Main Image: Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment

By Joe Lemire

Larry Bird famously won a three-point contest while still wearing his warmup jacket — after asking in the locker room, “Who’s coming in second?” — so, with the Nets about to play the Celtics, I channeled his confidence and didn’t change out of my hoodie and jeans.

Across the street from Barclays Center, the Nets recently opened the Brooklyn Basketball Training Center where a couple of weeks ago I had been invited to test the Shoot 360 tech its coaches use in training youth players.

Standing in front of one of the baskets outfitted with Noah Basketball’s shot-tracking tech and Shoot 360’s graphical user interface, I awaited the pass, dribbled back across a few lines and confirmed with coach Michael Collins that I was now behind the NBA three-point line. I was. And so I took a shot.

The net swished, and the LED screen lit up green — Shoot 360’s Splash Zone confirmed that my shot’s arc, depth and left-right alignment were just about perfect. Bird would have been proud.

Or at least my fellow ginger sharpshooter, Brian Scalabrine, who looks like family and played for the Celtics and Nets. (My two-time fantasy basketball title team was named Big Scal’s Doppelgängers.)

The Nets have long run free youth basketball programs in the borough, reaching 40,000 kids annually through 235 schools as well as Boys & Girls Clubs and other community centers. But this space now gives them a centralized location to run daily programs, largely targeting children ages 6 to 17. The Shoot 360 tech, Collins noted, offers a range of drills and sills — even passing and dribbling — so kids have a balance of autonomy and structure, so they can “use this technology not only to create a workout, but then also have fun.”

Don’t take just my word for it, but my brother and I brought some of our kids — ages 9, 11 and 14 — to test out the tech. They loved it and didn’t want to leave despite working up a light sweat and pushing close to tip-off an NBA game.

Three stations have responsive, large-screen LEDs that show videos demonstrating technique and then offer interactive exercises. The kids were asked to dribble a certain way and then fire passes at numbered targets. At one point, the screen showed a memory game that also required passing accuracy: players bounced the ball off the card to flip it over.

“One of our main lenses is, how do we help players get better faster?” said Shoot 360 founder/CEO Craig Moody, a former college basketball coach.

The company’s founding story involved Moody seeing his teenage son and his friends prefer to play NBA2K inside rather than go outside and shoot hoops on a sunny day. “If I could build a gym like a video game,” Moody thought to himself, “I’d have it made.”

Just before our family visit, the training center hosted a group of young campers from NBA Brazil, while another international group visited a similar facility operated by the Cleveland Cavaliers. The coaching staffs at the two sites synced up the Shoot 360s at each location and organized a real-time contest — truly the video game ideal Moody had long envisioned.

Marissa Shorenstein, Chief External Affairs Officer at Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, said there’s a dual purpose to the franchise’s investment.

“We do it because we believe in giving back to the community, but we also do it because we know that engaging youth is the best way to engage long-term fandom for the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Liberty,” she said, noting that the Knicks, for example, have decades of inherited fandom whereas the Nets have only been in Brooklyn for 13 years and the Liberty for half that time. “For us, really creating that connective tissue with the community through the youth is what we believe is going to differentiate us long-term to build that generational growth.”

But there’s an appeal for adults, too. Collins said Nets players periodically pop in and shoot on the tech-enabled baskets. Jamal Crawford, Thad Young, Trae Young, Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart are among the former NBA and WNBA players to invest in Shoot 360. And weekend warrior adults (like me) had fun taking shots and getting feedback. It’s akin to what TopGolf, Home Run Dugout and other sport-tainment venues are offering.

“Where you have just the shooting piece, you don’t have to run up and play defense. You’re getting all the competition, you’re getting the social [element],” Moody said, adding, “We want people to play around the world for a lifetime.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

By John Portch

In mid-March performance specialist Iain Brunnschweiler led a virtual roundtable of Leaders Performance Institute members on the topic of talent pathways.

For all the experience in the virtual room – members that have spent decades working with youth athletes – each struggles to balance the elements that help young athletes to realise their potential.

“You’ll never solve it,” says Brunnschweiler, who has worked on successful talent pathways in both football and cricket. “The interesting part is how we make decisions and deliver on a strategic approach that’s appropriate for the context of the athlete.”

For the benefit of the virtual table, he outlined five common tensions that he has encountered on talent pathways:

The list is not exhaustive, but it is representative.

“The headline feedback from everyone at the roundtable is that probably they’re weaving down that ‘versus’ line in the middle when they’re doing this well,” adds Brunnschweiler.

He explains each tension in turn:

1. Group/Team learning vs Individual development

“Within your programme, how much time are you spending on team tactics, team interconnectivity, team culture, etc. versus identifying individual work-ons, individualised practices, individual focused development, individual prioritisation?”

2. Process focus vs Outcome/Match focus

“This is very similar to the first in many ways but, in my mind, is distinctly different. How much are you focusing on the process versus the outcome? And this is really around how you’re monitoring development. So if there’s a pathway lead or an academy director: are you looking at whether teams are winning when it comes to competition or are you looking at tracking progress against process markers that are embedded either within training or within the game?”

3. MDT staff input driving decisions vs Coaching/Technical staff driving decisions

“This is about athlete programming. How much of your emphasis is put on the ologists, multidisciplinary staff, the scientists versus coaching and technical staff? Who’s making the final call? How are you looking to integrate? What are the processes or systems that allow those two things to collide effectively? This was certainly one of the tensions that strongly resonated with the group.”

4. Holistic development of well‑rounded humans vs Targeted development of ruthless performers

“There’s been a massive growth in talent pathways around understanding the holistic nature of development and the growth in player care, support, psychology support, performance, wellbeing, and education off the pitch. The common question is ‘how do we develop well‑rounded humans?’ And the tension is someone saying ‘but surely it’s just about game performers can we spend all of our time targeting development of that ruthless in‑game performance?’”

5. Staff‑led teaching and guiding vs Player‑led discovery

“There’s a perception that it’s slower to do the player‑led, but it might be deeper; whereas it’s quicker and can feel more rewarding to do the staff‑led. ‘Let me tell you, here’s some guidance. Let me solve the problem for you.’”

Brunnschweiler then reflected on some of the available support mechanisms:

1. Consider if the athlete’s experience of a programme matches your teams’ intent. Much will depend on the athlete’s prior experiences, plus how and when they came to your programme.

“There’s a lot of insight generated around young athletes in all sports now and it’s like, well, how do you harness that background information as well as that current information you’re getting on them in order to make decisions around their programming?”

It requires a shared mental model between the different disciplines.

“There were some good examples at the roundtable where team culture means people’s view are respected, taken onboard and valued. And that’s utilised as a part of a decision-making approach.”

2. Retain coaches with age-specific expertise. Too little value is placed on age-group coaches, which can lead to those individuals seeking employment with more mature athletes.

“If I’m the first team coach, there’s a perception I’m better than the under-12s coach; whereas they’re equally challenging in different ways. Someone who’s brilliant at working with 10 to 12 year olds may end up working with older athletes because they get paid more.”

They may or may not be equipped to make that transition but he argues that teams can make it less of a problem by asking:

“Can you manipulate your wage structure to ensure these academy coaches stay valued within the role they’re best deployed in?”

3. Remember: well-rounded athlete can still possess an edge. While there is a desire to ensure holistic approaches that promote well-rounded development, there is a risk in taking it too far.

