I've talked a lot about Smash Champs, the badminton and LAN eSports gaming facility that's been under construction for over a year,
and I've given you guys some glimpses of the progress.
But now that we're about to have our grand opening tournament, maybe it's time to finally let you, citizens of the internet, see what awaits inside.
But what is it? When will our first public gaming event be, and why is our sponsor Narwhal trying to open the door?
Come on, little fella. I'll show you around. With some help from my very favoriteest person in the entire world. Hi.
Yvonne has given so many hours to my dream project that I wouldn't dare to give this tour without her.
Also, she knows a lot more about it than I do in a lot of cases. Welcome to the Pro Shop.
Truthfully, I wasn't expecting this to be as big of a deal for the business as it was.
Most centers just, they have a few wares for sale. People walk past them.
It's usually a little tiny spot too, whereas we have this pretty big, expansive spot here, but it's, I feel like it's helped the brand overall.
It feels like a premium space. Having the big space makes it feel really welcoming and easy to shop, which I think has helped our sales.
But the reason it's big is not because we intended to do that, it's because we had no idea what else to do with the space.
Originally, when we started Smash Champs, it was only supposed to be one unit, so this whole space here was supposed to be check-in, concession,
Pro Shop. Pro Shop all together. And bathrooms.
Yep, and bathrooms. Yeah, I forgot about that too. And now it's just Pro Shop and check-in.
We offer shoe rentals and racket rentals. Or, if like most people, you prefer to play with your own sweaty racket, we also offer restringing services.
A lot of people don't actually realize that the strings on your racket are meant to be replaced.
How often are you supposed to replace the strings? Well, that really depends. There's two things that wear them out. Time and also use.
So if I'm playing a few times a week with one racket, I might replace my strings after a month.
Or, if they're just sitting on there over time, I'd say after about three to six months they've got to go.
Or the other big one is if you make mistakes like I do and you miss hit, you can break your strings.
Especially when they're tighter. How often do you blame your strings for poor games?
I wouldn't. You would never? No.
That is not true. What?
I would. Of course, one thing we haven't really shown much of yet is the technology behind our center.
Every one of our members gets one of these wristbands and every time they come in,
they simply scan to check in for their session.
And after a slight delay.
Hey! They're checked in.
Also, of course, we're using Ubiquiti, NVRs, and security cameras so that we can keep a close eye on
what all is going on both inside the center and outside the center.
We have three different colors of wristbands so that our staff can quickly verify that you're supposed to be where you are.
And we have integration between club automation, the software that we use to manage our members,
and Ubiquiti so that with door access control on every single door in the facility,
we can not only say, okay, hey, premium members, you're allowed in these areas,
you're allowed 24-7 access, but we can actually change that.
So for instance, when we're running a LAN gaming event on the one side,
badminton people are temporarily not going to have access to it.
This is Jake one. Coming back out here for a second, is this pricing right?
That's $15 and that's $72. $80.
There has been massive inflation in the price of badminton shuttle cocks over the last five
realistically about 10 years. And at $80 for a tube with just 12 shuttles inside,
it's about $6 per shuttle.
And at a high level, it is pretty typical for a group of doubles players to go through
one and a half to two and a half of these per 21 point game.
A traditional shuttle cock is made out of cork with a leather or synthetic leather cover
and then precision cut and fitted goose feather.
Real goose feather. Tradition is nice, but most modern shuttles,
especially anything below the absolute top of the line is going to be made with duck feather.
The advantages of these materials are that they fly just like a leather baseball is going to fly
a little different from a not leather baseball or football. They fly as an elite player would expect them to.
Is there not high end synthetic materials?
They're coming. But in the meantime, the best we have for synthetic materials is at the high end,
still a cork cap, but with just nylon skirt.
I mean, when you look at them, you can really appreciate the craftsmanship of it.
So somebody weaves all of these threads in here and applies glue and fits all the feathers
and then puts it on a tester to make sure that it runs at the right speed.
This string is a tied by hand.
David, do you recognize this claw machine? Is that the one we had at LTX?
Yeah. Boom.
Let's go! 10% off.
Anyone purchase up to $100. That's pretty good.
I'll be holding on to that. All right, let's head out to the courts.
