Former NFL star Greg Olsen discusses the second season of his show with Michael Gervais, Youth Inc., and the apps helping young athletes with their mental health.
You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.
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Former NFL TE Greg Olsen has stayed busy since retiring from the league after the 2020 season. He made a fresh name for himself as Fox Sports’ lead NFL color commentator over multiple years, and now anchors the network’s No. 2 booth following its addition of Tom Brady. In 2022, he partnered with former Panthers teammate Ryan Kalil, actor Vince Vaughn and LA-based venture firm Powerhouse Capital to launch podcast production house Audiorama, which has since spun off youth-sports-focused interview show Youth Inc. into a media company that is adding a digital commerce platform in 2025 and raised $4.5M earlier this year. On top of it all, he is also a dad and youth football, basketball and baseball coach.
“It’s hard,” Olsen said of juggling those responsibilities in a recent interview. “I try to coach one season per kid.”
The first episode of season two of Olsen’s Youth Inc. Podcast releases today with a new co-host in sports psychologist Dr. Michael Gervais. Earlier this week, SBJ Tech caught up with Olsen to discuss Youth Inc., working with Brady and sports technology trends that interest him.
On what to expect from season two of the Youth Inc. Podcast…
Season one was really almost testing the market. When we approached season one, our plan was, let’s cast a wide net, let’s have a big variety of conversations with all different aspects of the youth sports experience – whether it’s parents, coaches, Olympians, professional athletes, college, sports psychologists, performance coaches. Every aspect of what the landscape looks like, let’s have surface-level conversations, cast a wide net, and let’s test the interest level, let’s test which areas of the system people most gravitate to and respond well to.
It became very evident through those 40-some-odd episodes that there were certain areas that people had strong interest in. Season two is going to be a lot more of hyper-focused episodes that are more of a deep dive into different conversation with guests, but all have the same storylines.
For example, me and Dr. Michael Gervais, who’s one of the leading sports psychologists in sports from the youth level all the way up through professional athletes and Olympians – I met him when I played for the Seahawks and have gotten to know him – we sat down with a bunch of different guests. And while the conversations all covered different sports, different ages, different levels, different detail, they all had common threads around mental health, sports performance anxiety, best practices of parenting youth athletes, best practices for being a youth or college or professional athlete.
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On how technology is changing youth sports…
It’s a great question, and obviously [with Youth Inc.’s digital commerce platform] we’re trying to tackle one of the big areas, which is a very complicated and fragmented e-commerce experience. We spend all week very much on our phones or on our computers with the ability to process buying in a seamless one-touch, whether it’s Fanatics, or Amazon, and all these big e-commerce platforms that we’ve all become very accustomed to. And then when it comes to, you know, buying a hoodie for your kid’s middle school football team, it seems like you’re jumping through hoops.
With sports performance and mental health, there’s a lot of good apps and programs that people are investing in that are right on kids’ phones, take them step by step through performance anxiety, best steps to handling pressure, the best steps of handling failure – and they’re almost bringing a mobile sports psychologist into the palm of their hands. There’s scheduling apps that best process how to pick the best baseball tournaments and best volleyball tournaments. [The technologies are] all geared towards – yes, capitalizing on a big market, capitalizing on a big opportunity financially – but more so just trying to make the experience better.
On working with Tom Brady at Fox…
It’s been great. We’ve had a good relationship, and obviously we’ve had a lot of conversations as he’s transitioned to this role. He’s been really good to work with, super humble and open-minded to asking questions and wanting to learn and realizing that when you start anything new – it’s no different than when I first started – you don’t know what you don’t know. I give him a lot of credit. He’s been very upfront and humble and honest about wanting to learn and wanting to get advice from other people. And you’re talking about the best guy who’s ever played the sport. So, it’s a credit to him. I’m sure if you asked him, he feels a lot better now than he did in Week 1, and he’ll feel a lot better in five weeks than he did yesterday, and that process just continues to get more and more comfortable the longer you do it. No different than how it was when we all first came in the [NFL] as players. There is a learning curve and there is a process of getting comfortable as time goes on.