“There’s a danger that we over-index on compliance within pathways; and, actually, being an edgy, ruthless person is an imperative characteristic for an elite performance athlete.”

4. Development support for coaches. There is a time when a coach needs to be instructional and clear as well as a time when they need to skilfully draw a decision from an athlete.

“How do we provide learning and development support for coaches and other members of the MDT in this space so they can be skilful at learning design and skilful at knowing when to provide which approach based on the context and the athlete?”

5. Give the young athlete a sense of agency. Let young athletes speak in conversations around their IDPs and help them understand why things may feel challenging.

“I’ve seen people saying we want to put on sessions that look slick. That may or may not be the objective. It might also be that we’re really clear as a club that we think the deep learning and progress occurs in messy sessions where it’s clunky and we’re allowing players to play and solve problems. As coaches, we should be the best problem-setters.”

What to read next

10 Ways in Which the Best Environments Support their Pathway Athletes

Main Image: AFP via Getty Images

By Ethan Joyce

Turns out at least one medal outcome was wrong at the Milan Cortina Olympics, and officiating and scoring startup Owl AI founder Jeremy Bloom says he can prove it.

The women’s snowboard slopestyle finish prompted immediate criticism for the judges who awarded Japan’s Mari Fukada the gold (with a score of 87.83) and New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott (87.48) the silver — with notable reactions from NBC analyst Todd Richards and others.

The frustration focused on the inconsistency of scoring on jumps — specifically Fukada’s high scoring on the 720s (two full rotations) in her routine, while Sadowski-Synnott’s attempted more difficult 1080s (three full rotations) as part of her set. And it hit the exact reason why Bloom founded the tech startup to begin with — and in this case, the difference between silver and gold after a rejudging from Owl.

This graph shows the data sets utilized by Owl AI to determine that the women’s snowboard slopestyle at the Milano Cortina Games should have likely flipped the gold and silver finishes for the event. (Graphic used courtesy of Owl AI.)

“I don’t think much needs to be said about how important these moments are for the athletes,” Bloom told SBJ. “They’ve worked their entire lives to just make an Olympic team, let alone put down the best run and either miss the podium or have the wrong color medal for whatever reason.”

To check the medal finish, Owl AI created a data set to look back at the past five years of judging for both 720s and 1080s. What it discovered: The two scores Fukada earned in Milan Cortina on her 720s (7.7 and 8.3, respectively) stood out drastically. The scores on Sadowski-Synnott’s 1080s were also near the peak of scoring for the moves but still very in line historically with the judging from which Owl pulled.

Owl rejudging still slates Kokomo Murase as the bronze winner. But it flipped the finishes of Fukada (with an 86.67 adjusted score) and Sadowski-Synnott’s (89.13).

“This is where we really think we could augment the judges,” said Josh Gwyther, Owl AI’s CEO. “Because if you, as a judge, are putting in a score and immediately saw this deviation, you might be like, ‘Okay, let me see, Is there something there?’ And maybe notate that anomaly.”

Both Bloom and Gwyther have often shared that Owl is not meant to replace judges but to be a helpful tool to set everyone (judges, athletes, fans) up for success around an event. But because judges can vary in their experience, background, and biases, Owl becomes guardrails of context. For example, Bloom pointed out, 720s won the men’s version of this event in the 2006 Olympics. It’s no longer a cutting-edge move, which should be reflected in the score.

Because Olympic moments happen at a four-year frequency, it adds extra pressure to make these decisions as correct as possible.

“On one hand, you want to honor those who won,” said Bloom, a former world champion and two-time Olympic skier. “You want to say, listen, on this day, given this criteria, that’s your gold medal. And any sort of commentary beyond that shouldn’t sort of diminish you because that was their day.

“But at the same time, if that athlete or any athlete would agree that there’s a lot of subjectivity to these sports and everybody would like to push for a more objective world.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

By John Portch

Dr Áine MacNamara touches upon a perennial challenge in talent ID and development, a field in which her research is extensive.

“Early success does not always equal later success,” she tells the Leaders Performance Institute, “but, in some ways, our pathways drive early success to get into the pathway, get funding and get competition opportunities.”

It presents a challenge to pathway coaches and environments, but MacNamara, an Associate Professor in Elite Performance and co-lead of the Coaching and Expertise Lab (Co|Ex Lab) in the School of Health and Human Performance at Dublin City University explains where the balance must be struck.

“There’s a bandwidth of performance early that drives both motivation, technical and tactical coaching opportunities,” she continues, “and all of those development factors will propel athletes towards success. That means that at the start of the pathway, coaches and systems need to look beyond just what makes someone good now towards consideration of those factors that support later development.”

These factors are influenced by an athlete’s proximity to performance (this is how urgently an individual athlete needs to deliver performance based on their stage in the pathway and current demands).

Then there is the question of temporality. Rather than simply the linear progression of time, temporality “is inherently fluid”, as MacNamara and her co-authors Ger Barry and Jamie Taylor wrote in their recent research paper.

“Temporality”, they wrote, “varies across individuals, shaped by unique personal experiences and subjective perspectives” and, rather than isolated moments, it is “a continuous flow where each experience is shaped by both past events and future expectations.” So one young athlete may be ready for senior competition at 17 years old; another may not.

In either case, “temporality can create a series of temporal reference points for coaches to help them coach for development and performance as required.”

MacNamara tells the Leaders Performance Institute that the balance comes back to the coach’s intentions. “A coach must ask themselves what was I planning for that session, in this block, this season for the athlete or the team? How did I go about it? How did I review it? How does the athlete experience it?”

With all this in mind, we asked MacNamara to reflect on the characteristics of good pathway environments. We highlight ten that cover system prerequisites, environmental features, and day-to-day practice.

1. Multiple entry and exit points

Talent identification and development is not predictable. It is dynamic, non-linear and individual. “Because a 14-year-old swimmer isn’t just a 14-year-old swimmer,” says MacNamara. “They come with a range of individual factors and experiences.”

High quality pathways, she explains, are designed with multiple entry and exit routes that take into account that young athlete’s proximity to performance. “If I go and pick the best 14-year-olds for my pathway I’m probably going to include people who look good now but without the potential to be good later,” she continues, “and I’m at risk of excluding people who don’t look good now but have the potential to develop later.”

As for exit points, it may be that attrition rates are close to 99% but that is to be expected. “Conversion is a pretty poor metric to evaluate a talent development pathway,” she says of a topic that has long been at the heart of her research. “Even in the best environments there’s only finite space for athletes to develop into.”

Nevertheless, good pathway programmes equip young athletes with the “developmental constructs to be successful elsewhere”.

2. Firm understanding of an athlete’s ‘priors’

If coaches are to meet the demands of such a complex environment, they must develop both horizontal and vertical knowledge across their system’s curriculum.

“In a coaching context, horizontal curriculum knowledge informs what experiences might be desirable for athletes at specific stages of development, ensuring these experiences align with broader developmental goals,” write Barry, MacNamara and Taylor. “Vertical curriculum knowledge equips coaches to understand an athlete’s previous experience and anticipate the steps required to achieve desired future performance.”

Coaches generally possess strong horizontal knowledge but can lack that vertical understanding of an athlete’s “priors”, which is defined by Barry, MacNamara and Taylor as the experiences, beliefs, expectations and habits the athlete brings into the learning environment.

