Dick's was a mature retailer running 800+ stores and 40,000+ teammates on a stack that had layered over decades. The platform debt was real across the entire footprint — POS, inventory, associate apps, handheld devices, the works. The House of Sport scale-up (multi-floor experiential stores with TrackMan simulators, climbing walls, batting cages, and golf bays, scaling against a public roadmap of 75 to 100 locations by fiscal 2027) made the gap most visible, but the platform problem ran across every format.

The Connected Store strategy had to land everywhere. Not a House of Sport platform with the core stores bolted on; one in-store stack for the full retail footprint, with the experiential flagships and the core-format majority running on the same backbone. The Newport Centre House of Sport opening — second urban House of Sport after Boston, eighty-five thousand square feet, the country's largest media market — was the highest-visibility test in the window, but the same architecture was shipping into the rest of the fleet at the same time.

Took ownership of in-store product and design across the full retail footprint. Set the in-store technology roadmap so that every store — from the core-format majority to the House of Sport experiential flagships — ran on the same modernized backbone: the headline experiences (TrackMan, RFID-enabled fixtures, dynamic in-aisle media) and the everyday operating systems (POS, inventory, associate apps) on one platform. Not two parallel stacks for two store formats.

Negotiated the platform vision at executive altitude. The Connected Store strategy didn't get drawn up inside product — it got hashed out with the CTO and the C-suite around what the in-store stack needed to be over the next five years. From that vision, coordinated multi-year roadmaps with the core hardware partners — Samsung for the manager and teammate handheld devices, HP for compute and registers, Zebra for RFID — each running its own multi-quarter cadence. The platform was only as coherent as the partner integrations underneath it.

Modernized the associate-facing tools first. Forty thousand teammates operate the floor every day; the apps and devices in their hands move more inventory and serve more athletes than any single experiential feature. Treating associates as the first beneficiary of the platform shift kept the rollout grounded in operating reality — and gave the experiential layer a stable surface to sit on top of.

Coordinated across product, design, retail operations, store leadership, and engineering through the multi-format rollout window — core-store deployments and the Jersey City House of Sport opening both inside it.

Established the foundational architecture the organization will execute against for years to come. The Connected Store strategy is the in-store stack for the entire retail footprint — the core 800+ stores and the House of Sport scale-up alike, running on the same modernized backbone. The Jersey City House of Sport opened in September 2025 with the new stack live across the floor; the same architecture is running the everyday operating systems across the rest of the fleet.

Associate tools and POS systems shipped into production across the eight-hundred-plus-store footprint, serving forty thousand teammates daily. The architecture is the durable layer; experiences and formats will keep coming, but the platform underneath now holds.