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On the keys to his transition from player to broadcaster…
Early on for me, what I tried to remind myself is: there was no learning curve for football. I knew football. The learning curve came through the technical part. The learning curve came through communicating on live broadcasts and communicating with producers in your ear and understanding replay sequencing and all the specific things to a broadcast were where I had to do a bunch of my learning.
To this day, I don’t know exactly all the camera angles, official names. When I ask for a replay, I’m probably calling it the wrong name, but they by now know what I’m talking about… At the end of the day, when you get your 20-second sound bite to get in there, talk about what you know. We’ve lived this sport our whole lives. We know it. We see it. Describe it to someone at home in a way that keeps it interesting, keeps it informative. The complexity of football is what makes it so special. But also you can’t talk like you’re in the locker room. You can’t talk like you’re talking to another 20-year veteran at the position. So, there is a little balance.
To sum it up, keep the football part. That’s the part you know. Don’t let the transition of the technical broadcast component paralyze you. At the end of the day, you’re talking football. Don’t complicate it. Talk what you know. Talk what you see. You can figure out the mechanics of a broadcast, figure out the mechanics of television along the way.
On the NFL’s in-game authorization of Guardian Caps in 2024…
I think anything that can continue to improve the health and safety of players while keeping the game the game is something worth looking into. So, I’ll always be a supporter of any of that.
I think helmet technology has come such a long way. I mean, I look back, I had my rookie year Chicago Bears helmet and when I look on the inside, let alone when I look back at what I wore in high school compared to what I wore at the end of my career, you talk about the technology growing and getting better with time. And then you factor in what the Guardian Caps are able to do and the extra layer. I know everybody wears them in practice. And I’m sure there’s some adjustment getting used to it. But I think everybody has the decision, what helmet they wear, whether they wear the Guardian Cap in practice or also in the games.
I don’t know if I would wear one. Obviously, I’m probably on the older side. By the time it was introduced I was like that ‘can’t teach and old dog new tricks’ kind of person. But for guys who wear it, I’m sure there’s a level of comfort, a level of protection. I wouldn’t be shocked if some of that technology Guardian is developing gets incorporated into some of the helmet design, and one day you get the combination of both things all wrapped up in one.
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.
We bring you the views of the International Football Group’s Paul Prescott, Aarhus’ Morten Larsen, who sees one of Denmark’s best academies up close, and Kitman’s own Stephen Smith.
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It wasn’t always thus. “English clubs were basically funding talent development models in Spain or in Brazil because English talent wasn’t seen to be at the same level as players from those countries,” Paul Prescott, the Managing Director of the International Football Group, told this Kitman Labs podcast.
That situation persisted until recently and is starting to change in part due to the introduction of the Elite Player Performance Plan [EPPP] in 2012.
“We are seeing that some of the decisions that were made maybe 10-12 years ago are beginning to bear fruit,” added Prescott, who was joined by Morten Larsen, the Head of Methodology & Development at Danish Superliga club Arhus, and Stephen Smith, the Founder of Kitman Labs.
Aarhus share the Premier League’s emphasis on talent development, albeit in different circumstances, as Larsen explains [5:30].
“Denmark is a small country and the league is a small league,” he says. “So there’s only one thing we can do to compete with the other clubs in Europe.”
Elsewhere, Smith sets out the differences in approach between leagues and clubs [16:25]; Larsen explains the impact of data on decision-making processes in the Aarhus academy [24:10]; and Prescott ponders whether EPPP was an outcome or a catalyst [36:30].
Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.
Prevent Biometrics’ new device has been introduced to augment World Rugby’s Head Impact Assessment protocol and lay the groundwork for long-term study of head impacts in contact sports
Main photo courtesy of World Rugby
It’s why he calls Prevent’s sensor-embedded mouth guards, which track linear and angular accelerations, providing what experts say is a more accurate measure of head impact than other methods such as helmet sensors, “the most important technology in sports.”
“We’re the data. We are not diagnostic,” Shogren said. “But if you don’t have the data, you can’t do much.”