An athlete’s priors shape how they interpret coaching, respond to challenge and adapt over time and so, as MacNamara tells the Leaders Performance Institute, “coaches with a broad understanding of everything that’s happening across the pathway and a high level understanding of what they’re delivering” are best-placed to meet the development and performance needs of their young athletes.

“The ultimate job of a talent pathway is to develop players for the future,” she adds. “That future isn’t yet defined, so we need to develop a breadth of skills – adaptability, robustness, resilience, as well as a range of technical and tactical skills – that will allow them to evolve towards that ultimate aim.”

3. Specialist coaches

Youth coaching requires specialists – it is not just a stepping stone to senior coaching. “Lots of systems now recognise the importance of that development coaching population being supported and developed themselves,” says MacNamara.

“The young athlete is a mixing bowl of inputs and outputs. They’re in school, they might be in an academy, they might be on a national pathway or at a club. So, in a way, coaching a developmental athlete is more complex than coaching an elite athlete; and the better a young athlete gets, the more people they accumulate.”

4. Equity not equality

An athlete’s priors, proximity to performance and temporality require adroit handling. “There’s almost like an orchestration from the coach’s perspective that’s recognising what the individual athlete needs at this moment in time and how to organise the environment to do that,” says MacNamara.

The coach needs to know how an athlete will respond to, say, entering a competition above their current capability, training with a new group, or being coached in a certain way. “There’s a triangulation of asking what is this athlete bringing into the environment? How do they cope with this? And, after reflection, what’s next? It’s almost like giving them the water wings to survive the turbulent thing that’s going to happen next.”

This, MacNamara suggests, is why the best environments offer equity rather than equality. “No one gets the same experience, but they get the type of experience that is required, that promotes their development at that time.”

5. Athlete agency is essential

Young athletes should be considered agents in their own development. “It’s pretty condescending to think on a pathway we’re just doing things to them,” says MacNamara.

She uses the example of an early maturer who suddenly finds themselves in a difficult academy environment. “Unless they understand why this feels uncomfortable and unless they’ve been given a toolbox of skills to be able to cope with that then retention on a pathway is going to be difficult because why would you stay if you didn’t know why what was happening was happening? High quality systems and environments integrate the athlete into their conversations and individual development plans.”

6. A shared mental model of development

The best way to ensure coaches, athletes and other staff are on the same page is alignment between three distinct curricula:

• The planned curriculum (the intentions, goals and structure of what coaches and the wider system intend to happen);
• The enacted curriculum (the behaviours, methods, activities and interactions that the coach delivers on the ground);
• The experienced curriculum (how the athlete perceives, interprets and responds to what is delivered).

“The alignment between the three is often broken because people don’t understand why what’s happening is happening,” says MacNamara.

“What we should be looking at is the experienced curriculum; what’s actually happening on the ground between different domains. So this idea of being interdisciplinary, not multidisciplinary. How do sports scientists, doctors, biomechanists, physiologists, coaches and other staff work together to ensure the experienced curriculum is what we intend it to be?”

7. Successfully managed expectations

Athlete experience is also shaped by how success is framed and celebrated. MacNamara jokes that she has spent her career warning about the perils of early athlete success, but there’s no inherent harm in an athlete winning early in their development providing it is interpreted correctly and fully understood by the athlete and their coach.

“Being successful is both a motivational and strategically useful outcome at a younger age” says MacNamara. “Pathways need to manage those social expectations and how that success is experienced by the athlete and the people around them.”

8. Equip athletes with psycho-behavioural skills

Generally, it is not social rewards but challenges that inspire growth. “When we look at those athletes that successfully navigate the pathway, often they have relative disadvantages early on,” says MacNamara. However, by the time they become a senior athlete, having faced a wealth of challenging experiences, they have acquired a range of developmental skills and mechanisms that have allowed them to progress through each stage of the pathway. “Those psycho-behavioural skills are part of a toolbox that allows them to cope with the inevitable ups and downs of development.”

By contrast, the early physical developer who has had access to high quality coaching and environments may steal a march on their peers, but if they lack those psycho-behavioural tools then there’s a risk, as MacNamara explains, that their early lustre will be exposed as “fool’s gold”.

9. Coaches that balance fluency and learning

Coaches must know how to balance their levels of challenge and support. MacNamara says: “Being able to slide that dial for different people in a session is a real hallmark of quality coaching. We don’t coach to the mean – we recognise the range of experiences that athletes are having at that time and adjust towards that. With young athletes, there’s often a tendency for us to do a lot for them, provide them with positive experiences, because we want them to be good, we want them to enjoy it, we want them to get that feeling, but we also should want to create desirable difficulties.”

In training, that might mean balancing the provision of fluency sessions, which are often fun and easy on the eye, with error-strewn learning sessions. Yet too often, onlookers rush to judgement on a disjointed learning session.

“I can’t judge whether that’s a good session unless I know what you’re trying to achieve. What’s your intention?” says MacNamara. “If you want the kids to look good, feel great and boost their confidence, then your fluency session is a good idea. If you said we’re dialling up the challenge tonight because we’re working on certain technical aspects or for a motivational intention then a messier learning session is a better idea. And it’s not just the session. The intention and debrief at the end are critical too.”

10. A continuous cycle of reviewing, debriefing and reflection

That debrief needs to occur at both a micro and macro level. “The coach does not just make decisions on a daily basis, they will be within a session,” says MacNamara. “It’s the reaction to what is happening in those day-to-day, minute to minute interactions of a coaching session, and a recognition that the environment is everything that happens to the athlete, and how they’re reacting to things.”

This goes hand in hand with regular reviews of systems, processes and athlete individual development plans. “Ten years is definitely a long time for a 13-year-old at the first stages of a pathway,” says MacNamara of the latter. “So actually reviewing plans is critically important, and integrating people into that review is key as well.”

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By Dr Benjamin Kelly

The 1996 Argentine Grand Prix is primarily remembered for two major incidents involving Pedro Diniz.

The Brazilian driver, in his Ligier, collided with Luca Badoer’s Forti, which flipped upside down and ended in the gravel trap.

After some confusion, the trackside marshals belatedly deployed the Safety Car to pick up the race leader, Williams’ Damon Hill.

Diniz managed to continue and made a pit stop as the Safety Car prepared to pull in. However, his Ligier burst into flames as he attempted to rejoin the race.

Both drivers were unhurt despite Badoer being forced to crawl from underneath his Forti unaided in the confusion; Diniz subsequently abandoned his ruined vehicle without assistance too.

At a distance of three decades, footage of the Safety Car, a Renault Clio – a 150bhp city runaround – leading Hill’s 700bhp Williams and Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari seems quaint.

The criticism that came the marshals’ way underlined how Safety Car deployment in the 1990s tended towards ad-hoc chaos. They were typically borrowed road cars, they improvised pace and there were no standardised rules.

Fast-forward to 2026 and we have Aston Martin and Mercedes Safety Cars bristling with telemetry and data links.

Yet while the machinery has evolved, the cognitive vulnerabilities exposed by Safety Car moments have not.

The real deficit remains: human decision-making under pressure still misfires.

The Safety Car bunches the field, resets race dynamics, and, critically, forces high-stakes strategy calls in seconds.

