business on Sunday, Sept. 7, that meant an intimate workshop with the founder of a sports app company who hails from the famous family that owns the Pittsburgh Steelers.
That day, at UNE’S Harold Alfond Forum, the business students volunteered at an NFL watch party to beta test a football app designed by Jimmy Rooney, the great grandson of Steelers' founder, Art Rooney.
At the three-hour-long workshop held before and during the Patriots game against the Raiders, the students volunteered to serve in a focus group to help Rooney design his game and, at the same time, get to learn first-hand about sports marketing in the NFL.
Vlachos forged a connection with the Rooney family when she collaborated in teaching sports governance on Zoom with Jim Rooney, Jimmy’s father, during the pandemic. Since then, she has maintained that relationship, cultivating enhanced student opportunities for industry engagement and career advancement in a professional sports league as storied and massive as the NFL.
Sunday’s workshop was just one example of the many future-focused, career-ready academic initiatives Vlachos creates for UNE students.
“I'm just all about real-world experience, providing anything that I can do to help students not only network and meet new people, but also have something else that they can put on their resumes,” said Vlachos, Ed.D., the program director of UNE’s Business Administration program. “We’re not just testing an app; we’re giving students a professional experience where they can shape the future of fan engagement for an NFL team.”
The in-development app Rooney has designed with his partner at their company, J4 Design, will have fans play the role of coaches during NFL and college football games, allowing them to guess whether a team will run or throw the ball, the yards gained on each play, or how timeouts will be used.
There’s a solid market for it, he said, with some 140 million Americans engaged with the NFL — and more growing with the NFL’s expansion into Europe. In just two weeks’ time, Vlachos will take four UNE students to work at the Steelers-Vikings game in Dublin, Ireland, the first regular-season NFL game ever held in that country.
Working with the students, Rooney simulated the app experience with score sheets that the students used to predict the plays in the Sept. 7 Patriots-Raiders match.
Morgan White, B.S. ’25 (Sports Leadership and Management), immediately signed up for the focus group as soon as she saw Vlachos’s email. As a graduate assistant in the UNE Center for Sport and Business Innovation, White said she wants to experience as many different research opportunities as possible at UNE.
“This was just another opportunity that I saw in research and seeing what opportunities there are for research, especially with what Jimmy's doing,” said White, a graduate student in UNE’s new online Master of Business Administration program, which offers a distinct concentration in sport leadership and management.
After Rooney explained how the app works, Vlachos jumped in to help with his market research by asking her students: How many of them look at their phones during football games, how frequently, and what do they look at?
The answer: Most of them look at it often to scroll through other games or to find insight on social media. One student said if there’s a questionable play during a game, he jumps on X (formerly Twitter) to see the replay before it’s shown on television.
Rooney thanked Vlachos for translating her students’ sports habits into an opportunity to further advance fan engagement with the sports industry.
“Hearing this is actually exactly what I’m here to do,” Rooney said. “The app experience we're trying to create is kind of what you all were just talking about: to use the phone more as a tool to get more engaged in the experience of watching the game as opposed to being distracted from it.”
Rooney tells the story of his NFL family.
Students test the app during a game.