Plantiga believes their wearable sensors can fight back against the male bias and collect data on ground forces, contact times, stride length, and asymmetries for female athletes.
Main image: Plantiga
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After that season, however, Bueckers underwent right ankle surgery. The following year, she suffered a tibial plateau fracture and meniscus tear in her left knee, which required another operation. In August 2022, she tore the ACL in that knee — another surgery.
But Bueckers was fully cleared for the 2023-24 season and returned to form. She was again a unanimous All-American, leading UConn to the Final Four again. During the tournament, her legendary coach, Geno Auriemma, called Bueckers “the best player in America,” in an implied comparison to Iowa’s Caitlin Clark.
Among the modalities helping monitor her as she returned to elite performance were sensors embedded in the insoles of the sneakers she wears in practices and games. That device, made by Plantiga, is in the early stages of a multifaceted effort to collect real-world biomechanics data on female athletes. Its sensors collect data on ground forces, contact times, stride length, asymmetries and more.
Plantiga is working with the WNBA through its participation in the NBA Launchpad program. It’s helping women’s running shoe brand Hettas inform its designs and materials. And it’s being deployed to track elite athletes such as UConn’s Bueckers, Azzi Fudd and Jana El Alfy, all of whom have suffered ACL or Achilles injuries over the past 20 months.
“The main problem that we see in women’s sports right now is that there’s a really big bias in the scientific literature, and there’s a bias in the resources that are often made available to women’s teams,” said Matt Jordan, a kinesiology professor at the University of Calgary who serves as Plantiga’s Chief Scientific Officer.
“Where Plantiga comes in is it affords us a brand-new opportunity to study girls and women playing in sport on the field of play, doing the things they do in the real world, not just in a lab, but on the field and on the turf. And it really opens up a new paradigm to be able to understand how training load, movement biomechanics and asymmetries, and how these things really influence the health profile of the female athlete.”
Plantiga Co-Founder/CEO Quin Sandler described the dual motivation for pursuing research in women’s sports: the altruistic idea of helping advance the science for women and also the business opportunity of supporting an underserved market. Title IX already ensures a large population of young women playing elite sports at U.S. universities, but the recent explosion in popularity of all women’s sports — pro and college — is helping grow budgets for more rigorous training tech.
Plantiga is helping women’s running shoe brand Hettas inform its design and materials as it builds sneakers for elite athletes, as well as working with the WNBA through the NBA Launchpad program. Image: Plantiga
Sandler declined to specify the price, but said it is comparable to the cost of technologies such as Catapult and Kinexon. In some instances, teams could get the same load monitoring data only from Plantiga.
The research gap between male and female athletes has been well documented in recent years, but the severe discrepancy persists. Chris Napier, Director of the Simon Fraser University Run Lab that has been conducting research for Hettas, said there’s a huge opportunity to create more optimal sneakers for women because just about everything to date has been designed based on research for men.
“Then they just make the shoe a little bit smaller for women, and we think we can do better than that,” Napier said. “We think we can actually optimize those materials and the geometries to really suit female runners and make them improve their mechanics to make them perform better. And then we think, potentially, we can also do better to prevent injury.”
The stark need became apparent when his company built a predictive model for the Canadian Armed Forces regarding knee injuries in soldiers.
Because most of the test subjects were men, Plantiga’s model became precise in identifying trends in their data. It could estimate how long ago a male soldier injured his knee down to the month.
“When we applied that model to women, it just didn’t work. Same model, same machine learning, but that goes to show you that their movement patterns are so unique that our model — because it was just trained on male data — literally couldn’t even see it accurately on women,” Sandler said. “If [the data] wasn’t on both sexes, it basically rendered it almost useless.”
Through NBA Launchpad, Plantiga is conducting a two-pronged research effort. Its technology will be available to WNBA players and performance coaches for use in practice to collect data on elite players, and it will be offered to a high-level girls’ basketball program, New Heights in Brooklyn, with a particular focus on tracking its U17 club team for up to six months.
Plantiga successfully completed the NBA’s rigorous wearables validation program, but the WNBA CBA prohibits wearable usage in games. The WNBA is introducing optical tracking for the first time this year with Second Spectrum, but there’s appeal in the potential of collecting ground forces from a device such as Plantiga as well. (The company’s athlete user investors include NBA player Thaddeus Young and Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter Andre de Grasse.)