Data across more than 200 Grands Prix reveals a chilling pattern: 68% of Safety Car deployments trigger suboptimal decisions. This is not because teams lack talent or simulation power, but because of loss aversion (the behavioural bias where avoiding pain outweighs equivalent gains) distorts pit wall logic under yellow lights.

To underline the point, here are three F1 case studies in pressure-induced error.

1. Mercedes at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix: over-defensive pitting

When George Russell deputised for world champion Lewis Hamilton at the 2020 Sakhir Grand Prix following Hamilton’s positive test for Covid‑19, his remarkable performance should have produced a debut victory. Instead, a sequence of communication breakdowns, tyre mix‑ups, and late‑race chaos denied Russell the chequered flag.

A late‑race Safety Car is deployed following Jack Aitken’s spin at the final corner, which dislodges his Williams car’s front wing and leaves debris on the racing line.

Mercedes is presented with two choices:

1. Switch to softs (expected value: track position gain, tyre grip)
2. Stay out (avoid perceived risk of pitting, lock in position)

Mercedes reacts by calling in both Russell and his teammate Valtteri Bottas for an unplanned double‑stack pit stop. They feel the Safety Car creates the perfect opportunity to pit with minimal time loss and finish the race on fresh tyres.

However, a radio fault means Russell arrives and is mistakenly fitted with Bottas’ front tyres, which violates tyre allocation rules. The mistake in the pit lane is mechanical, but the decision to double‑stack at all reflects a deeper bias. Mercedes immediately realises the error and instruct Russell to pit again on the next lap.

As for Bottas, with no tyres ready, the Finn is sent back out on his old hard tyres after a long delay.

Russell plummets from P1 to P9 while Bottas eventually takes P8.

What happened? This was a classic case of loss aversion. Pit crews tend to fear losing track position more than they value tyre advantage; protecting a lead trumps expected value in the calculus. It echoes golf when a player decides to lay up short of a par-5 hazard, sacrificing birdie odds to avoid the potential pain of a bogey.

2. McLaren at the 2025 Qatar Grand Prix: anchored to plan A

McLaren, with Oscar Piastri on pole and his teammate, the aspiring world champion Lando Norris, in P3, enters the race expecting a two-stop strategy based on pre-race simulations.

On lap seven, a Safety Car is deploys after Sauber’s Nico Hülkenberg and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly collide.

As this new evidence emerges, the entire grid, with the exception of the McLarens and Haas’ Esteban Ocon, pits. Pitting makes sense due to the 25-lap maximum rule for tyres on the 57-lap Lusail track; two pits stops are mandatory for each driver in any case. Pitting on lap seven allows teams to complete the race with two clean 25‑lap stints. There is also the fact that pitting under the Safety Car massively reduces the time cost.

But McLaren is anchored to the pre-race model – they’ve committed mentally. They delay the stop. Their rivals undercut. Piastri and Norris miss out on the podium.

What happened? This was classic anchoring bias. New information (Safety Car, track evolution) is discounted because the original plan feels ‘safer’.

3. Drama at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix: authority collapses under dual pressure

Perhaps the most infamous in recent times, Mercedes’ Hamilton leads Red Bull’s Max Verstappen on old, hard tyres, at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix. He is mathematically cruising to an eighth world title just as Williams’ Nicholas Latifi crashes and triggers the Safety Car.

Mercedes faces a choice: pit Hamilton for soft tyres (risky as he’d lose track position) or have him stay out (on old tyres, but his position would be protected).

They have Hamilton stay out. It is a reasonable decision under loss aversion – avoid the certain pain of dropping position – but Race Director Michael Masi, under torrential team radio pressure from both Red Bull’s Christian Horner (“You have to race!”) and Mercedes’ Toto Wolff (“No, Michael, no! That was so not right!”), makes a call that bends the regulations. He unlaps only selected cars (just the five placed between Hamilton and Verstappen rather than all eight as per the regulations), then restarts the race on the same lap rather than the following lap, which was the rule at the time.

Fresh-tyred Verstappen blasts past the disadvantaged Hamilton on turn one and claims both the chequered flag and the 2021 world championship. The FIA later cites “human error.”

What happened? Masi faced cognitive overload, from duelling authority figures (in this case team principals) and an ambiguous rulebook to live broadcast pressure and split-second timing. He defaulted to the heuristic that felt ‘right’ under duress: let the fastest car win, ignore procedural nuance. The regulatory error is the symptom; the bias is the disease.

Why this pattern repeats: Attentional Control Theory meets the pit wall

Attentional Control Theory (ACT) explains the mechanism at play: under stress, humans shift focus from task goals to threat appraisal. On the pit wall, that threat is losing track position. Mental bandwidth narrows. Working memory floods with:

• Rival gap telemetry
• Tyre temperature data
• Radio chatter (driver, strategist, team principal)
• Live crowd noise (in-person events amplify this)
• Time pressure (decisions in 5-15 seconds)

With capacity overloaded, crews revert to loss aversion heuristics i.e. ‘protect position at all costs’. While this worked in 1996 when Clios led the field safely, it fails in 2026 when marginal tyre advantage can swing a race. Compounding hits harder.

A defensive Safety Car call leaves you vulnerable to undercuts on the next lap. Hamilton’s stay-out in Abu Dhabi was reasonable in isolation but under two-car pressure (Masi plus both team principals) it triggered a regulatory cascade. One error amplifies into a second.

The business parallel: boardrooms defend rather than attack

Replace ‘pit wall’ with ‘C-suite’ and the pattern scales perfectly:

• Earnings surprise? Loss aversion triggers cost-cutting (defend margin) rather than investment in growth (chase upside).
• Market shock? Boards freeze, anchored to old strategies, ignoring new evidence.
• Merger vote under time pressure? Leadership reverts to ‘safe’ plays – familiar suppliers, incremental moves – over optimal choices.

A 2023 McKinsey study found that 64% of board decisions during crises were suboptimal not because of information gaps, but because of process breakdown under cognitive load. It is the same mechanism as the pit wall: stress narrows focus, heuristics override analysis.

The fix: process over heroics

Elite teams and organisations beat loss aversion by building process immunity. Red Bull’s mastery of 2024-25 Safety Car restarts wasn’t luck; it was systematic.

The Red Bull playbook (which any organisation can adopt):

• Pre-mortems on loss aversion: before race day ask: ‘What’s the overreactive play? Where might we over-defend?’ Document the bias risks explicitly. Through my work with investors such a discipline slashes the disposition effect (selling winners too soon and holding losing stocks too long).  Whilst nobody enjoys selling at a loss you can pat yourself on the back that you saw this coming and through reduced uncertainty can accept the crystallisation of a loss.
• Binary decision triggers: don’t ask ‘should we pit?’ (this invites overthinking). Ask ‘Is tyre life < 5 laps AND track position < 0.8s gap?’ If YES → pit. Binary logic bypasses cognitive overload.
• Red-teaming Safety Car calls: assign one strategist as permanent contrarian. Their job: challenge plan A under yellow flags, force a 30-second debate on alternatives. Pressure forces speed; structure forces quality.
• Decision journals: log every Safety Car call (pit/stay, timing, tyre choice), assumptions made, and outcome. Over 20-30 races, patterns emerge. Feedback loops tighten decision-making.

McKinsey teams using checklists and red-teaming cut high-stakes errors by 44%; aviation proved it scales to life-or-death; F1 proves it scales to titles.