As a focus on head impact reduction in collision sports — e.g., the NFL’s in-game authorization of Guardian Caps for this season — grabs headlines domestically, Prevent and years-long collaborator World Rugby are embarking on their largest data collection effort on the subject yet, and on a global scale.
Since January, World Rugby required that athletes competing in its elite-level competitions wear Prevent’s instrumented mouth guards, a deployment that will ultimately encompass 8,000 players. The aim: to both augment World Rugby’s Head Impact Assessment protocol and lay the groundwork for long-term study of head impacts in contact sports.
Dr Joe Maroon co-developed the ubiquitous ImPACT concussion management protocol, worked as the Pittsburgh Steelers’ team neurosurgeon for more than three decades and is now a Prevent adviser. He said World Rugby is “leading the charge” in concussion management, adding that smart mouth guards could eventually permeate contact sports such as American football, wrestling, lacrosse and soccer.
“We took ImPACT and other management tools to World Rugby 10, 15 years ago,” Maroon said. “World Rugby now is bringing another tool back to the sports in the United States.”
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The mouth guard mandate necessitated a $2.4 million investment from World Rugby, which covered fitting (via teeth scans), producing and delivering the gear, plus equipping teams with support staff to help operate the technology and analyze the data collected. The custom-fit mouth guards typically price between $225 and $250, Shogren said.
The mouth guards detect hard impacts as an early warning of possible concussions. [Photo: Prevent Biometrics]
“To draw any kind of meaningful analysis, you need to have hundreds of these [concussive] events, not tens,” said Falvey. “Our first priority at the moment is making sure the [impact] threshold is as clinically relevant as it should be.”
Prevent’s mouth guards trigger a Bluetooth alert upon registering a linear or angular acceleration above thresholds set by World Rugby, at which point the player is pulled from the game to undergo evaluation for a possible concussion. (Players can still be flagged for assessment based on observable clinical symptoms, independent of the mouth guard.)
“We’re not using this as a concussion detection device. We’re using it as a device that picks up a large impact,” Falvey said. “A concussion actually is a clinical diagnosis. There’s more to it than just an impact. There’s how the player is, what their previous exposure is, what their age is, what their concussion history is.
“It’s never going to be just about the impact. But that impact is putting the right players in front of us to have a look at.”
So far, unique alerts triggered solely by a mouth guard are adding an average of one extra stoppage every three games, he said. He added that 43% of total concussions logged across World Rugby competitions have triggered a mouth guard alert, and 35% of mouth guard alerts have ultimately correlated with a concussion diagnosis. According to Falvey, that 35% rate is in line with other individual subtests within the head injury assessment protocol, which include assessments of symptoms, memory and balance.
The hope is that having as many guardrails as possible in the protocol will continue to increase its overall accuracy and mitigate cases in which athletes continue to compete with a concussion. Citing research conducted by the University of Pittsburgh, Falvey noted that every 15 minutes a player continues playing after a concussive event, their recovery time is lengthened by three days. That comes with medical risks — for example, issues with non-resolving concussions — and, of course, the business impact that dovetails off player absences.
“None of the subtests on their own are fantastic, but the diagnostic accuracy of the HIA protocol [as a whole] is about 88%,” Falvey said. “That’s as good as an MRI for tendinopathy in your shoulder. When we are able to look back on this year, we feel this is going to have improved the accuracy above 88%. It’s another piece, which is as good as any of the other subtests so far.”
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Ultimately, World Rugby hopes to leverage the wealth of impact data it is collecting, high-impact and otherwise, to inform rule changes or best practices for competition and training. Falvey cited a dataset of 35 players who play the same position from a recent competition as an example.
“One player was getting nearly six times the number of impact events that a player in their position was getting in the same tournament,” he said. “It may be that they’re involved in more tackle events. But it also might be that their technique isn’t as good as it should be. Doing something about that can significantly improve that player’s health and welfare and make playing the game safer.”