NBA Vice President Tom Ryan described the utility of an inertial measurement unit, which is the type of sensor used by Plantiga, in the shoe: “Being able to have an IMU that is right there at the point of contact for both feet, we think is just a piece of data that is always going to be valuable, as a complement to optical.”
This is the first year Launchpad introduced a focus on the WNBA, with Ryan explaining that the league looked at technologies with application at all levels of “the basketball pyramid.” He said, “The goal on the grassroots side is to take all those learnings that an elite health and performance professional at a WNBA setting or NBA setting could teach an athlete, but then being able to take those learnings and productize it into Plantiga’s platform.”
Image: Plantiga
The goal is to collect longitudinal data that would create benchmarks of progression, just as has been established in European soccer academies, which have voluminous data on what the physical performance of each age and positional cohort should be.
“We want to collect a first-of-its-kind data set on what that player development pathway looks like,” Sandler added. “What does an elite 17-year-old basketball player look like? What does an elite 19-year-old, 21-year-old, 24-year-old look like?”
In the case of Bueckers, she began wearing Plantiga in early January, according to Andrea Hudy, UConn’s Director of Sports Performance for Women’s Basketball. Hudy noted the use of Plantiga at this juncture is mostly for information gathering. For Bueckers specifically, the data indicates “there are some things we can do after the season that I think will be helpful for her,” Hudy said, but too much intervention during a season would be unwise and impractical.
Hudy, who is concurrently in a PhD program at UConn, cited a 2019 research paper on Division I women’s soccer players who had MRI scans of their ACLs before and after the season. The study found a 10% increase in knees with edema, a type of swelling in the tissue outside of the joint, which is strongly correlated with injuries to the ligament.
“Is it an overuse injury? Is it a traumatic injury? What are we dealing with?” said Hudy, who was recruited by Auriemma in the late 1980s before a pair of ACL injuries. She instead played Division I volleyball at Maryland and said her personal injury history helps drive her research.
“It’s all coming back, in my opinion, to just gait patterns, and what happens before or after an injury,” Hudy added. “And then how does that reflect your gait afterwards? Because your body compensates in so many ways. And it’s just the kinetic chain of dysfunction if you don’t correct it right away.”
That can persist and manifest itself in future ailments. Part of the epidemic around ACL injuries, added Jordan, is the high recurrence rates, which studies have pegged as anywhere from 8 to 40 times higher risk, as well as the challenge just to return to the same level of play.
“Your ability to return to performance — that, you can’t hack unless you’re training smart, monitoring your deficits and attending to this every single day as a part of your training,” Jordan said. “We’ve known that forever, and the blind spot is essentially that once the athletes are back on the court, we have no clue how they look because we don’t have biomechanical devices that allow us to measure in the real world.”
In a world of insole sensors and properly designed sneakers, the shoes female athletes wear might finally fit.
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.
Alphabeats explains that the goal is to train one’s brain to produce more alpha waves, which are typically associated with calmness.
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The offering consists of an EEG-sensor-embedded headband supplied by BrainBit, which monitors brain activity while users go through mental training sessions in an accompanying mobile app. The sessions, ranging from eight to 12 minutes, are augmented by music playlists curated in partnership with audio streamer Feed.fm (which works with Dr Daniel Bowling, PhD, a neuroscientist at Stanford University School of Medicine) and include dynamic visualizations, cognitive games and eyes-closed meditations.
The idea, according to Alphabeats chief commercial officer Jorrit DeVries? “Training alpha [brainwaves],” he said, recommending users deploy Alphabeats’ solution several times per week over a four-to-six week span to see results. “This is not a solution that you use while you’re working out, for example.”
Alphabeats’ core innovation is in proprietary algorithms that respond to users’ brain activity – sourced from the EEG sensors – in real time. The goal through that feedback is to train one’s brain to produce more alpha waves, which are typically associated with calmness. The system does this by altering music to reinforce negative feedback when less alpha waves are being produced, and vice versa.
Image: Alphabeats
“At a very general level, you could say that [the music] would sound more flat [when providing negative feedback],” said Alphabeats’ head of product Elroy Verhoeven. “And if you were doing well, it would sound richer. It’s a continuous process as you’re listening to the music.”
Alphabeats’ thesis is that athlete training has historically not dedicated enough time to mental performance, instead focusing almost exclusively on physical training, nutrition and gear. Verhoeven and DeVries cite research conducted with Tilburg University in the Netherlands dating back to 2012 as evidence for their method.