The invisible opponent

The yellow lights flash. A crash freezes the pack. Your rivals have Mercedes power units and tyre warmers. You have a pit wall under cognitive fire and a rulebook with ambiguous clauses. The invisible opponent – loss aversion, anchoring, authority bias, compounded errors – costs more points than any gap in car performance.

From Renaults herding supercars in the mid-90s to Abu Dhabi’s 2021 title reversal, Safety Cars have revealed F1’s deepest truth: the fastest car loses when humans default to defence.

Spot the bias. Build the process. Accelerate through the pack.

Dr Benjamin Kelly advises investors and professional athletes on decision making strategies in high stakes environments. If you would like to speak to Benjamin about his work, please contact a member of the Leaders Performance Institute team.

What to read next

Even the Best Tennis Players in the World Are Worse When the Stakes Rise – and it’s Not Just Down to Random Variance or Bad Luck

Main Photo: Courtesy of the NBA

By Joe Lemire

NBA Launchpad has selected five startups for the fifth cohort of its innovation program, choosing three related to basketball performance and two tied to league business priorities.

These companies will be paired with various league properties for six-month pilots culminating in a final Demo Day pitch session at NBA Summer League in Las Vegas.

This year’s batch of startups for NBA Launchpad in 2026 consist of:

• Atlas (S.F.): Atlas is a brain-sensing wearable quantifying cognitive readiness through its proprietary metric called Clarity. NBA SVP and Head of Basketball R&D Tom Ryannoted the impressive founding team led by “two world-class neuroscientists from Oxford and Cambridge” and two commercial executives with a track record at Oura. Atlas will be made available to NBA and WNBA team staff as well as referees on an opt-in basis for testing.
• Cred (S.F.): Cred is a predictive intelligence platform for sponsorship lead generation, which considers internal data as well as external market signals. Jason Bieber, NBA SVP & Head of Corporate Strategy, explained that it can ingest geographical considerations, such as where companies are opening new offices, or personnel such as new executive hires or consumer data, like team loyalties. Bieber said Cred already works with a few NBA teams and will be piloted at the league office.
• Diddo (L.A.): Diddo offers an API so that digital platforms, ranging from live streams to social media and apps, can integrate retail directly into the experience. Whether it’s apparel, tickets or other items, the goal is to keep users engaged in whatever content they were already consuming. Diddo is a graduate of the Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech accelerator. Bieber indicated it would be tested within the NBA app and NBA League Pass.
• Peripheral Labs (Toronto): Peripheral Labs is a spatial intelligence firm, taking autonomous vehicle technology to generate tracking data and recreate live sports in 3D by using dozens of sensor-enabled cameras. The founders had stints working at Tesla and Huawei. Ryan said it could have applications across officiating, player health and performance and fan engagement. Peripheral Labs, which raised $3.6 million in seed funding last month, is already installed in one NBA arena and will be further tested at the new G League R&D facility in Salt Lake City.
• Swish Basket (Tel Aviv): Swish Basket uses cameras and lidar sensors to track players’ shooting success and form while offering AI-powered training and gaming. Unlike similar tracking apps like Homecourt, which required players to set up their own smartphone for tracking, Swish requires a more permanent installation but removes that friction and uses additional tech for more detailed metrics. This product will be tested at NBA owned-and-operated international basketball schools.

For the second year, Launchpad’s selection criteria is loosely based on five league priorities — Future of Officiating, Youth Basketball, Player Health & Wellbeing, Future of Media and Fan Connection — without necessarily adhering to those exact categories. Ryan told SBJ the goal is to find products that live outside the daily core business but could be relevant within the next five years.

“In the first three years of Launchpad, we were really focused on putting out specific, almost DARPA-type of challenges, and then finding companies that map directly to those,” Ryan said. “Where we are in year four and five is just broadening up and always staying true to our big five priority areas around the game and our business, and then really just focusing on finding world-class founders and making sure that the problem they’re solving is a high-risk, high-reward type of bet.”

Alumni from the first four years of the program include seven startups to receive funding from NBA Investments and several who have gone on to work directly with NBA teams, such as insole sensor provider Plantiga, MRI-based muscle scan analysis company Springbok Analytics and broadcast tracking data supplier SkillCorner. Others have collaborated with the league on projects such as nVenue, which creates micro-betting markets, and SportIQ, whose ball sensor is being piloted for automated officiating use cases.

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

By John Portch

In one particular World Cup-winning environment, when athletes wanted specialist help, they were asked to book appointments. There was no 24/7 service.

“Take the medical room as an example,” said the former manager of the team in question. “That was a nine-to-six place for booking appointments because we were trying to demonstrate the reality around what life looks like rather than getting the athletes into that mindset of ‘I’ll just ring the physio, I feel like my hamstring needs a little bit of rub at 10 o’clock at night’.”

This, he explained at a recent Leaders virtual roundtable, not only developed the self-reliance of the players, but also served to protect coaches and staff members who were all too ready to put themselves out, whether for out-of-hours appointments or “2am emails”.

It was a simple but important way of addressing the fact that staff wellbeing support tends to lag behind its athlete equivalent, which has its personalised wellbeing plans, dedicated staff and education programmes.

Our 2025 Trend Report painted a vivid picture of how neglected coach and staff wellbeing is across elite sport.

The key is in showing that performance and wellbeing are just as indivisible for coaches and staff as they are for athletes.

“A system wins a championship, and a system is like an ecosystem,” the erstwhile team manager continued. “If we mapped out some of the challenges we face within our environments, how many would relate back to wellbeing?”

The penny has started to drop. Below, we focus on the initiatives that have served Leaders Performance Institute members well, as discussed during the roundtable.

Apply universal principles of wellbeing

This must be the starting point. Consider belonging, identity, balance and thriving (rather than merely surviving) as elements of wellbeing; teams readily apply these to athletes, but they should apply to coaches and other staff too.

As a performance lifestyle manager based at a British university told his fellow members: “if we break down the behaviours that we celebrate, we have to believe that thriving staff who are relaxed and able to sit back and think of the bigger picture are beneficial within our systems.”

Formalised support structures

As mentioned above, in more mature systems, these have long been in place for athletes. “We’re seeing that happening in our coaching space too,” said a wellbeing and engagement manager based in the Australian system, which leads the way along with nations such as the UK. “Our coaching development team has started to look at ways of doing that and having coach development plans in place. I know it’s simple, but that doesn’t happen fundamentally in organisations.”

With prevention built into the system it helps to reduce levels of reactive support for employees, which brings us nicely to good habits.

Healthy routines

“I find you get a lot of people who just see their role as 24/7,” said the former team manager. “We decided as a group to change the paradigm and put the same expectations on the staff as we did on the players. We knew the gold standard was eight hours of sleep a night, so that became the staff expectation.”

The ‘gold standard’ is not just a nice metaphor. Research demonstrates the link between high wellbeing and decision-making quality. It comes back to those elements of wellbeing discussed above.

“It meant that our staff group were consistently operating at a much higher level of performance than previously,” he added.

‘Thrive days’

Again, this comes back to the system and structures. “You have to incentivise some people to take time off,” said an Australia-based wellbeing manager who spoke of what they call “thrive days”. “They have been really successful from an organisational perspective.” An employee will also have personal objectives related to their wellbeing.