Of course, we can't get there without passing through what I like to call the world's most expensive hallway.
I actually forget the details of why this was so difficult to do.
Do you remember? Yes, I do. So there's an upper floor here and all of that upper floor was supported by beams that went through here.
And of course, the beam went right through this spot right here.
So in order to move that beam, we had to put in supporting beams and like strengthen one on that side or something like that.
So anyway, it cost a butt ton of money to do all of that because they had to core all the concrete as well to do it.
But the alternative was to have this hallway go like out into the court area and then back.
Because from a business standpoint, this hallway is probably going to pay for itself in the long term because exit through the gift shop.
Oh, this is our Q&A board. There's actually some questions that need answering.
Mr. Linus, what does this say?
I'll let you guys leave a comment with what you think this says.
And once we've got that sorted out, we'll get a reply for them.
Our empty concession area.
We learned after the fact that if we want to do so much as microwave a hot pocket and hand it to you or wrap a Costco muffin in plastic wrap and make that available,
we need not one, but two sinks.
But that's a project for another time once we have some more money we feel like spending on it.
Oh, not actually a problem because our sponsor Narwhal is at the ready.
Check this out. The Narwhal flow has a self-cleaning mopping system with edge reach extension.
This allows it to extend into edges and not just push dirt into the corners, which is pretty neat.
And for bigger messes, the Narwhal keeps the mopping water warm, which helps to dissolve any stubborn stains.
And because it uses dual water tanks, one to provide fresh water and the other to collect dirty water,
the mop stays cleaner for longer, preventing dirt from spreading and preventing you from having to manually clean it nearly as often.
Thanks, buddy. The last thing in here is we've got a nice little counter where you can watch your kids lesson, charge your phone, do whatever it is you need to do.
And that brings us out to the courts. On the surface, there's not really much to it.
Like any other sports facility, you want a nice open space, a flat, unobstructed floor, but the devil's in the details.
You walk past one of the first details.
Yes, I did. So right when you come into the badminton court, you'll notice that all of these benches are perfect height for changing your shoes.
And all of the benches behind the courts are the perfect height to actually properly sit and observe.
And store your bag underneath. Yeah. The other nice thing about the observation benches is we've put USB charging and regular power outlets next to all of them on both the badminton only side and the badminton slash gaming side of the facility.
On half of them. Sorry, yeah. Because on this side there isn't, but on this side there is.
So originally we were actually going to have all the benches only on one side because we were thinking in the future we might put bleachers or something like that on this side if we're hosting national tournaments or provincial tournaments.
I don't think I was ever hoping to have enough bleachers for like a national level tournament.
But yeah, maybe provincial level. One option if we did want to host a high level tournament that requires a lot of seating is to actually close off some of the courts and then only use the center courts and put like stadium style seating here.
But I'd be really worried about the impact that that would have on both the vinyl top as well as the subfloor.
So this is a multi-layer sport floor that starts with the concrete underneath.
Then you have a vapor barrier. Then you have these rubber squishy.
They call them pucks. Yeah, they call them pucks. They don't really look like pucks.
Yeah, they have like little teeth and then a flat surface on top and they just sit on top of the floor to give it a little bit of extra bounce.
Then you've got a layer of plywood. Then another layer of plywood running the other way so that you've never got anywhere where the seams perfectly overlap.
Then you've got a cushion layer and then finally a wear layer on top that gives you the grip that you need to move around confidently on the court.
There was a whole fiasco where our first sport floors were manufacturing defect, you know, whatever.
I want to give credit to caliber flooring systems.
They stood by their product. They replaced it.
They got everything installed for us and they did what very few contractors do.
And even though it did cost them quite a bit in replacing everything, they got us sorted out.
So definitely shout out them. We switched over to Victor, not necessarily because we thought the quality was better than caliber's, you know, not defective product that we initially approved.
But rather it was just because their BWF certified and the timeline was better.
It was the biggest issue. We were able to kind of move heaven and earth in order to get them to us really fast, which was important because we were already supposed to be open.
Water fountain. Tilled filtered water.
It actually doesn't cost that much. So if you're ever in a sports facility that doesn't have it, you know, write them a polite little note and say you'd love to have something like this installed
because man is it ever a difference maker and it saves so many plastic bottles.