“The trick is – if you’re familiar with meditation – to really tap into alpha, and to calm your brain down and to make sure that you produce more of the alpha waves than beta or gamma waves and really start to calm down your brain,” DeVries said. “That will ultimately lead to better focus, but also to better sleep outcomes and better recovery.”
Although Alphabeats’ technology is hardware-agnostic – it only requires EEG sensors to connect with – BrainBit is the company’s exclusive hardware provider as of now. Using the product on an individual basis involves purchasing a BrainBit headband (which retails for $499) and registering for Alphabeats’ $15.99 per month app subscription. In line with its US launch, however, Alphabeats is offering new customers a headband and one-year subscription for a total cost of $499.
The company also offers a starter package for teams, which includes 10 headbands and user accounts, access to an analytics dashboard, and support for onboarding and data analysis. Pricing for that offering varies. Alphabeats has a formal partnership with the Dutch Olympic archery team and a “couple” more in the hopper that they cannot yet publicly share, DeVries said.
Image: Alphabeats
The vision is that as EEG sensoring becomes more widespread, Alphabeats will be well-positioned to serve athletes and teams. “That’s our moonshot,” Verhoeven said, referencing Apple’s work around EEG sensors in its AirPods – for which the tech giant received approval on a patent last year – as one example.
“There’s different market segments where this taps into. We look, potentially, at a $12 billion market,” DeVries said. “This is a huge market where you see a lot of potential in different areas. But if you then boil it down to what we’re trying to do here, is really capture the athlete platform market, to make sure we connect as many athletes as possible in a hardware-agnostic way, to really build an install base that drives us to the next wave of growth where you see that EEG measurement become more and more available.”
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.
In the third and final session of her Performance Support Series, Dr Meg Popovic explored the value in wellbeing intelligence in fostering environments where athletes and coaches can thrive.
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So said Dr Meg Popovic at the outset of her Performance Support Series, where across three sessions she led Leaders Performance Institute members in an exploration of wellbeing and burnout.
In her view, high performance environments that foster wellbeing also:
She also acknowledged that her definition of wellbeing, while having broad relevance, will have subtly different application in each and every environment.
As for her own environment, Popovic is the Senior Professional Sports Manager for North America at EPIC Global Solutions, the world’s leading independent gambling harm minimisation consultancy and a valued Partner of the Leaders Performance Institute.
She also served as the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Director of Athlete Wellbeing & Performance between 2018 and 2021 and drew on that experience in this third and final session where she delved into wellbeing frameworks and ‘wellbeing intelligence’.
How to bring a wellbeing framework to life
An intentional strategy is essential when you have finite time with athletes and staff.
At the Leafs, Popovic adopted a three-phase approach:
However, your framework is not viable without ‘wellbeing intelligence’
‘Wellbeing intelligence’ refers to a skillset that leaders can develop to better understand and improve their own and staff wellbeing.
As Popovic explained, workplace challenges continue to increase and so having wellbeing intelligence becomes essential for effective leadership.
At the Leafs, she focused on three key areas of intelligence that integrated growth mindset and learning into the wellbeing and performance strategy of athletes and staff.
How do we ‘do’ growth mindset so the organisation embodies a growth mindset? The Leafs introduced ‘Mindset Mondays’, which was an organisation-wide communication sent to all athletes and staff to encourage the cultivation of character and performance that positively impacts the wider team culture. The communication spotlighted a person in the organisation each week who would share ‘The Seeds’, ‘The Sunlight’ and ‘The Growth’; providing advice, content and perspectives that everyone could read and engage with.
They also introduced professional development Thursdays. This was a 15-week period during the off-season which provided opportunities for athletes and staff to learn from experts outside of their specific sport. The player sessions were strictly a space for the players. The sessions gave them ownership of fostering their own growth mindset with guidance from key members of staff.
The ‘team of teams’ – the interconnected departments within an organisation – necessitates relational intelligence to better understand the unique needs of different subcultural groups within a team.
The Leafs hosted dedicated player development programmes enabling athletes to learn more about mental performance, wellbeing and different areas of interest. Alumni were also brought in to share stories around being a professional athlete.
There were also staff professional development workshops – four in-season and two in the off-season – for each department. These workshops were aligned to the goals of the team, specifically the areas identified when it came to skill development and building team culture.
