"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." -Walden, Henry David Thoreau
by National Sports Museum
February 7, 2026
Rendering of potential National Sports Museum design in NYC
Adam Slocum’s journey to becoming the champion behind bringing a National Sports Museum to NYC is the story of an entrepreneur who spent decades at the intersection of sports, technology, and social impact before deciding that America’s love affair with sports deserved a permanent, national home. It’s also the story of someone who consciously turned a lifetime of diverse roles—athlete, sports technology entrepreneur, teacher/coach, financial services professional, nonprofit board member—into a single, unifying project designed to honor sports’ profound impact on our social, cultural, and national identity.
Roots: Athlete & Student of the Game
Long before the museum existed as a proposal deck or URL, Slocum was a multi-sport athlete who saw sports as both a personal passion and a lens on character, community, and aspiration. At Amherst College, he was a four-year starter in both soccer and baseball, an experience that sharpened his sense of how sports shape identity, teamwork, and leadership. To this day, he continues to coach soccer and baseball at a prominent preparatory school in Manhattan, imparting the values he learned on the playing fields during his formative years while also greatly enjoying the camaraderie and competitive spirit of the younger generation of aspiring athletes at Collegiate School.
Amherst College Soccer, 1993
New Brunswick, Canada, 1994
After college, he pursued professional baseball in Canada, Australia, and The Netherlands, competing against players who would go on to represent their countries in the Olympics and World Baseball Classic. Those seasons abroad gave him a global perspective on how sport can unify people across different socio-cultural views, helping seed the idea that American sports deserved to be framed in similarly broad terms.
Academically, Slocum doubled down on the business and institutional side of sport, earning an MS in Sport Management from UMass-Amherst and an MBA in Management and Entrepreneurship from NYU Stern. The combination of elite liberal arts, sport-specific graduate training, and high-level business education prepared him to think about sports not just as games, but as platforms for innovation, storytelling, and social change.
Two Decades of Sports Innovation
After the conclusion of his international baseball travels, Slocum spent roughly 25 years in sports-themed startups and sports entertainment technology, building a toolkit he would later apply to the museum. He worked at or with at least ten different sports and entertainment ventures, including roles as VP of Sales and Marketing at Sports Simulation, and leadership and consulting positions with firms like Cybersports, Disruptive Apps, Monsterful VR, and SporTech Ventures.
In these roles, he helped design and promote products that used motion-tracking, simulation software, and interactive hardware to create what he called “an entertraining experience”—experiences that blend entertainment and training in immersive, game-like environments. This work kept him on the frontier of how fans engage with sports: not passively as spectators, but actively as participants inside data-driven, interactive experiences.
In 2009, Slocum’s sports technology company, Cybersports Ventures, created the Cyberball with embedded sensor technology to track a baseball’s motion along key data points.
At SporTech Ventures, he led content and sales, writing presentations, investor updates, and strategic materials that translated complex technology into compelling narratives for partners and funders. That narrative skill—turning a vision into language that investors, athletes, and civic leaders could rally around—would become essential once the National Sports Museum project began to take shape.
Commitment to Social Impact
Parallel to his work in sports tech, Slocum cultivated a deep commitment to social entrepreneurship and youth development that would become a defining pillar of the museum vision. He supported sports-themed nonprofits, including Players for the Planet, an environmental sustainability organization backed by professional athletes, and currently serves on the board of Tomorrow’s Champions, which focuses on sports as a means to build character and opportunity for young people.
His path also ran through public service in New York City. As part of the NYC Teaching Fellows program, he taught in a high-needs school in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he worked with special needs students. That experience reinforced his belief that sports stories and environments must be designed for inclusivity, giving all kids—even those farthest from professional arenas—a sense of belonging and possibility.
While in business school, he consulted for the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), helping support the revitalization of Lower Manhattan’s small business community in the years after 9/11. Working on downtown recovery introduced him to the civic side of development projects—how public, private, and community interests converge when new institutions are proposed for New York’s urban fabric.