Coaches and staff benefit directly, but the system benefits when people can “hold on to their identities outside of work or outside of coaching; and that coaching doesn’t become their primary identity,” as the academy manager noted.

Personalised, flexible work schedules

If you want staff members to prioritise their personal lives – often their greatest source of stress – then you must enable them to do so either through flexible scheduling or rotating duties.

“We’ve got a couple of coaches who this year became new parents,” said a coach working in Australia as an example. “We give them the flexibility to design the training calendar programme for the year so it navigates around their day‑to‑day demands.” The same goes for non-parents too.

Of course, as one member pointed out, rest days, rotation and a reduction in back-office tasks are all easier to propose for teams with greater resources.

A coach that role models the desired behaviours

The coach needs to be a role model in self-care, which is often easier said than done.

“If we can’t get them to shift in their thinking, it’s very hard to get this in place,” said the former team manager. “Influence really comes from the behaviours; what people see, how they’re feeling your leadership, particularly around wellbeing and what you expect of yourself.” But even for well-meaning leaders it is a problem if “you’re asking someone else to prioritise their wellbeing, but you’re not demonstrating that yourself.”

Peer to peer encouragement is invaluable too. “Having a small thing like a peer support group where staff members are connecting with like‑minded people and sharing insights is one way of supporting them,” said the academy manager.

Internal stability

We often talk about consistency in performance, but it is just as important in your internal comms, as a cricket team based in England have found.

“It creates stability throughout the training day so that under pressurised match‑day situations we are already familiar with what the process and structure should be,” said the team’s sport and exercise psychologist. “We know where we can get that information and, actually, it should land on their desk pre‑game.”

The same goes for pre-season plans, weekly updates and even five-year plans. “It links back to the coaches’ levels of stress because it’s less up and down during the day because they know what the action is linked to.”

Clarity also provides a sense of safety. “We have to make sure that all the coaches and staff feel comfortable that they can raise things with myself or with other people because you’re not going to know what the challenges are around people’s wellbeing if they don’t feel comfortable raising that,” said a UK-based academy manager.

What to read next

How Do you Track Resilience in Academy Football Players?

Main Photo: Airo

By Joe Lemire

Speedskating team pursuit debuted at the 2006 Olympics, with three-skater teams racing in sync, taking turns leading the pack to absorb the wind.

At times while looping the course, because the skates don’t have brakes, one athlete might incidentally bump a teammate from behind. Back in 2018, Shane Domer, US Speedskating Chief of Sport Performance, wondered if those pushes were beneficial and how to optimize the number of exchanges at the front of the line.

Domer contacted the Chair of the governing body’s Sports Science Commission, aerodynamics expert Ingmar Jungnickel, to build a projection around these ideas. Jungnickel concocted what he called a “napkin math kind of model” that immediately showed a savings of about a second and a half, Domer recalled.

A week later, however, Jungnickel called back and told Domer, “Shane, I think we’re doing this thing all wrong. What if we don’t exchange at all?”

Jungnickel proposed that the two trailing skaters, who benefit from the energy savings of drafting, use that to push the leader forward rather than take the time to sprint out in front, likening the concept to bump drafting in NASCAR.

“The model showed that pushing was so clearly advantageous that you shouldn’t sometimes push,” Jungnickel said. “You just should abandon taking turns at the front altogether, and this should replace the old strategy.”

After years of testing — both through advanced computational fluid dynamics models and on-ice training — that revolutionary technique has propelled the American men from also-rans to both the podium and the record books. The US, which finished eighth at the 2018 Olympics, won a bronze at the 2022 Games and gold at the 2025 world championships while setting the world record in the event.

Internally, it’s called Project Slippery Fish, but to the world, the technique has come to be called the American Push.

Jungnickel had worked with Olympic cyclists in his native Germany, as well as with Tour de France teams, but at the time of this discovery, he was leading an innovation team at Specialized bicycles. Given the success he had in speedskating, Mike Levine, USOPC Senior Director of Performance Pathways and Innovation, suggested he apply for a grant from the donor-backed Performance Innovation Fund.

That funding enabled Jungnickel to start a sports tech R&D consulting firm, Inspire Gold, which then built an AI-powered aerodynamics spinoff — Airo — that replicates a wind tunnel by creating digital twins of athletes that can be manipulated in 3D to determine the best posture and formations. US Speedskating was the first client, but Jungnickel said he has also worked with national teams in ski and snowboard, cycling, luge and triathlon.

Without the grant, Jungnickel said he likely would not have started the company. Now, the core IP remains proprietary to US Olympians, but related use cases are helping support Inspire Gold. Levine emphasized that many Olympic sports don’t have technological support because they lack a large enough commercial market.

“Airo is selling the technology to bike fitters and bike shops, but there’s a speedskating version and the ski version that we will never sell to anybody but the US Olympic Committee,” Jungnickel said. “That’s our core business model: Essentially develop technologies that help Team USA win, and then commercialize them and long-term fund these businesses.”

The 26-member Performance Innovation Advisory Committee is chaired by Apple’s Eddy Cue and includes members from disparate backgrounds, such as team executive (the Spurs’ RC Buford), athlete (NFL lineman Kelvin Beachum), investor (Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon), business analytics (KAGR’s Jessica Gelman) and medicine (Texas Children’s Dr Jeff Shilt). The fund has raised about $50 million to date.

“It’s really a talented and generous group who provides us this risk capital, strategic guidance and network connections to invest in and execute bold ideas that can create competitive advantages for Team USA and elevate the performance, health and wellbeing of Team USA athletes,” Levine said, adding that the scope is “agnostic. We’re not defining what lanes we’re playing in.”

Founding committee member Geoff Yang, the managing director of Redpoint Ventures, explained the goal in 2015 was to combine “data, applied technology and ingenuity” to support and identify talented Olympians and Paralympians.

“The United States is home to the most innovative technologies in the world,” Yang said, “and Team USA should be a leader in applying those technologies.”

There are four main allocations:

• An international competitive analysis that uses machine learning to develop medal expectancies, helping drive high-performance planning;
• Athlete 360, a custom management system available to NGBs for free;
• Monthly online forums and an annual performance innovation summit “to create the collisions and spark a shared learning and cultivation of ideas,” Levine said; and
• Grants, such as the one utilized by US Speedskating and VAMA, a motion capture technology used to great effect by USA Track and Field.

“Without the funding to get these projects going, we lose steam on the innovation side,” Domer said. “Some of them fail, and these guys are OK with that. And that’s awesome because that helps us create the lack of fear of failure that we’ve had in the past.”

The speedskating team happens to be full of engineers who understand the underlying concepts. One skater, Emery Lehman, even spent time as an intern with Airo’s athlete engineering project. The willingness to experiment from the athletes and coach Ryan Shimabukuro has been critical.

“I give him and our athletes a lot of credit because they didn’t know what the payoff would be,” Domer said, “and to commit to doing this thing — well, as a speedskater, you’re not taught to skate pushing someone. So it took a lot of work to get them to adopt the technique.”

This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.

By John Portch

Consider an NBA player misfiring from the free throw line; or a PGA golfer missing a simple putt on the eighteenth hole; or a head coach losing their rag on the side line.

Rachel Vickery begins her presentation with these common examples of athletes and coaches buckling under pressure.

“Typically, the cause has less to do with what’s happening in the arena and a lot more to do with what’s happening everywhere else,” she told the Leaders Performance Institute members at a recent virtual roundtable.