At director level, there were fortnightly roundtables to connect C-suite individuals to each other in the hope of cross-pollinating ideas and best practices. Too often this subculture is overlooked.
What can be done to amplify individual experience and learning of self, profession, and leadership?
At the Leafs, one-to-one coaching was available for both athletes and staff to engage in confidential conversations. They also created a dedicated one-to-one player programme designed for athletes to discover answers to questions such as:
Another approach was a prospect mentorship programme, focused on providing support for up-and-coming talent. This was co-created with development staff to provide mentorship and professional development training for future and current young prospects.
Select alumni were also paired with the prospects in monthly calls to explore themes such as goal-setting, professionalism, use of social media, time management, navigating conflict and skill development.
Finally, athlete care and other support resources were created in collaboration with doctors, the operations team and the performance director to provide options for athletes and their families to access whilst playing for the team. These resources included parental support, family therapy, psychological assessment and mental health resources, clinical psychology and mental performance specialists.
The recurring challenges currently facing athletes, coaches and staff
The PGA Tour player and US Ryder Cup captain is the latest guest in SBJ Tech’s series The Athlete’s Voice.
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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.
Among the standout traits of Johnson, 48, is his durability. He had played 69 consecutive majors until withdrawing from the 2021 Open Championship, not because of injury, but because he had tested positive for Covid-19. In fact, Johnson revealed that he has never undergone any surgery in his career — before joking that he wished he hadn’t said that publicly.
One fitness tool Johnson has adopted in recent years is GolfForever, which recently raised a $10 million Series A investment round and was named the Official Golf Fitness System of the PGA Tour. GolfForever uses its patented SwingTrainer, resistance bands and AI-powered app to guide workouts. It was created by chiropractor Jeremy James and has been used by company ambassadors Johnson, Scottie Scheffler, Justin Leonard and Tom Kim. In all, more than 400 PGA Tour and LPGA pros are users.
On how’s he incorporated GolfForever into his training…
The versatility of it is one of the aspects I love about it. I use it every day. I use it at my gym at home, if I don’t see any of my PT guys, just to get going. I can use it in my hotel room. I can use it to warm up for tournament, before I practice at home, whatever. I use it all the time, because of what it has and the ease of it. It’s very mobile — stick it in my golf bag and go. Shoot, I can use it on the range before I actually started to compete. So I just love the accessibility of it at any given moment is really what I think sets it apart from other apparatuses when you’re talking about engaging, warming up, creating some sort of mobility, yet stability. That’s where I find it to be the best thing on the market.
On his training progression…
I do use weights. I do use other apparatuses, too, for my conditioning. This thing is not going to put on 15 pounds [6.8kg] of muscle. I’m 48 years old. Longevity and injury prevention are my two focuses, and knock on wood, I’m probably an oddity in the sense that I’ve never had to go under the knife — I shouldn’t have put that out there, but anyway.
I give my body its full attention each and every day. I think [GolfForever] really helps from a corrective standpoint. It allows me to go through my corrective exercises, my corrective movements, so that I’m warm. I can even go in and do some heavier stuff after I use it. And then when I cool down, it’s great to get everything balanced and firing again after my workout. The app is great, too. They have an app that’s very comprehensive. If I’ve got a corporate event and I’m just going to travel [but not compete], I could just take I could take the bands and the apparatus and use the app, and I can get a full workout in my hotel room if I desire.
On golfers’ need to counterbalance their rotational movements…
That is an absolutely fantastic question. Obviously I’m right handed player, so there is asymmetry in me innately. And I say that it’s probably because I didn’t give my body the attention it needed when I was a young, young, young pro. In the late 90s, golf fitness was just kind of a thing — now, it’s a full-fledged industry. Shoot, golf recovery is a full-fledged industry.
From my body’s standpoint, I’m trying to get as symmetrical as possible, fully knowing that it’s probably not going to be that possible because I’m still hitting golf balls constantly. I would have to hit golf balls left handed, at a pretty high rate to find some sort of symmetry, and I don’t intend on doing so. But the beauty of this GolfForever is it allows me to get into motions. If I need to do more — we’ll just say, for lack of a better term, left handed — I can do that.
One of my imbalances is I can really turn through the ball. So post-impact, I can just keep going. On my backswing, my T-spine, my torso, even down into my low back and shoulders, that whole area basically is fine, but it just doesn’t want to turn as far in the backswing as it does on the downswing. So I’m constantly doing a little bit more to help open up my T-spine on the way back. That’s always an emphasis, if I’m going to get specific.