Falvey will present findings from the first year of the mandate in early 2025 at a meeting of the International Collision Sport Group, a collection of collision sports medical leaders, including from the NFL and NHL.
“It’s a scenario where everybody helps everybody out in this space,” Falvey said. “It’s all about getting to the right answer as fast as we can.”
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.
The former NBA small forward talks to SBJ Tech his new tool, which helps players to shot and offers instant feedback.
Main photo courtesy of Form
You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.
* * * * *
Even though he was an above-average shooter — Hayward hit 1,111 career three-pointers at a .370 rate, and his .950 playoff free-throw percentage is No. 1 in NBA history — he kept seeking new ways to improve, which led him to an entrepreneur named Charlie Wallace. Hayward, 34, and his former Butler teammate, Emerson Kampen, acquired most of Wallace’s company, redesigned a few things and rebranded it as Form, which they launched this month.
Form makes a basketball shooting aid. The product is a flat-sided cube whose shape helps encourage proper shooting form and the development of muscle memory. The pro ambassadors for Form are nine-time NBA All-Star Paul George and the WNBA’s Lexie Hull, who’s currently a starter for the Indiana Fever.
On how he got involved with Form . . .
The creator of Form was this guy named Charlie Wallace, who created what was called Qube. I’m somebody that’s kind of a perfectionist, and I was scouring the internet looking for something for hand placement on a basketball and where to position it. And I came across Charlie’s YouTube and saw this device, saw him shooting it, and thought, ‘I might as well try it out.’ So I ordered one for myself. He came across on his sheets that Gordon Hayward bought one, so he messaged, asking if it was the real Gordon Hayward — it was.
I got the product. Then he sent me his number. We talked and chatted about it. Then we decided — my partner and I, Emerson Kampen — that we wanted to push forward with it and rebrand and relaunch the company. We designed a few different things about it and changed some stuff a little bit, and here it is now.
On the target demo for the product…
It was something that I loved using during the last couple years of my career, and I felt like this was a product that could really help a lot of young kids, especially. It’s really a tool that’s geared more towards younger kids that are just [wondering], How do you learn how to shoot? How do you shoot a basketball? You would start with a tool like this. I have young kids myself and felt like it was something that could really help them.
On what interested him originally…
For one, I saw Charlie, who’s this unassuming, middle-aged guy just draining jump shots from almost half-court. And it was like, ‘What is he doing?’ Shooting it straight every time. The ball is rolling back to him.
Now, at this point in time, I obviously still was a good shooter, and it’s not like I wanted to change my shot at all, but certainly felt like I used my left thumb a little bit and wanted to perfect it even more. So I think that’s what initially sold me on it, and then once I got it, just [saw] how simple it was. I used it more shooting around the house than anything. I didn’t really shoot it on a goal. I would warm up with it on a goal, especially during my offseason workouts, but more than anything, it was something that, I could be on the couch and just shoot over and over and over. It just locks in your form.
You can’t be on the basketball court at all times. But you’re sitting around watching TV and you’re just shooting this thing up and down on the couch. If you’re thinking about basketball and thinking about your shot and thinking about your game, it’s something that you can do, like I said, not even on a court. And that was another thing: I know a lot of people don’t have access to courts all the time, and you can use this anywhere and everywhere.
On whether he always wanted to become an entrepreneur…
I honestly didn’t ever think about it. I wanted to be a basketball player, and I was blessed and lucky enough to be able to play in the NBA and have a long career in the NBA. And I was just thinking each year about how I could get better as a basketball player, and this kind of fell into my lap. As I got older and older, you do have to start thinking like, at some point in time, this is going to end. The NBA always has a lot of meetings about that, and they’re trying to help players because your career is usually a lot shorter than you think it will be. And so you’ve got to have something that you can do afterwards.
This was something that fell into my lap, but it’s something that we quickly became passionate about because it allows me to still be around the game and help young kids learn how to shoot and but it’s also the other side of it. It’s the business side of it, and that’s fun. Obviously business is competitive. It gives you a chance to compete.