By the time he began to focus on a national sports museum, Slocum was not just a technologist; he was a social entrepreneur who believed that any major sports destination should give back to its city and consciously elevate community and social impact.
Vision: Why a National Sports Museum?
The idea of a national sports museum in New York has flickered in and out of the public conversation for years, with previous efforts at downtown sports attractions rising and falling. Slocum’s version of a nonprofit National Sports Museum began to crystallize around 2021, when he formally took on the role of Founder and Chief Visionary Officer and began actively developing the project in New York City.
His core conviction is that the United States lacks a single “national” institution that tells the whole story of sports across disciplines—melding the on-field heroics with the social, cultural, and civic impact of athletics. The museum, in this vision, becomes part of how the country tells its sports story to itself and to international guests, both in a virtual, “digital twin” format and immersive, bricks-and-mortar experience.
In his public statements and writings, he frames the museum as a place “where athletic achievement and social impact meet 21st century interactivity,” emphasizing that it must be both a memory-evoking venue as well as a living laboratory for how sports can drive education, health, inclusion, and civic pride.
Building the Museum: From Ambitious Idea to Organized Movement
From 2021 onward, Slocum’s journey has been about turning an ambitious concept into a credible institution with allies, partners, and a roadmap to physical reality. He has assembled a growing coalition of sports-focused nonprofits, philanthropic athletes, and civic-minded partners who see the museum as both a cultural landmark and a platform for impact initiatives.
The museum is being planned for New York City, drawing on his familiarity with the city’s economic development landscape and his conviction that New York—with its ticker-tape parades, iconic franchises, and global tourism—is the natural home for a national sports institution. Public communications describe it as an attraction that will combine immersive technology, dynamic storytelling, and interactive exhibits to let visitors “relive” iconic sports moments and understand the broader context behind them.
Slocum’s own messaging reflects both conviction and humility. In a widely shared personal note, he acknowledges that people often call the project “ambitious” and ask whether he can pull it off; his answer is that the collective passion Americans feel for sports (citing the over 70% of Americans who identify as sports fans) is too strong for this museum not to exist. He stresses that, although he initiated the project, the National Sports Museum is “not about me – it’s about our nation’s love affair with sports and what they mean to each of us on a social, cultural, and deeply personal level,” inviting others to join as co-creators rather than spectators.
National Sports Museum is being built as a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) institution with a charter from the New York State Education Department.
The Journey’s Current Chapter
Today, Slocum stands at the center of an evolving ecosystem: sports tech veterans, nonprofit leaders, athlete advocates, and educators who see the National Sports Museum as an opportunity to institutionalize the values that sports have always promised—excellence, resilience, teamwork, and inclusion. The project’s public-facing platforms present him as Founder / Director and Chief Visionary Officer, but his own writing makes it clear that he sees his role less as owner and more as steward of an idea whose time has come.
His journey—from Amherst fields to overseas diamonds, from startup labs to Brooklyn classrooms, from post-9/11 downtown consulting to the helm of a national cultural initiative—has given him a rare vantage point on what sports can mean to a country. The National Sports Museum project is the vehicle through which he is trying to translate that vantage point into a place where the stories of our American sports legacy are not only preserved but used to advance, empower, inspire, and unite us for generations to come.
NATIONAL SPORTS MUSEUM IN NYC
The National Sports Museum will celebrate sports’ profound impact on our national identity and pay tribute to athletes, brands, leagues, and teams who use their platform as leaders to effect meaningful change. Exhibits will include “Sports as Social Change”, “Sports as Cultural Identity”, “Sports as the Pursuit of Excellence”, and “Sports PLUS (Personal Learning Using Sports)”, along with an immersion theater and interactive sports entertainment & training facility.
We're developing an attraction-museum focused on education through sports. By using the latest interactive technologies we will bring sports history to life, viewing it all through a lens of social and cultural themes that illuminate the transcendent power of sports to advance, empower, inspire, and unite. We intend to align with other like-minded non-profits, athletes, the sports industry, corporate sponsors, and the city of New York to create a special and enduring cultural institution.
We welcome your feedback at Contact@NationalSportsMuseum.org.
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