I actually have a left-handed seven iron. I can go in my gym, or I have a little simulator room. I can go in there and just hit balls — it’s ugly But I can do that. I can actually put a weight on there too, if I desired, and I’ve got to be careful because it’s really uncomfortable. It’s really awkward. And it kind of hurts. But there’s some there’s some truth in that. Yeah.
On other parts of his wellness routine…
I think I’m fairly diligent. I’m sure there’s peers of mine, especially guys that are younger, that may exhaust the resources even more, but I cold plunge probably two times a day, usually in the morning to get me going. It’s kind of like an endorphin release. It’s a hormonal balancing mechanism, and then I’m also going to use heat therapy as well. I just got done working out. So everybody thinks well, you should cool down and get the plunge. Well, the research says you should wait at least three to four hours, so I’ll cold plunge probably tonight before I go to bed. I’ve got a plunge at home, and then I’ll also introduce heat before I go practice to get limber.
Then for supplements, I’m pretty diligent on what I put into my body for the most part. I mean, I can eat bad, too, like anybody but I’m also very conscious of what goes in. I’m a chiropractor’s son, so that’s all I know. Whether it’s vitamins or other things of that nature, I’m a part of a company called LivPur with four other golfers and we make pre-, during and post-round supplements that help —whether it’s aminos, electrolytes, proteins. I’m always constantly monitoring, monitoring that intake.
On recovery…
Sleep obviously is massive. And that’s the best form of recovery for frankly anybody if you can get proper sleep. I used to wear a Whoop. Probably should get back into it. I’ve got some of the things I can wear, too, but it gave me a little bit anxiety. I was only into it for about four to five, maybe six months. I’d be like, ‘Man, I slept great last night,’ and then it says you didn’t or just the opposite. But that’s data, and I love objective data. I probably need to get back into it. My boys are actually starting to do that — I’ve got a martial artist and a football player.
Teammates of mine — my PT and chiros — are constantly encouraging me, pushing me, making me uncomfortable. That’s also, I think, very rewarding in the end, too, so there’s a lot of things that go into my day-to-day operation.
On evaluating business deals…
I think my plate’s pretty full. With my team, my manager, my wife, we pursue relationships more than business opportunities. It’s got to be a good fit. It’s got to be a win-win. So I don’t you know, with three kids at home, I’m not desiring anything more. I like who I’m associated with. I hope they would say the same. And I don’t say it lightly because if we’re going to start something, you’re going to get all of me. I can only be both feet in with a certain number of obligations or ambassador roles. I don’t think it’s fair to myself or them if I spread myself too thin.
On the PGA Tour’s offer of equity to its players…
That’s a hard question. I’m learning as I go. I’ve pursued some communication with certain individuals and the Tour. I think everybody’s kind of learning. I understand it is probably the appropriate or pertinent next step in our evolution as a product. I’m also pretty trustworthy in the sense that I feel like there’s individuals making these decisions that are a lot more wise than I am, especially when it comes to just business in general and the savviness it requires.
It is new. It is obviously somewhat reactionary. But I’ll tell you what I am: I’m grateful for my peers. Because I served on that board in the past, I’m really grateful for the time and energy they’re putting into it. I don’t even know the half of it.
There’s really two factors in my mind, and the first one is I hope the money side of things is not the motivation. There’s an appropriate way to pursue money. Greed is the inappropriate way. So I hope, and I trust that they’re doing that right. And then the second thing would be — and these are 30,000-foot view things — don’t let the game of golf be secondary. It’s still got to be for the fans, it’s still got to be a level of entertainment, it’s still got to be meritocracy, it’s still got to be the purest form of the game where you earn what you get in the dirt. I trust that that that’s still a priority.
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.
Neurodivergence is not the blocker that some coaches perceive it to be and neurodivergent athletes are some of the best-equipped to perform – with the right coaching.
The term ‘neurodivergence’ can often be perceived to be a blocker in sport, but as Dr Julie White, Head of Learning Support at Millfield School, put it to our members at Leaders Meet: Teaching & Coaching, “neurodivergence is when there are differences from the ‘neurotypical’ as opposed to perceived weaknesses”.
In fact, neurodiverse learners have been known to display high levels of perseverance and demonstrate transferrable resilience into the classroom. They embody the words of Harvey Blume, who was one of the first journalist to cover neurodivergence. In 1998, in the Atlantic, he wrote:
Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general. Who can say what form of wiring will be best at any given moment?
