Case study: Powering the technology behind the 2026 Special Olympics USA Games

Every four years, the Special Olympics USA National Games bring thousands of athletes, coaches, and families together for a week of competition across a full slate of Olympic-type sports. Behind the scenes, a mobile stats and scoreboard application gives officials, coaches, and spectators real-time access to results as they happen, making it one of the event’s most critical pieces of technology.

The 2026 Special Olympics USA Games were hosted June 20–26, 2026 in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota and brought together nearly 3,000 athletes and 1,500 coaches across 16 sports. As the Game Organizing Committee was preparing for the fast approaching event, the organization needed technology used for prior events upgraded, validated, and tailored to a new competition lineup that included two brand-new sports.

Creed partnered with the 2026 USA Games team to lead that effort, with codebase modernization through live technical support during the Games themselves.

The challenge

The existing stats application had been built on Xamarin, a mobile framework Microsoft has since moved away from in favor of .NET MAUI. With each USA Games cycle came a different sports lineup, a different set of venues, and updated requirements from the organization’s technology partners, meaning the application couldn’t simply be reused as-is.

Upgrading a proven platform

Rather than starting from scratch, Creed began with a technical Discovery phase to assess the existing Xamarin application, its dependencies, and its integration points with the Stats API and Brightspot content management system.

From there, Creed’s development team upgraded the application’s core codebase to .NET MAUI, preserving the functionality the USA Games team relied on while moving the app onto a modern, maintainable foundation. In parallel, Creed stood up a new Azure development environment to host the API powering the mobile app, giving the organization a more current infrastructure to build on going forward.

Customizing for the 2026 Games

With the core platform modernized, Creed turned to the specific requirements of the 2026 Games. Working from technology partner WWT’s API change specifications for the Atos results system, Creed’s team updated the application’s sports, games, roster, and stats data models, which included adding new fields, introducing a new sport ID structure to accommodate the newly added sports, and building in the reconciliation logic needed for accurate, real-time results.

Creed then carried that updated codebase through a full round of quality assurance, including targeted fixes identified by the USA Games team, such as refining the scoreboard’s scoring display before deploying the updated application to the Apple App Store and Google Play.

“Creed worked to understand our business needs and upgraded a legacy app that a previous partner built for the 2022 Special Olympics USA Games. While we thought this would be simple, Creed showed us the complexities and exposed more technical debt than we knew existed. The result was rethinking the approach and integrating 5x more testing than was previously done. While the overall project took longer than anticipated, the result was a rock-solid system that performed well for all team sports during the week of the Games.”

— Lonnie Snyder, Chief Technology & Information Officer, 2026 Special Olympics USA Games

On the ground for the Games

Creed’s involvement didn’t end at launch. For the six days of competition, June 21–26, 2026, Creed provided dedicated event support coverage, with a team available daily to triage reported issues, investigate critical defects, and deploy hotfixes if needed, coordinating directly with the USA Games team’s designated point of contact throughout the event.

We wanted to ensure the technology powering competition results for nearly 3,000 athletes across 16 sports had a team behind it for the entirety of the Games, not just through launch.

As a 10+ year partner for Special Olympics Minnesota, Creed was proud to provide technology upgrades to ensure the 2026 Special Olympics USA Games had the reliable, real-time results experience that athletes, coaches, and spectators expected.