Increasing knowledge: Developing graphics to inspire and educate hardcore Spanish fans and newbie English fans of the Hexagon Cup
Hexagon Cup’s new AR graphics all add to the story around each teams’ strategy during the game. One new graphic that was developed showed player positions during a point
The iconic Madrid Arena in Spain became the stage where the best padel players in the world faced off to participate in a unique tournament that has been created to revolutionise the sport, in the second Hexagon Cup.
In 2024 – the first year of the Hexagon Cup – the production was differentiated from other existing padel tournaments with four point wire cams, mic’d up coaches, augmented reality (AR), heat maps, and other interesting and gamified features.
“English viewers are probably not used to seeing that level of strategy and I believe that once we peel that layer back, you can get more into it and understand what is going on”
On Hexagon Cup’s strategy for this year over the course of the five-day-long competition in early February, Jose Garnes, Hexagon Cup’s head of content says those features remained and the same service providers on data and graphics were used with FoxTenn and WTVision, which is a Mediapro company so works seamlessly with the new host broadcaster’s vision as it moves the tournament forwards with Mediapro as its technical production partner.
Comments Garnes on how the graphics have been developed to aid its two audiences, which are the highly knowledgeable Spanish-speaking fans, and the new-to-the-sport English-speaking fans: “Even though we changed host broadcasters, we really kept a lot of the foundations that were put together in year one. The main differentiator this year was we added a few more AR graphics, now that we understood who we were tapping into [in the audience]; so what made sense for a new audience and what made sense for hardcore audience. So we just added two or three graphics that allowed us to keep evolving our graphics package.”
Another graphic that Hexagon Cup has created this year is serves, which differ in intent in padel compared to other racket sports
Increasing knowledge
This year the graphics for the broadcast were developed to increase knowledge for both the experienced fans and the new starters. Comments Garnes: “We had a conversation with FoxTenn and WTVision, who are both very experienced in padel. My comment for them was I felt some of our graphics in year one were doing a bridge between tennis and padel, but we needed to really focus on padel, and what mattered in padel.”
The new graphics all add to the story around each teams’ strategy during the game. The first new graphic that was developed showed player positions during a point. Says Garnes: “Part of the discussion was about the strategy that happens during a live point. That means that the position of the players goes up and down [the court]; if they’re defending, they go on the back, if they are in transition they’re in the middle, if they are at the front, they’re attacking, and you can see during one point that transition happening several times. It’s not like you might just play defensive or you might play attacking all game; it actually is very fluid.
“So that was one of the main graphics that we worked this year, in showing the transition of play between defensive transition and offensive, and explaining that to both [Spanish speaking and English speaking] audiences, because the people that know the sport will identify who are the most aggressive players and during the point when the shift happened, while the new audience will start understanding why they move so much, why there are so many smashes, or why do they play so many lobs.”
Serving up graphics
The next thing that needed to be illustrated graphically was serves, which differ in intent in padel compared to other racket sports. Says Garnes: “What they need to know as an audience is to understand how the sport is different to all the other racket sports. In padel the serve doesn’t have the same importance as in tennis. In tennis you can win games or points by scoring aces. In padel, it’s rare that you see an ace because [the serve is] more about position and the opening move of a strategy, [for instance] how close can you put it to a wall so you can take the balance out of a play? So this one was about what is the opponent thinking [during a serve].
“The third graphic was about returning a point. As you play with pairs, there’s a weakest link [in a pair], so how were the opponents playing against the weakest link? And that was important to show strategy; it’s not just about returning the ball and continuing playing, it’s actually putting pressure on the opponent and for them to identify who was the person in the pair that should play the ball, as they could see the win or loss by doing that. So we were going deeper, but actually it was important to explaining the sport as a whole as well.”
He adds: “English viewers are probably not used to seeing that level of strategy and I believe that once we peel that layer back, you can get more into it and understand what is going on.”
Hexagon Cup has made a new graphic for this year’s broadcast with FoxTenn and WTVision, this one showing viewers the teams’ strategy on attacking the other team’s weakest player, with vertical coverage on the court
Solid foundations
Going forwards, this new tournament is building solid foundations technically that will make it simple for future rights holders to access all the content available. Garnes explains: “Next step for us is building an archive, building our ability to actually centralise all of the media that is coming in, the different feeds, different languages, different great moments.
“And we partnered this year with Scoreplay [an AI-powered digital, media and production asset management provider] to ingest all of our feeds and also do all the live collecting, and also to distribute all of that with a few clicks,” continues Garnes. “Normally one of the issues that you have once you have great moments, you have a bottleneck on how can you distribute that media as fast as possible with the least pain. So this year what we did is we had all of our social clipping, all of our highlights and all of our broadcast feeds in one place, so when we were onboarding partners, commercial sponsorship, news outlets, we bring them into one place for them to access all of our media, and that has helped to increase our reach and allowed us to actually focus on the content creation, on the opportunities on the ground.”
He adds: “For an entity that is on year two, this is highly valuable because compared to an established entity which is going to get the media attention, people coming to you, we need to switch it. We need to be able to share as much as possible as quickly as possible. So that was another area that we worked very hard on to allow for that transaction of media to happen without too much stress.”