On his other post-basketball business interests…
My portfolio, in general, I wanted to make sure it had a lot of variety in it. I just also released a movie — I was the producer of a movie. So that’s another thing, and it certainly has helped me. As preseason games get started, I’m kind of missing it a little bit, but this has helped me bridge that gap. They always say retired athletes start to get bored and all this, but this has helped me jump right into it.
On the first film from his production company, Whiskey Creek Productions…
We made the movie [Notice to Quit] in September of ’21, over the course of that year. I was obviously still playing, so I wasn’t extremely involved on a day-to-day standpoint, but as the producer, I was sent dailies. I was able to go to Skywalker Sound and do some editing there, and I think, moving forward in the future, I would love to get more involved with that as well.
On other shooting tech…
I used Noah when it first came out. My shot was actually pretty flat, and we used that for a little bit just to work on the arc of my shot. Noah is good because you want to be consistent in your shot more than anything, and it helps you just realize your arc is not as high as you think it is. And so I used that. We used the gun when I was in high school — the gun is just the thing where you’ve got the nets that go right around the goal, and when you shoot it, the balls drop down, and then it passes it back to you.
On how youth can learn to shoot…
Another thing I thought was really amazing about Form: There’s never been and there’s not really a tool that helps you learn how to shoot. A lot of tools these days are data-driven, and they’re showing you all the data about your shot, the arc, the rotation of the basketball, the depth, how far you’re shooting it. It counts your misses and your makes, and all that stuff is really good, but it doesn’t help you learn how to shoot. It doesn’t tell you about your form.
There’s so many tools in other sports, like golf and baseball, for example, that everyone’s all-in on and learning to do the fundamental part of whatever you’re trying to do. [Basketball tools] show you your data, but they can’t help you fix it. You would have to do that on your own. This, if you don’t shoot it the right way, it’s going to spin because it’s a cube. It’s not going to spin on that singular axis. And so if you do it correctly, you see its instant feedback. You see it right away. It spins beautifully, and if it’s not, it’s going to be wobbly.
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.
As Fabio Serpiello of Central Queensland University suggests, a structured approach to innovation – and a supportive environment – could be the critical edge.
“One of the issues we have in our organisations is that sometimes that definition is not set at the beginning; and that creates problems,” said Professor Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University in Australia.
“If there are different expectations of what ‘innovation’ is and they are not discussed properly – I don’t want to say ‘agreed upon’ but at least discussed – then we can have an issue appraising the results of innovation.”
It is just one of the pinch points discussed in the first instalment of this three-part virtual roundtable series titled ‘How to Approach Innovation’.
Serpiello, having previously served as Director of Sports Innovation at Victoria University in Australia, is the ideal host for a discussion based on the challenges facing Leaders Performance Institute members in this space.
In the first session, the group explored how a structured approach and supportive environment can make all the difference.
What innovation meant to the group
There were some common definitions:
The difference between creativity and innovation
The idea of putting creativity into practice chimes with the work of American psychologist Daniel Goleman, who alighted on distinct, but interconnected, definitions for each. Serpiello shared them in his presentation:
Creativity: defined by Goleman as the generation of new and useful ideas. It involves the ability to think outside the box and produce original concepts, whether they are ideas, products, or performances.
Innovation: defined by Goleman as the successful implementation of those creative ideas. It’s not just about having a great idea, it’s about executing that idea effectively to create value. To do that, the environment must support those tasked with innovation.
The last point about organisational support is critical: creativity can happen without innovation, but innovation can only follow creativity.
Greg Satell’s Innovation Matrix
As leaders, we can better support innovation in our teams when problems are clearly defined and the skills needed to solve them are just as well defined. This is because effective problem-solving and innovation requires a suite of strategies tailored to the specifics of a challenge.
To address this challenge, Serpiello cited business and organisational consultant Greg Satell’s Innovation Matrix, in which he outlines four distinct types of innovation:
The group wrapped up the session with some reflections on their persistent challenges and the steps they can take to address those.