You may be familiar or have heard of neurodivergence through familiarity with such terms as dyslexia, dyspraxia (cognitive learning and gross motor skills), autism (speech, communication and language processing), ADHD (social, emotional and mental health difficulties). But, a lot of the time, the signs and symptoms of these conditions are hidden or less obvious for coaches to pick up on.
It’s critical for coaches and practitioners to have a baseline understanding to ensure they know a) what to look out for; and b) how the various conditions affect decision-making and subsequent performance.
White breaks down one of the core neurodiverse challenges into two areas related to speed of thinking and recall:
Many neurodivergent people will have a weakness in one or both of these areas, regardless of their label.
It’s easiest to think about it as a bucket.
For most of us: information comes in the top, there’s a steady flow. It’s being processed in the middle section at a good speed, and it comes out of ‘the tap’.
But if your processing speed is slow, your ‘tap’ lets out a lot less water. The info comes in at a fair speed, the bucket fills up very quickly, it can’t drain quickly enough and so it overflows. That’s what happens in young people’s brains where they can’t take in any more information, and they feel overwhelmed.
On the field/pitch/training, you might see this as:
As a coach, you need to…
Pay attention to the language you use and the quantity of information you give:
You have to make adaptations. We’re not all the same. It’s about equity and giving them equal access.
Dr Julie White, Head of Learning Support, Millfield School
Coaching checklist
Don’t assume you know the full picture – many players will not acknowledge that they have a difficulty, because:
A coach should:
WorkRate is a startup seeking to address issues with lack of movement skills and neuromuscular fatigue in athletes.
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Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other high-impact areas in sports.
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World’s shortest elevator pitch: “WorkRate translates athlete-centered research into practice through diagnostics and evidence-based training to reduce injury and boost performance.”
Company: WorkRate, Inc.
Location: New York, New York
Year founded: 2020
Website/App: https://workrate.fit/
Funding round to date: “Self-funded.”
Who are your investors? “We do have some family and friends investments and that was up to around $30,000.”
Are you looking for more investment? “Yes. That would expand our capability development.”
Tell us about yourself, founder & CEO WorkRate Rondel King: “I was born and raised in the twin island republic of Trinidad and Tobago. In my formative years, I had a deep passion for science and sport. I co-founded a soccer team in my neighborhood that competed in the official youth league in Trinidad and Tobago. After one year of competing as a founding player, I migrated to New York. I studied exercise science at Brooklyn College and continued my sporting career by joining the soccer team at Brooklyn College. I experienced a series of injuries which severely hindered my development. I experienced sub-optimal results with my athlete care team, which included pain doctors, athletic trainers and physical therapists. This frustrating experience galvanized my passion for research. I made investments in continuing my education and completed my Masters in exercise physiology and sports nutrition at LIU Brooklyn. It was at this point I gained a deep understanding of my biomechanics and physiology, and I was able to solve my own problems that my care team wasn’t able to solve. After my personal success, I started asking questions. Why was my care team unsuccessful? What was missing in my care approach? Ultimately, I learned a huge disconnect exists between evidence and practice in athlete care. I started WorkRate to narrow this gap and improve athlete-centered care.”
Who are your co-founders/partners? “My co-founder and COO is Janna Szangolies. Janna is special in many ways, but if I had to choose one way that makes her stand out it’s her versatility. Not only is she a problem solver, but she also plays a pivotal role in translating the deep science into a customer-facing narrative. As a scientist, it’s sometimes difficult to cut the jargon. Janna helps keep me in check and to ensure we are communicating effectively with our users and collaborators.”
