Trinity College was not only celebrating its bicentennial in 2023, but also planning to open a major new addition to its athletic center in 2025. The original athletic center had plenty of wall space for old photos and trophy cases…although even this was running short… and starting to look a bit tired and out of date. The new athletic center was to be mostly glass and open space. So, how to celebrate and honor Trinity’s rich athletic tradition in this new, state-of-the-art space?

The answer was a digital, interactive sports history “exhibit,” highlighting the great People, Teams, and Moments of Trinity’s 150 years of athletics history.

We partnered with Rocket Alumni Solutions to provide the software for the digital, interactive platform.

Our key priority was to keep it really simple to navigate. Some touchscreens — even at leading museums — can get overlay complicated and busy.

The platform is flexible, but we ended up with just three categories: Great People, Great Teams, and Great Moments.

The great thing about a digital project is that you can constantly add to it.

History is incredibly vast and rich. Just when you think you knew everything about the past, some interesting tid-bit is uncovered.

And history is being created all the time as new people, new teams, and new moments become worthy of remembrance.

Trinity College (Hartford, CT)

Even within each category, there are hundreds of profiles, but with easy filtering, you can get to exactly the team and era you are looking for.

We developed what we called the “ten-second rule.” In ten seconds, you should be able to find your team photo. And we think we have achieved that.

Within each profile, you can scroll through photos, read narrative text, or access video clips.

Again, Simple!

As a part of the project, we did oral history interviews with over 200 former athletes and coaches, starting with the very oldest graduates from the early 1950s to more recent ones.

We then took curated clips from the interviews (usually 1-2 min long) and uploaded them into the platform.

While the photos and narrative text is great, there is nothing quite like seeing and hearing history directly from those who lived it.

You’ve heard the expression…'if these walls could speak’…. well, now they do!