Luke Tingle – Daktronics

Luke Tingle learned project management long before he learned the term. Growing up on a farm in rural South Dakota, responsibility came early, and results mattered. Equipment had to be ready, crews had to be coordinated, and weather windows could not be wasted. That environment built a mindset centered on preparation, accountability, and follow-through, traits that now define his work as a project executive for Daktronics, a publicly traded, global leader in audiovisual display technology serving sports, transportation, commercial, and institutional markets through a vertically integrated model of manufacturing, installation, and long-term service.

Tingle’s path into large-scale technology projects did not begin with a fixed career plan. At South Dakota State University, he pursued mechanical and electrical engineering because math and physics came naturally to him. Over time, he realized a design-only role would not keep him engaged. He wanted real-world execution, visible outcomes, and fast feedback loops. An introduction to Daktronics opened that door. He joined as a student project manager, one of the first students trusted to run projects with meaningful independence. Before graduation, he was already managing installations for universities and professional sports teams while balancing coursework and client calls.

“I realized pretty quickly I didn’t want to sit behind a desk just designing,” Tingle says.

“That hands-on coordination side felt natural to me because I had already been doing it on the farm for years.”

Roots of an execution mindset

Farm life and a family custom-harvesting operation shaped more than just Tingle’s work ethic. By his early teens, he was leading crews, staging equipment, and sequencing work based on risk, timing, and available labor. That background shows up clearly in how he runs projects today. He has little tolerance for work that is almost finished and strong respect for the tradespeople and field installers who bring complex systems to life.

Planning and sequencing are central themes in his leadership approach. He is known internally for pushing teams past minimum specifications if the long-term customer outcome demands it. Colleagues describe him as steady under pressure and comfortable managing dozens of moving parts at once, from subcontractors and structural engineers to programmers and rigging teams.

Daktronics differentiates itself in a crowded display marketplace through vertical integration. The company designs, manufactures, installs, and services its own systems, often supporting them for ten to eighteen years or more. Many competitors act as brokers or rely on third-party factories, which can limit quality control and long-term support. Tingle has watched multiple competitors enter the market and disappear just as quickly.

“A lot of companies can sell a screen,” Tingle says. “Not a lot of them can stand behind it for fifteen years because they don’t control the full lifecycle.”

Live events at a massive scale

Within Daktronics, Tingle works in the Live Events division, which focuses on large, custom video and control systems for professional and collegiate venues. His role blends project executive oversight, sales support, and people leadership. He oversees roughly eight to ten project managers across the western United States, California, the Rocky Mountain region, and the Southeast. He also serves as an account leader for Oak View Group, supporting high-profile venues across North America.

Projects regularly involve fifty or more contributors across engineering, fabrication, logistics, installation, and programming. Tingle sits at the intersection of those functions, translating customer vision into executable plans and aligning internal teams around scope, schedule, and risk controls. He is also active in early design conversations, helping customers understand technical tradeoffs in resolution, structure, weight, and service access.

His portfolio includes some of the most recognized venues in sports and entertainment. At T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, home of the NHL’s Golden Knights, he helped lead the delivery of integrated interior and exterior LED systems, including a transparent display embedded in a glass façade overlooking a major public plaza. That element alone underwent roughly 70 design iterations to address geometry, brightness, and pixel overlap challenges. Final calibration required multi-night programming sessions to eliminate visual hot spots and ensure uniform performance.

“These buildings are becoming entertainment platforms, not just places to watch a game,” Tingle says. “Our job is to help create reasons for fans to leave the couch and come into the stadium.”

Engineering the impossible at intuit Dome

The most complex project of Tingle’s career to date is the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, the purpose-built arena for the Los Angeles Clippers. Daktronics served as the primary video technology partner across the campus, delivering more than two hundred displays anchored by a double-sided, 360-degree halo board suspended above the court. The halo measures roughly 32 feet tall and about 640 feet in circumference, with more than 40,000 square feet of LED surface.

The installation pushed structural, mechanical, and digital coordination to new levels. Two independently hoisted sections each weigh about 110,000 pounds. Precision tolerances became a defining issue. Original allowances would have permitted a three-inch visual break line. Tingle challenged teams across companies to do better, coordinating redesigns and recalculations to reduce that tolerance to roughly one inch to protect visual continuity.

“If we had accepted the three-inch gap, people would have noticed it every game,” Tingle says. “It took more work and more redesign, but now everyone looks at it with pride.”

Early design phases unfolded during pandemic restrictions, forcing remote collaboration across ownership, architects, engineers, and fabricators. Later stages required tightly choreographed installation windows and integrated service catwalks for long-term maintenance. The result set a new benchmark for immersive NBA arena technology and reinforced Daktronics’ reputation for handling extreme complexity.

Tingle sees broader trends continuing to push scale and quality upward. Displays are getting larger, resolutions are tightening, and content systems are becoming more dynamic. Teams and universities are expanding beyond scoreboards into tunnels, locker rooms, and practice facilities to create athlete-specific experiences and recruiting tools. At the same time, he notes that affordability and manufacturability remain constant engineering targets, with advances such as microLED influencing future product lines.

Global stages & personal standards

International work has added another dimension to Tingle’s career. At the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Australia, one of the world’s most historic sports venues, he helped lead modernization efforts that introduced new video boards and ribbon displays without disrupting the site’s character. Installation planning had to work around live events and broadcast schedules while minimizing structural intrusion. The project drew national media attention, and Tingle was invited onto the field for the ribbon-cutting, an uncommon honor for a project delivery leader.

Across projects, he returns to the same leadership themes: honesty in commitments, humility in collaboration, and helpfulness in problem solving. Those values align directly with Daktronics’ cultural framework and help sustain long-term customer relationships. He also connects them back to life outside work. As a father of two young children, he often thinks about how to pass along the same work ethic and ownership mindset he learned early.

Looking ahead, Tingle is helping lead new flagship projects, including the Tennessee Titans’ upcoming stadium, which features a planned Ring of Fire-style display system, as well as major upgrades for existing professional venues. He views each assignment as both a technical challenge and a leadership laboratory, a place to develop younger project managers and strengthen cross-functional trust.

“This is a fun industry and an amazing company,” Tingle says. “If we keep pushing ourselves to get better, the opportunities just keep getting bigger.”