How does your platform work? “WorkRate designs and builds data models to enhance human performance. We have developed two diagnostic models and a training recommendation model to address two pertinent risk factors identified by the WorkRate scientific team – lack of movement skill and neuromuscular fatigue. The primary goal of WorkRate diagnostic testing is to obtain objective information to guide the training process properly and systematically. From a movement skill perspective, we developed a self-guided biomechanical analysis algorithm that objectively measures movement quality. The data from this analysis is manually entered into our platform by the user to individualize corrective exercises and identify orthopedic abnormalities. To diagnose neuromuscular fatigue, we invented a graded exercise test (GXT) that evaluates the integrated cardiovascular, pulmonary, musculoskeletal, and neuropsychological systems. We accomplished this by leveraging commercially available heart rate monitors – i.e. Polar H10 – and Inertial Measurement Units like Garmin and Apple smartwatches. The 21-stage running protocol is designed to objectively measure locomotor performance in free-living humans through the utilization of Human Activity Recognition (HAR). HAR is the art of identifying and naming activities using Artificial Intelligence. The rapid proliferation of wearable technologies and advancements in sensing analytics have greatly enhanced our capability development over the past four years. Our novel analysis functions similarly to lab-based graded exercise tests, whereas it can analyze critical running dynamic metrics such as ground contact time (GCT), cadence, stride length and vertical oscillation. Furthermore, the protocol calculates running economy and identifies heart rate zones – i.e. Zone 2 – to fine-tune aerobic and anaerobic metabolism for enhanced performance and fatigue mitigation. Data analytics from our diagnostic models are used to create our training recommendation models, which include respiratory muscle training, corrective exercises, gait training, neuromuscular training and zone-based conditioning. Ultimately, our product is the way we harness human performance data. Our model-based system promotes a classification of athlete performance that helps us to understand and analyze how various training methodologies affect performance and injury. WorkRate models are housed and delivered through the WorkRate Performance App for individual athletes, coaches and organizations.”
What problem is your company solving? “Athletes are still getting injured at a very high rate, from professional soccer all the way to your everyday runner. Research shows a significant gap exists between practice and scientific evidence in sports science that restricts the advancement of effective injury prevention and performance enhancement strategies. At WorkRate, we take a very evidence-based approach. We have curated a powerful, problem-solving model for sports science practice that incorporates the best evidence from well-designed studies, athlete and coach perspectives, documentation, performance diagnostics and the knowledge of the WorkRate Scientific Team.”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “We are pre-market. We are targeting soccer athletes and runners as our primary target market to start with.”
How are you marketing your product? “We are marketing our product through collaborative channels with our partners, such as InjureFree and Gateway Athletics Trinidad & Tobago. We have tapped into running communities throughout New York City. We’ve conducted pilots within these ecosystems. We’ve launched soccer performance ecosystems in Tampa, Fla., through collaboration with Flex Soccer. It’s very much a controlled and systematic deployment of our technology, and we do this to ensure our models are scientifically valid before we go into scale and a wider market. These collaborations will be guided by WorkRate Labs. WorkRate Labs is a boutique-style research and development hub that was built to bridge the gap between athlete-centered research and practice. The fully portable laboratory was designed to ensure that WorkRate diagnostics and interventions are scientifically validated via medical-grade diagnostic testing. WorkRate Labs is the cornerstone of the WorkRate evidence-based practice model.”
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “We will scale through our collaborative channels where we intend on acquiring up to 60,000 individual athletes and 5,000 coaches within the next 12-24 months.”
Image: WorkRate
How does your platform work? “WorkRate designs and builds data models to enhance human performance. We have developed two diagnostic models and a training recommendation model to address two pertinent risk factors identified by the WorkRate scientific team – lack of movement skill and neuromuscular fatigue. The primary goal of WorkRate diagnostic testing is to obtain objective information to guide the training process properly and systematically. From a movement skill perspective, we developed a self-guided biomechanical analysis algorithm that objectively measures movement quality. The data from this analysis is manually entered into our platform by the user to individualize corrective exercises and identify orthopedic abnormalities. To diagnose neuromuscular fatigue, we invented a graded exercise test (GXT) that evaluates the integrated cardiovascular, pulmonary, musculoskeletal, and neuropsychological systems. We accomplished this by leveraging commercially available heart rate monitors – i.e. Polar H10 – and Inertial Measurement Units like Garmin and Apple smartwatches. The 21-stage running protocol is designed to objectively measure locomotor performance in free-living humans through the utilization of Human Activity Recognition (HAR). HAR is the art of identifying and naming activities using Artificial Intelligence. The rapid proliferation of wearable technologies and advancements in sensing analytics have greatly enhanced our capability development over the past four years. Our novel analysis functions similarly to lab-based graded exercise tests, whereas it can analyze critical running dynamic metrics such as ground contact time (GCT), cadence, stride length and vertical oscillation. Furthermore, the protocol calculates running economy and identifies heart rate zones – i.e. Zone 2 – to fine-tune aerobic and anaerobic metabolism for enhanced performance and fatigue mitigation. Data analytics from our diagnostic models are used to create our training recommendation models, which include respiratory muscle training, corrective exercises, gait training, neuromuscular training and zone-based conditioning. Ultimately, our product is the way we harness human performance data. Our model-based system promotes a classification of athlete performance that helps us to understand and analyze how various training methodologies affect performance and injury. WorkRate models are housed and delivered through the WorkRate Performance App for individual athletes, coaches and organizations.”