These were a fun one. The intention behind them was twofold.
One was safety in the event that anybody comes kind of like running off a court or, you know, trips and face plants into a wall.
I wanted a little bit of cushioning. Can't hurt.
I don't think it was going to be likely, though, if you look at how much space we have behind the courts.
I mean, you never know. Some of the lessons and stuff, they'll have the kids doing laps around the facility and you could easily go flying into a corner.
But the bigger concern was actually more selfish.
I get really sweaty when I play and two of the walls in our facility that are going to have benches along them are concrete.
Meaning that if I were to be all wet and lean against them, I'd be so cold and uncomfortable.
So I wanted a wall cushion behind the benches.
For me, what mattered more was the acoustic treatments that's inside here.
So there was a lot of reverb or echo in the place and these help cut that down a ton.
In addition to the spray that we put in the ceiling.
The HVAC guys looked at me like I was from the moon when I explained that I wanted to be able to heat and cool the facility without causing any air currents.
They were like, okay, well, that's how that works.
And I was like, okay, but hear me out. Okay, what if we had some kind of extremely low flow system and they came back to me and they were like duct socks.
Duck socks are perforated fabric so that the air that's coming down can be diffused out very slowly without causing any current that's going around.
And one of the big benefits is especially when you're cooling, if you have a big blower that's up at the top of the unit, then it's blowing that cold air out,
which is heavier than the warm air in the facility and it will fall.
And when something goes down, something else must come up, which will create a circular airflow by bringing the cold air all the way down to court level.
We can prevent that. And well, that was the theory and in practice it has actually worked out.
It's worked out great. Like really well. You'll see a lot of sweaty badminton players come and just stand here because you can feel the air.
It's pretty nice. And a big part of keeping the airflow so low was having a ton of them so you can actually see that they're positioned in between every court and then over on the other side,
they're either between the courts or they're above the doors.
That seems like a good opportunity to talk about the wall color. Wait, wait, you just walked by the power.
I can't go anywhere in this place without there being something interesting.
In between every court, we pre-run two CAT 6A network connections that are home run to our server room upstairs as well as a total of four 120 volt outlets.
We don't know exactly what we'll do with these, but what I kind of have in mind in the future is that each court court side could have like a TV and, you know, God willing.
Jensen willing. We could have some kind of machine vision system that will automatically score keep or something like that.
But that's a tomorrow problem.
It's just that if we wanted to try to do this after the fact, it was going to be impossible.
Cost of fortune if it was possible at all.
Which brings us finally then to wall color.
Jay Kwan, who you guys met earlier, made 10 trips to the paint store.
Oh, yeah. And then in addition to that, I think we made another four or five trips to the paint store.
We tried every stock color. We had the mixing custom colors.
We were here literally at midnight with all of these patches.
Midnight, please. Okay, whatever. Two in the morning.
Holding birds in front of each color patch trying to figure out, is this the best color?
We were trying to strike a balance between, you know, being able to see the birdie really well, but not it being an eyesore in here.
Oh, this is cool. In between all the courts, some cases above the doors, some cases not above doors, is more power and more networking.
And again, praise be to Jensen Huang.
We are hoping at some point to have cameras back here that will allow us to do the aforementioned automated scorekeeping or whatever the case may be.
In the meantime, we've partnered with PlaySight. They've got these RFID scanners that you can put courtside.
We've actually got one that we're trialing right now, but the idea would be to equip every court with them, and then players can install their app, scan the RFID,
and then they can say, hey, can I download the video of my session?
So we're working with Zcam to send over some of their cameras, and we're going to get those installed hopefully...
Before the tournament coming up, hopefully. All of this might happen sooner than you'd think, though.
This is a little project that's being worked on by just one guy and runs off of his laptop that he uses for training.
So who knows what the future holds. All the really cool stuff for you guys, though, is probably on this side.
Spaced for tables of gamers to go all the way down this entire unit.
Are these California standard power connectors that are 250 volt, 50 amp, allowing each of these to do about 14,000 watts.
So pretty much an entire row of computers. Alongside CAT 6A networking, which would be at 10 gig, and fiber optic networking that we could run at,
I believe what we are set up for up there is 25 gig.