Identifying performance challenges can be tricky: Problems need to be clearly defined; and yet numerous organisations struggle with this initial step, which can lead to misaligned efforts and ineffective solutions. What specific challenges do you currently face? Which type of innovation might be most applicable?
Practicality can be elusive: Creativity is essential but must always be aligned with practical outcomes that address real-world problems faced by athletes and coaches.
Collaboration is crucial: Collaboration between end-users and innovators is essential in ensuring that relevance and practicality. Without this, there can be an over-reliance, as one attendee observed, on disruptive innovation.
Assess your skills and resources: Evaluate whether you have the right skills and resources available to address the problem. Do you have the in-house expertise or might you require external help?
Encourage open discussion: A collaborative approach can lead to a richer understanding of the challenges and potential solutions.
Integrate research into practice: Can research and innovation strategies be integrated into daily training environments? This helps solutions to progress from the theoretical to applicable in practice.
Avoid silos: As one attendee pointed out, there is a risk in assigning multiple innovation responsibilities to a single individual. This can lead to inefficiencies. The answer lies in greater collaboration.
The Olympic gold medalist is sits down with the Athlete’s Voice to discuss her new venture with Always Alpha
Main photo: Always Alpha
A Data & Innovation article brought to you by
You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.
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The Los Angeles native competed in the 100, 200 and 400 meters, with an individual gold at the 2012 London Games in the 200. Felix also won 21 medals in the world championships before retiring at the end of 2022.
Felix has been active across a wide range of interests in recent years, as an advocate for Black maternal health, as the Co-Founder of women’s footwear brand Saysh and, as of today, the Co-Founder of Always Alpha, the first talent management firm exclusively dedicated to women’s sports.
For Always Alpha, Felix partnered with her brother, Wes — a former elite runner who has served as his sister’s agent — as well as former Wasserman executive Cosette Chaput and Dolphin Entertainment CEO Bill O’Dowd. Always Alpha is a subsidiary of the NASDAQ-listed Dolphin and will work with women athletes across all sports and support them in a variety of ways, including brand partnerships, media production and entrepreneurship.
On the motivation to start Always Alpha…
What led to it really was my experience in my career. My brother managed me, and we really had to kind of piece things together. There wasn’t really a cohesive strategy starting out to bring all the things that I was interested in and make all the work seamless. And so we had missteps and struggles, and when other athletes would come to me and ask, ‘How did you do this or that?’ Or how to start a company, or if they were interested in writing a book — whatever the thing is — where do I point them where they can do all the things and show up as themselves?
That was the inspiration — that it didn’t exists — and especially something focused on women’s sports, obviously, with all the momentum that we have now, but I think there’s just a unique way that you show up for a woman, and so we are excited to do that at Always Alpha.
Photo: Always Alpha
On an example of the marketing challenges she faced…
It was an idea of always wanting to get outside of track and field and break through to the mainstream. That was always the big fight. I felt like, through my career, we learned so much, and I always told Wes, ‘I wish we could do it again.’ Now we have all the pieces, and we have the things to take advantage of, the relationships and all of that. That would have made that path so much easier, as I was interested in business, and it just wasn’t there.
Now that I understand things so much clearer, I feel like a big piece of this is this legacy and mentorship. And how do I give back? And I really see this as a vehicle, also, to be able to do that and to say, ‘Let me help you avoid some of the hardships that I went through.’
On connecting with Dolphin to launch Always Alpha…
Cosette and I met working on the LA bid in 2016. Then we met Bill from Dolphin [earlier this year], and he really just shared the vision. He understood that what we were trying to create didn’t exist and that we needed to have something fully focused on women.
It was just being aligned — Wes, myself, Cosette — and talking to Bill. He got it. And that doesn’t always happen. So to be able to bring this into the world at scale, and to be able to have amazing resources that Dolphin provides is a unique experience.
On Allyson’s daily role with the agency…
It’s really that piece of guidance and [having], conversations with athletes and coaches broadcasters about, not only my experience, but what are their goals and what would they like to achieve? Being that piece of it, but also on a personal level, being available, being an open book and transparent about my journey and how I can help others with theirs.