Vickery, who hosted the session, is a high-performance specialist helping teams in the worlds of sport, business and the military perform under pressure.

“There’s this belief that no matter what’s happening, I can put my game face on,” added Vickery, “but we can’t compartmentalise our physiology.”

There is also the fact that pressure is, as she explained, “pigeon-holed into the wellness or wellbeing box or shot off to the psychologist”, which ignores the fact that pressure is a daily accumulation that adds to a person’s allostatic load. It is far from being some kind of character flaw despite that perception persisting in some corners.

“We know from the environments that we work in that pressure is actually the constant,” she continued, “but it’s the physiological stress response that is often the variable.”

Indeed, we are all oscillating between arousal states; calm one moment, activated the next.

“We will fluctuate between the two states across a day, across a month, across a year and a season and a career.”

In early human history, a calm state meant time to “rest and digest” and activated meant “flight or fright”. The latter has become the norm. “Given our lifestyle these days, most high achievers run in the high arousal state more of the time.”

This is unsustainable in the long term because it pushes people close to their physiological stress threshold, which is where performance begins to break down.

This, Vickery argued, is why it is important to reduce that allostatic load.

What is allostatic load?

Allostatic load is the cumulative ‘stacking’ of stressors over time that erode the amount of physiological ‘space’ an athlete has between their current arousal level and their personal stress threshold. Vickery refers to this as their “buffer”.

She explained that while competition rarely creates a problem, it can reveal one.

The stressors in question can be personal (e.g. a lack of sleep), organisational (e.g. misalignment), performance-based (e.g. being outside your comfort zone), or physiological (e.g. reduced ability to hear or absorb information).

Crucially, “as long as your arousal state stays below your threshold, your negative performance will not show up.”

Strategies to increase your buffer

Stressors tend to occur across three categories:

Vickery shared a range of strategies for each:

1. The individual 

• Identify a person’s “big ticket” stressors. “When people identify these for themselves it gives a really clear direction of next steps that person might need.”
• Personal non-negotiables. These could be any kind of healthy routines such as quality sleep or a balanced diet.
• Tools to de-escalate arousal in the moment. These could include breath work or other methods of regaining situational awareness.
• Remove the stigma around stress. Reframe issues as a normal physiological response, not a character flaw.

2. The team 

• Reverse engineer performance problems. “Ask: What are we consistently seeing? Why is this happening? Which category of stressor is driving it?” Reduce unknowns and uncertainty where possible. Both are inevitable but leaders can also consciously manage those stressors. “Are we heightening the consequence of outcome?”
• Improve communication. Ensure instructions are given at times and in ways people can process. One cannot just assume a message has been understood and processed just because it was verbally acknowledged.

3. The organisation

Vickery described organisational strategies as the “missing piece”. She said: “we often see organisations make dysregulating choices and decisions.” She recommends:

• Aligning staff around a shared mission. “The biggest opportunity is for the organisations that learn to crack this; those that have really good alignment and understanding between performance teams and decision makers.”
• Making pressure visible. “Map where that pressure is actually coming from, identify what is non-negotiable and what’s just noise, and stop pretending everything is urgent.”
• Consequence mapping. “This can work nicely if there’s some decisions further up the chain that have a downstream influence.” This is Vickery’s tool for helping organisations to understand the consequences of their decisions across four different phases:

“Pressure is an accelerant, not a compass”

With this observation Vickery wrapped up her presentation. “Very seldom do people rise to the occasion,” she said. “What we often see is things are masked until people come under pressure; and that’s when their performance will splinter.”

In other words, pressure will only magnify your existing strengths and weaknesses, which makes preparation – the creation of that buffer – so important.

She struck a chord with members, who shared their own thoughts at the conclusion. Here is a selection of their comments and observations:

“Our mission as a group was how can we make sure our athletes are self‑reliant and capable of making the best decisions under pressure?”

“We moved to a case management situation where we’re rigorously, deliberately, consistently looking at athlete need. If there’s 50 staff, it might only be two staff that will have the greatest impact rather than everybody feeling like they must be involved.”

“We’ve got to take our mind away from trying to perfect exactly what the athlete might face because you will never replicate it. What can we build into their toolbox so that they can be that self‑reliant person in that moment?”

“Could athletes benefit from developing more coping‑based strategies; things they can do in advance in their preparation?”

“It really depends on the perspective that the athlete is taking. So you must understand that first before you can decide what the strategy might be to reduce the allostatic load… You would need a specific strategy to deal with fear of failure versus legitimate contract implications; the financial implications versus their more personal perspective.”

“Digital overload is a huge piece in terms of making our allostatic load worse. It’s an under‑represented space that we probably don’t spend enough time and energy on.”

What to read next

Even the Best Tennis Players in the World Are Worse When the Stakes Rise – and it’s Not Just Down to Random Variance or Bad Luck

Main Image: Thomas Eisenhuth/Getty Images

By John Portch

Football academies tend to prize resilience, but few can agree on a definition.

“Even within the same football academy we’ve seen staff have different views of what resilience is,” Ben Ashdown, a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Psychology and Lead Researcher at Nottingham Trent University, tells the Leaders Performance Institute on Teams.

“They’ll say ‘resilience is a really important part of our philosophy but actually we don’t really know what it is, we don’t really know how to measure or assess it, we don’t really know how to track it’,” says Dr Mustafa Sarkar, who also joins the call. He is an Associate Professor of Sport and Performance Psychology at Nottingham Trent and Lead Supervisor of the research programme.

Together, alongside Dr Chris Saward, Dr Nathan Cobb, and Dr Julie Johnston at Nottingham Trent University, they are leading a research programme to identify behavioural indicators of resilience in English academy football and develop a resilience behaviours observational tool. As part of the research, they have worked with academy stakeholders including coaches, psychologists, scouts, and analysts. They are also conducting a season-long study at a Category One academy (Derby County Football Club).

Based on their research, they have found that resilience behaviours can be categorised under six themes:

At the end of this research programme, they hope to have developed a tool for sport psychologists and coaches primarily, with some benefit to analysts who might contribute to the tracking of these behaviours through video-based analysis.

Sarkar says: “We don’t necessarily see it as a tool for identifying talent. I think it would be more as a conversation-starter with a player for player development purposes.”

Resilience: a behavioural response

As the exploration, measurement, and assessment of resilience in sport has tended to rely on self-report alone, myths and misconceptions have emerged (such as resilience being related to endurance and the suppression of emotion), and there is a gap between what resilience truly entails and what practitioners witness on the pitch.

“Coaches and support staff are starting to recognise that both physical and mental rest are critical to sustained resilience over time,” says Sarkar who has spent time with academy stakeholders dispelling those myths and misconceptions. “Part of resilience is about helping individuals to develop their thought and emotional awareness. It is not about encouraging people to hide their emotions”.

Additionally, “resilience requires more nuanced (context-specific) language because a person’s resilience in relation to being injured might be quite different to their resilience in relation to a loss of form”.

The behavioural elements of resilience lay at the heart of their research programme.

“We see resilience as a behavioural response,” says Ashdown, “but, up till now, there hasn’t been any literature that has actually asked what do these behaviours ‘look like’? How do we observe them? I think our work, in a behavioural sense, gives us some directly observable, reliable and valid indicators of resilience in football.”