That would be for each one of our rows of computers for our whale land gaming events, which we finally got our temporary use permit from the city for,
and I am so excited to, maybe not announce, I guess we'll have announced it by the time this comes out, but the first one's September 28th.
I don't remember the exact date. I just know that I still need the fire department to get in here to approve the increased occupancy.
So that's what I'm working on. But it should be done in time. They just called me today.
Okay. Getting this done was extremely difficult, and I have to take a significant amount of the blame for that.
See, the city doesn't love it when business owners announce what they're going to be using their building for without getting a permit for it.
Anyway, I think I ruffled some feathers the wrong way. We ultimately got it sorted out after a long and painstaking process.
I want to shout out Chase, Yvonne, Sean, Colton.
Jim and Jake won helped a lot. Ivan, of all people, he actually came to the city council reading with us to be like a non-employee and talk on behalf of what gaming means to him and community engagement.
And credit to some people at the city, the people that were a little higher up and who were trying to increase the amount of things to do in the city really did help us out as well.
Yeah, the general manager, the business relationship manager, and the mayor were all instrumental in helping us get this over the line.
So I'm so excited to see you guys there.
And we're very happy to be here just because it's so hard to find a building that has both enough parking and a high enough ceiling to accommodate a high level of badminton play.
Let's say, for example, I was playing an attacking shot towards my opponent over here and in defense, they wanted to...
Well, okay, I mis-hit it, but one sec. Sorry, little buddy.
And in defense, they wanted to hit it up really, really high so that it was hard for me to retrieve it or I had to move all the way to the back.
This ceiling height allows us to do that.
Another situation where this can come up is if your opponent plays a really tight shot to the net, it allows you to play it to the back without hitting the net itself.
If you have a low ceiling, the only way to get it to the back is at an angle, but with a high ceiling, you can go up quite a lot steeper.
At the back is the place we don't really love showing people because it's kind of where our messes go to die.
There's leftover stuff from the little test land that we did.
There's our sign for taking pictures, projector screen.
Where's the rest of the sufferware lens? Ooh, I'm glad you asked.
That's where this comes in. Here's our cable whips that are pre-cut and pre-bound to be exactly the right length to go from our switches at the end of the table to each gaming station.
Shout out infinite cables, by the way. Their cables truly are infinite.
There's also some pretty fun archaeological items here.
Got a bunch of heat guns from back when we had like a tube bending station at LTX once upon a time.
Casual orca plushies. I found our original sample of what the flooring construction is.
So there's the rubber pucks. Oh. It's not a ton, but you'll feel it if you kind of jump on it.
Oh yeah, that's way more give than just wood would be.
Yeah, or even just putting like a vinyl sport floor over concrete.
Obviously, we're not just going to have everything piled under the mezzanine forever.
It was actually moved under there so that we could acoustically treat this space because some parts of it are going to be set up as like a crafting space.
I don't know, like running Etsy shop. What is it that you do these days?
Oh man, or either that or we're going to stream or do a craft channel or something like that.
We're figuring it all out right now, but the rest of the space here is going to be all storage.
So on this side is going to be all of LTX stuff. So you can see all of the chairs that they have set up and there's going to be hundreds of seats worth of tables.
Right. Along with all of the gear that we have over there that we don't get rid of.
And then on this side, we're going to have a pallet racking because of all of.
So I think Chase told me he wanted 10 pallets for LTX stuff and then smash champs needs 30 right now because of the container of birds that are coming.
The supply chain for badminton equipment has not been the most amazing from our experience so far.
It's very start and stop. So we need to take on a lot more inventory than we originally anticipated because we can't just draw in small amounts from a local distributor.
One of the things that won't be here in the future, although they're doing such a great job that you might actually want to keep them around,
is our army of narwhals that are showing off their dual camera with 10 tops of NPU processing setup that allows them to respond to obstacles that are in front of them much more agilely and more quickly than previous solutions.
Very cool, right? That one just went around the cup. That was impressive.
I know, right? Will it clean up all of my sawdust over there?
Yes, yes it will. Welcome to the members lounge.
In theory, this is for our premium members to hang around after their matches.
I don't know, maybe watch some badminton games on the 98 inch TV.
In practice, what it is, is a place for Linus to put all of the cool toys that he doesn't have room for in his house, like an air hockey table.