On the roots of her entrepreneurship…
It’s funny — growing up, Wes and I used to collect things around our house, and then we would create a store and actually sell back our family’s items to them. And so we’ve always had that bug. We had a lemonade stand — it was actually a Kool-Aid stand — on our lawn. So we always had that spirit in our family, but we also weren’t really exposed to it in a real way. We didn’t know people close to us who had done it, and so being two kids from the inner city of LA, it didn’t really ever seem like a real possibility.
It wasn’t until right before starting Saysh [that we found] the confidence. I struggled with imposter syndrome, all those things, but getting the courage to just go for it. Launching Saysh was like, ‘OK, we can do this.’ To me, this is the next step in that journey that I’m on, just to make things better for women and make it an easier path.
Photo: Hannah Peters/Getty Images for World Athletics
On preparing for a post-competition career…
It was such a natural progression with Saysh because it happened organically. At that point, I wasn’t really focused on what was the next thing. It was, ‘Well, I don’t have shoes, and I need them, and so we’ve got to build this thing.’ Throughout my career, Wes was always really hounding me on, ‘You need to make these connections and these relationships, and we don’t know what it’s for, but it could be useful later on.’ And so I was really heavy into that and into mentorship. I wasn’t sure what the thing was going to be, but I was constantly trying to prepare for my next move.
On her mentors…
Jackie Joyner-Kersee has been my athletic mentor, and she’s been incredible. Mary Erdoes has been someone who has been really just transparent — one of those relationships that I didn’t know where it was going, but she’s provided so much business advice to me through the years, but early on in sport, she’s just shown up for me.
Yesterday, I was speaking at the NASDAQ Forum, and Fawn Weaver was one of the other speakers. Fawn has also been incredible in my life, helping me with that confidence piece, as someone who’s built an incredible business with Uncle Nearest, but just showing up in my real life and being that sounding board for me. I’m huge into mentorship. I think that if you haven’t done something before, talk to someone who has.
On the tech that she and coach Bob Kersee used to help her training…
That’s another one of those ‘I wish that I was at my prime now’ because I think there’s so many more tools, but we used a lot of filming and models — overlaying a model on top of the film that we take. You can set those models to like a world-record pace, and you can look at all of your mechanics. You can learn so much and adjust your [joint] angles and different things from that. So that was a huge piece while I was training that was helpful.
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.
NFL Player Health & Safety Innovation Advisor Jennifer Langton sets out the ways in which AI, AWS and the NFL’s Digital Athlete Program has had a positive impact.
Main Photo: CNBC
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Lower-extremity injuries have become a major focus for the league, with the first two weeks of preseason training camp – a period of re-acclimation to the sport – as the period of greatest risk, yet for the first time ever, the NFL saw a reduction in leg injuries in consecutive summers.
NFL Player Health & Safety Innovation Advisor Jennifer Langton shared that finding on stage at CNBC Evolve: AI Opportunity in New York City in October. She attributed that success, as well as changes to the kickoff rule, to the league’s work with AWS on the Digital Athlete, in which data about every rostered player on every team is anonymized and analyzed. Positional benchmarks are shared league-wide to help inform player training and usage.
“When you can integrate and aggregate data across all 32 [teams] for all 53 [players], you have more power in the data that you are generating to model,” said Langton, who for years helped lead player health and safety efforts as an SVP in the league office before leaving her full-time position for personal reasons in August.
Other work Langton highlighted was the use of computer vision triangulated with the Next Gen Stats RFID sensors to calculate the severity of head impacts, which for the first time last year was distributed to offensive and defensive line coaches on a weekly basis so they can “put in injury prevention strategies to get the head out of the game,” she said.
The reformatted kickoff was a direct result of the league’s biomechanical consultants at Biocore collaborating with AWS to run 10,000 seasons’ worth of data on rule variations to determine the best combination of a rule change that would be safe but also encourage on-field excitement.