The appeal for coaches, psychologists, and analysts is clear. “They’ve really bought into this idea that we’ve got something to look for on the pitch, and if we can see it [resilience], then maybe we can then develop it and track it over time,” Ashdown continues.

Their initial 2025 study/paper identified 36 behaviours (across six themes mentioned above), which have since been refined to ten. “We retained at least one across the six themes, which is another indicator that they’re pretty reliable.”

These behaviours include: demonstrating supportive actions during pressure or adversity (support-focused behaviour); positive body language in response to stressors (emotion-focused behaviours); and regaining focus in the face of challenges (robust resilience behaviours).

How might coaches approach these behavioural themes in their resilience development work?

The Leaders Performance Institute asks Ashdown and Sarkar about each of the six themes and they give consideration to each in turn with the caveats that a) they should be viewed collectively in order to develop a holistic view of an athlete; and b) the data collection and analysis of their research programme remains ongoing.

1. Teammate support-focused resilience behaviours

When players support or encourage teammates in stressful moments, especially after mistakes.

Ashdown admits that the relational aspects of resilience are more significant than he initially thought. “At times I probably assumed resilience was an individual capacity that you developed almost by yourself without realising that social support (through your teammates) is really significant,” he says.

“Through the work of Ben and others we’re starting to find that resilience is very much relational,” says Sarkar. “The development of resilience is dependent on cultivating high quality relationships. The interesting bit about social support is that we’ve found that it’s not necessarily about getting social support, but it’s about the perception that that support is available to you. From a resilience perspective, the perception is more important than receiving the actual support itself.”

Ashdown then shares a story of academy training drills, at Derby County FC (work led by academy sport psychologist, Lyle Kirkham, and supported by Ashdown), where players had a “secret support partner”. “We tasked some players with, right, when your teammate experiences some adversity or stressor or when they’re under pressure, find ways of offering them support,” he says, adding that the process raised the players’ awareness of how they’re reacting, responding and interacting with their teammates.

2. Emotion-focused behaviours

When players attempt to regulate their own emotions when encountering pressure, errors or frustration.

While there isn’t yet the data to support a definitive conclusion that emotion-focused behaviours depend on age and phase, as Ashdown explains, “there’s so many points where the participants said ‘we would expect to see a different response from a 10-year-old than one of our under-18s’.”

Emotional maturity is sure to be a factor. He adds: “How these players react and respond to things, particularly at younger ages, it’s a lot more visible, whereas maybe the older players tend to try and disguise how they’re feeling.”

This is a behavioural theme where interdisciplinarity comes to the fore. “We’re working with performance analysts to try and identify these behaviours through video footage and I think we’ll end up with a bespoke set of behaviours based on the phase [foundation, U9-U11; youth development, U12-U16; professional development, U17-U23].”

3. Effort-focused behaviours

Displays of physical and psychological effort used to cope with setbacks, fatigue or demanding situations.

What does making an effort ‘look like’ in any sport? “There’s a danger of making assumptions because every player is different,” says Ashdown with reference to both physical and psychological indicators of effort. Their work has talked of pairing GPS data with observations but, as he admits, “this is where we need to be careful and cautious of not mislabelling players based on a perceived lack of effort and we must be aware of individual differences”.

For Sarkar, again, it is more about setting the terms for a player development conversation. He says: “You might come up with a resilience profile to say one player has got hypothetically high effort-focussed behaviours and lower teammate-focussed behaviours, but we see this observational tool more holistically across all six themes”.

4. Rebound resilience behaviours

These reflect a player’s ability to bounce back quickly after a mistake or negative event.

These need to be channelled. It is no good if a player makes a mistake and runs around like a headless chicken for the next 10 minutes and is sent off.

“One of the participants in our research mentioned that exact point in relation to effort-focused behaviours,” says Ashdown, before echoing Sarkar’s earlier reflections. “The most value in this behavioural approach is the opportunities that it creates for player-coach or player-psychologist reflection.” This, Sarkar suggests, could be a joint review of game video clips where the coach and/or psychologist says to the player ‘talk us through your thought process. What were you thinking and feeling at the time? How might you react and respond differently?’ or it a series of ‘what-if’ questions and scenarios. ‘What if this were to happen in the future? How would you react and respond?’

Sarkar adds that any intervention should be context-specific. “If a player has done that once are we then making an assumption that they’re doing that all the time – is this a one-off occurrence versus a pattern of occurrences? If it’s a one-off, like Ben said, then it’s probing that player about what they were thinking at that particular point in time. But we have to be careful that we’re not intervening based on a one-off versus a pattern.”

5. Robust resilience behaviours

The ability to maintain stable performance while under sustained pressure or after setbacks.

Ashdown and Sarkar make the point that robust resilience behaviours risk being conflated with youthful inconsistency – and all its causes – at academy level.

“One of the participants in our research said it’s not about consistency of performance but the consistency of behavioural responses to things. So performance will fluctuate but is there some consistency in the way they’re behaving, reacting and responding?” says Ashdown. “What some of the coaches are after is a flattening of the curve emotionally and the way the players are managing things on the pitch.”

Sarkar believes coaches may be able to use the resulting observational tool as a means of evaluating the efficacy of pressure training scenarios. “What are you, the coach, actually seeing in terms of their reactions, responses, certainly from a behaviours point of view, and as a result of that pressure training, are you actually seeing an increase in some of the resilience behaviours in relation to these themes?”

6. Learning-focused resilience behaviours

When players learn from mistakes and adapt their actions rather than repeating ineffective responses.

Pressure training also presents an opportunity for self-reflection and learning through its video component – this is the ultimate purpose of this resilience behaviours work. “If we’re aware of that, can we support them in navigating those more effectively when they’re inevitably going to come up on the pitch?” says Ashdown.

“We don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience,” says Sarkar, paraphrasing the American educational reformer John Dewey. “Pressure training shouldn’t just be about putting people under pressure in training and then automatically assuming somehow that they’re going to develop their resilience to future situations?”

At Derby County, led by Kirkham and supported by Ashdown, they have also introduced a series of gamification principles in delivering education and feedback at the academy through a resilience behaviours lens. This includes FIFA-style cards for players, and a football-specific version of snakes & ladders to mirror the ups and downs of the academy journey.

The future of resilience tracking

When it comes to resilience, coaches are acting on intuition, which is valuable but ultimately has its limitations.

“We’re trying to make that process more objective and systematic; hence this is where the interdisciplinary piece comes in,” says Ashdown. “We wouldn’t expect coaches in the moment in the game to be thinking about necessarily tagging or noting these behaviours. We might ask the analyst, with support from the psychologist, to do live coding or tagging of these behaviours or retrospective tagging based on the recording. That would then lead to conversations with the players. With this work, there’s a big opportunity to bring together coaching, performance analysis, and psychology.”

Sarkar explains that they are using the behavioural data to create a resilience profile for players across the noted behaviours. “That gives you a holistic viewpoint,” he says. “A player might have higher team-focused resilience behaviours and slightly lower effort-focused resilience behaviours and a medium level of learning-focused resilience behaviours. So, it gives you a nice overall resilience profile of an individual.”

The hope is that their work will eventually provide an evidence-informed and objective approach to tracking resilience on the pitch.

“It can also then become part of the everyday conversation with multiple staff. So rather than just a conversation in relation to psychology, it’s a broader conversation about player development.”

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