Cadence Sports: Facilitating a successful Ride to End ALZ
In 2007, best friends Gary Metcalf and Brian Leto co-founded Cadence Sports in a basement in South Austin, Texas. Their passion for cause-related running, walking, and cycling events hasn’t faltered in 15 years. When the demand for events started skyrocketing in 2022, including with the Ride to End ALZ event in Fort Collins, Colorado, Metcalf knew Cadence Sports needed a better map to give participants and vendors a better, more interactive experience during events.
Keeping passion for cause-related events
Gary Metcalf is passionate about bringing cause-related sports events to life through Cadence Sports. The team thinks of themselves as the engine underneath the hood, managing all the logistics of the events, including permitting, routing, vendors, parking, bathrooms, and much more. While Cadence acts as a general contractor for these aspects of the events, the foundations putting on the events can focus on what matters most to them—the participants.
“Monday through Friday, it’s just like any other job… what’s cool about it is we can actually see the tangible results of what we’re working on.”
Gary Metcalf, Co Founder & President of Cadence Sports
The challenges Cadence Sports faced
Facilitating an event at a venue can, in Gary’s words, “entail a tremendous amount of moving parts.” Prior to finding Concept3D, Cadence Sports tried organizing those parts with large PDF maps. These were not only time-consuming to create, print, and send out, but they did not dynamically or interactively advertise those moving parts in the venue.
“A PDF is exactly that. I can send you a PDF, but are you really going to get a lot of engagement from that?”
Gary Metcalf, Co Founder & President of Cadence Sports
Why Cadence Sports chose Concept3D
Metcalf found Concept3D while researching for an event location at Texas A&M, another happy customer of Concept3d. He knew Cadence Sports could use an Interactive Map to make event planning and organizing easier than ever.
“I was really impressed by how intuitive it was, the different layers, and i just thought it was awesome . . . The beauty of your platform is once we do invest that time and we go through this year and we have everything … next year we can just go back and modify as we need to.”
Gary Metcalf, Co-Founder & President of Cadence Sports
How Cadence sports is using Interactive Maps
Cadence Sports uses their Interactive Map to make event organization and advertisement the easiest it’s ever been. With a more dynamic option than their PDFs allowed, the Cadence Sports team can label restops, bathrooms, and vendor locations not only for participants, but to vendors and staff as well. They can also take advantage of the privacy settings on their Interactive Map to only send certain categories or maps to certain people who need the information.
“We’ve created everything in Concept3D and we put it into a QR code as well as a link. We just send out the link and the QR code to the vendors. Our waste vendors called our production director specifically to say ‘this is amazing, we’ve never seen this before. We wish all events would do this.’”
Gary Metcalf, Co-Founder & President of Cadence Sports
Initial Results
At the Fort Collins Race to End ALZ, Cadence Sports successfully rolled out their Interactive Map to help participants prepare for the event ahead of time. They’re planning to use it for many more events, including at one at the end of July in Charlotte, North Carolina. Metcalf says the business impact of Concept3D’s Interactive Map is saving their team valuable time and bringing value to their clients.
“We take a lot of pride in the experience that the participants get when they’re onsite the events that we’re apart of. Why not start that experience more three months out where they’re able to get their bearings?’”
Gary Metcalf, Co-Founder & President of Cadence Sports