The NFL has crowdsourced innovations in computer vision and worked with AWS on collecting more accurate tracking data. The investment in data capture is paying dividends and, Langton noted, will expand in the future to full-body limb and joint tracking. It has been a challenge to get the necessary precision for actionable insights, particularly with the high rate of occlusion in a contact sport like football.
“With the new AWS deal, that’s the focus, to build that pose estimation so that we can get to that true Digital Athlete on quantifying body movement,” Langton told SBJ in a post-panel interview.
Much of the efforts to date have been in creating operational efficiencies. A half-dozen years ago, for example, staff would take four days to manually tabulate head impacts through painstaking film review. That’s now done in real-time. Similarly, injuries would be listed in the league’s electronic medial records database as happening only in a particular quarter, so officials would have to review game film to find the specific cause. Now, those injuries are automatically tagged with a clip of the play in question.
“The infrastructure and the data to fuse that together is power,” Langton said of the work with AWS. “If you can standardize them and then synchronize, then we can integrate and aggregate across the league.”
The acclimation period was instituted in 2022, with leg injuries down 27% in 2024 compared to the year prior, in 2021. Langton had noted that the league saw declines in consecutive years for the first time.
“The decrease in the lower extremity injuries that we saw in the preseason last year led to the savings of more than 700 games that players did not miss during the regular season,” Miller said. “And so those benefits of the fewer hamstring strains or soft tissue injuries pull through into the regular season. Those injuries don’t recur as often, and the fact that the players don’t suffer the injuries in the first place mean that they’re healthier for the regular season.”
The new dynamic kickoff helped encourage 70% of kicks to be returned in the preseason, up 15% from last year. The injury rate on those played declined by 32%, with Miller noting that player speeds — which are calculated by the Next Gen Stats RFID chips in players’ shoulder pads — were about 20% lower on average in the reformatted version of the kickoff, in which most players line up 5-to-10 yards away from each other.
“Because we eliminated some of the space and therefore decreased some of the speeds, that led to a substantial decrease in the injury rate,” Miller said. “In fact, we saw zero ACL injuries on the kickoff. We saw zero MCL injuries on the kickoff. And those huge time-loss knee injuries are going to substantially save a lot of players, a lot of time.”
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.
Springbok Analytics uses AI to create a tool with the potential to help all 450 players.
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A graduate of the NBA Launchpad, Springbok Analytics has been scanning players for more than three years and has grown its team partner list to 10. To date, performance and medical staffs had used the product to detect muscle asymmetries and fatty infiltrations into the tissue, both of which can be early signs of injury risk.
But teams didn’t gain value from Springbok’s normative database because, even though there is a large proportion of elite athletes to go along with recreational competitors, most NBA players are outliers for their height and ability.
Utah Jazz Director of Performance Science Barnett Frank said the new NBA database “allows us to really be a little more strategic with our information.”
“One of the biggest challenges I have in the space is always getting asked, ‘Well, what does that mean for an NBA player?’” he added. “There’s 450 of them. When we’re comparing them to the general research or what’s out there in the population, it’s really hard to make any specific conclusions for them. So knowing that it’s NBA-specific for us, that really gives me a little more juice, for lack of a better term.”
This feature has been requested by teams for a while, said Matt Brown, Springbok’s Director of Sales & Business Development.
“It’s the first time they’ll really use the comparison mode,” he said. “Now they’re going to have a better pathway forward of team-wide analysis, understanding how strength and development is working for their players, and what metrics that means, and what that looks like, and is there an attainable phenotype that they’re going after in comparison to other players?”
Brown added that other sport-specific databases are in the pipeline. A pro soccer database is next — consisting of players from MLS, the English Premier League and Championship and other European leagues — and slated for this fall. American football would follow that, primarily of college football players who participated in the NFL-funded hamstring injury research study. Similar datasets for women’s soccer and the WNBA are also progressing toward possible 2025 launches.
In 2023, Springbok Analytics was one of SBJ’s 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech Companies and also won Best in Athlete Performance Technology at the Sports Business Awards: Tech. Nominations have opened for this year’s awards, with the nomination window closing on Oct. 21. You can review the categories and make nominations here.
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.