This is the most musical sounding air hockey table I've ever heard.
I know. When it bounces off it, it's like a friggin' wind chime or something.
It's so cool. I've also got a pool table.
And then, because people weren't really using it in the LMG staff lounge, I moved the superchecks game over here.
And...
We had some software configuration issues with the DIY arcade cabinet.
So, we moved the buy one over here. This was another Linus has always wanted one and doesn't have room for it at home thing.
I think you have room, I think Vibandis doesn't want it in the house.
I lost already.
Again. It's not because I'm good at it that I want one.
It's because I need practice that I want one.
We even have this ice-me-surfer-surfer for the superchecks.
Uh, okay, I don't think that actually works, does it?
Uh, no, it's made out of cardboard.
But not well-flow. We'll go look at the gym in a minute.
Sorry, David. First, I figure you guys might want to check out the server room complete with Ubiquiti RGB.
Let's go! Legitimately useful because it can tell you the status, like what that port is set to.
Uh, what else do we have in here? Well, we've got our battery backup, courtesy of Eaton,
as well as just a kind of run-of-the-mill desktop computer that's running that play site stuff
that we're still in the testing phases of. We don't know if we're going to settle on that, but that's what we're using for now.
We've also got our NVRs that are handling all of the security
and the oodles and oodles of fiber,
as well as ample cooling for both the courtside LAN events,
as well as any future machine vision processing that we wanted to bring on-premises.
Corner office for our general manager.
Oh, hey, Jimmy, he's in here. Uh, we're doing a tour.
Yeah, we decided the tour you did was... Actually, it was really good.
You can see it on Floatplane. This is not the first tour of Smash Chance we've done.
It's just the first we sponsored by Narwhal. Wait a second, Jim, do you have your own fridge in your office?
No, it was the one downstairs I bought, and then we didn't eat up downstairs, so I bought up here, right?
It's just energy drinks now. What? Why did you...? Is that alcohol?
Energy drinks. Oh, man, okay, we'll talk about it later.
Which brings us to our final stop, the gym.
It was designed in collaboration with Mr. Luke Lafreniere of Floatplane,
and his goal was to have it, you know, to address the cardio people,
of whom he is not one, but also make sure that we had at least two options,
even if one of them is just free weights, for pretty much every movement that you would want to do for badminton.
Cool. There were a few things that Luke wanted that we didn't manage to put in,
like he wanted a grass strip, and I think that was the main one.
But in general, we did pretty much everything he asked,
and when Badminton Insight came out here, they rated it a 9 out of 10.
This is pretty sweet. As long as it doesn't get too busy, it's like, I would love to work out here.
Well, that's why we don't allow anyone who's not a premium member to work out.
Although, there is one exception.
Even though we have enough parking, according to the city bylaws and zoning for the amount of space that we have for recreational use,
we don't. But we knew that, so we worked out a deal with our neighbors.
They don't need most of their parking. They have like half a dozen people working in their units, and they're these size.
So there's like another 45 parking stalls that are not being used,
especially in the evening when they're not even in office.
So we made a deal. We said, hey, I offer free gym membership for you and your crew.
I receive access to your parking stalls without you guys calling a tow truck.
That's pretty great. I'm grateful to our sponsor.
Narwhal, one of which I think I'm going to have to be taking home for cleaning up kitty litter.
See, we've got our kitty litter robot thing in the bathroom that is closest to our pool,
and wet feet and kitty litter is a pretty bad time.
And my kids, at best, I can convince them to vacuum that room like once a week.
If I had a little robot to do it, that would actually be a perfect application for something like a narwhal.
Their narwhal flow has carpet-focused technology that automatically lowers the brush cover on carpet,
creating a high-pressure airflow zone with 22,000 pascals of pressure for deeper carpet cleaning,
and has a dual-action edge brush that adapts near corners for a deeper reach,
while the dynamic zero-targeting side brushes actively release trapped hair and direct it to the air intake for easy cleanup.
You can check out the narwhal flow at the link in the video description.
Thanks again to Narwhal for sponsoring this video. If you guys like tours like this, why don't you check out the first video we did on this space,
where it was a completely empty concrete box.
And, man, I mean, yeah, it's pretty amazing the difference.