What problem is your company solving? “Athletes are still getting injured at a very high rate, from professional soccer all the way to your everyday runner. Research shows a significant gap exists between practice and scientific evidence in sports science that restricts the advancement of effective injury prevention and performance enhancement strategies. At WorkRate, we take a very evidence-based approach. We have curated a powerful, problem-solving model for sports science practice that incorporates the best evidence from well-designed studies, athlete and coach perspectives, documentation, performance diagnostics and the knowledge of the WorkRate Scientific Team.”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “We are pre-market. We are targeting soccer athletes and runners as our primary target market to start with.”
How are you marketing your product? “We are marketing our product through collaborative channels with our partners, such as InjureFree and Gateway Athletics Trinidad & Tobago. We have tapped into running communities throughout New York City. We’ve conducted pilots within these ecosystems. We’ve launched soccer performance ecosystems in Tampa, Fla., through collaboration with Flex Soccer. It’s very much a controlled and systematic deployment of our technology, and we do this to ensure our models are scientifically valid before we go into scale and a wider market. These collaborations will be guided by WorkRate Labs. WorkRate Labs is a boutique-style research and development hub that was built to bridge the gap between athlete-centered research and practice. The fully portable laboratory was designed to ensure that WorkRate diagnostics and interventions are scientifically validated via medical-grade diagnostic testing. WorkRate Labs is the cornerstone of the WorkRate evidence-based practice model.”
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “We will scale through our collaborative channels where we intend on acquiring up to 60,000 individual athletes and 5,000 coaches within the next 12-24 months.”
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.
Edge3 and Kenyon Rasheed are using data to help athletes navigate the complex recruting process in college football.
A Data & Innovation article brought to you by
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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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Kenyon Rasheed captained the University of Oklahoma football team before playing three seasons in the NFL as a fullback, starting 10 games for the New York Giants in 1993 and 1994. When his playing career ended, Rasheed began a career in tech. He started at Oracle, then ventured out on his own, licensing sports data to media in a quarter-billion-dollar deal and building a HIPAA-compliant medical record system for players at the NFL Draft Combine.
Rasheed, 53, later consulted for Opendorse and worked for Global Payments, Inc, helping the company become the official commerce technology provider for Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
His latest project is Edge3, an athlete intelligence and advisory firm that recently partnered with IBM to leverage Watsonx AI to create a data-driven college recruiting service. Co-founded with a fellow NFL alumnus, Brian Jones, who is also a CBS Sports analyst, Edge3 raised a friends and family seed raise in 2022 and signed with Next League to develop its product strategy and business model. Other retired NFL and NBA stars — Warren Sapp, Gary Payton, Horace Grant — joined as advisors, and Edge3’s first client was Will Anderson Jr, a national champion at Alabama who recently was named NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year with the Houston Texans.
On the idea for Edge3…
I was running a podcast and was having on a lot of retired athletes, Jonathan Hayes, Rod Woodson. I heard a coach in them as they were being interviewed — a need to give back this intelligence and knowledge that they had. And my question was, ‘Why are you not coaching? You’re Hall of Famers.’ And they had the same question, ‘Why are we not coaching because we’re Hall of Famers?’ What I found is, there’s really only 32 opportunities to do that — or broadcasting — to really give back what you know. And as you get older, your name loses a lot of relevance. So what doesn’t always fade is that intelligence.
Instead of trying to coach 32 teams, what if they could coach 1000s of teams because of the information? Well, I looked at technology and said, What a great way to scale it. If I can take all of this information and stories and intelligence of all of these players that have been through, the recruiting process, college, pro, financial planners, agents, NIL deals, all of that, and then give it to the generation that actually needs it, which are these young athletes and parents that are coming up.
On proving the idea…
To test it out, I went out and said, I’m not an agent. Let me see if I can go sign a first-round pick and have them be our first client. And that happened to be Will Anderson Jr. And all we did was [say] we didn’t really know if we could help you at the time, but let us try to add our intelligence and advisory position to help you choose an agent, to help you choose a financial planner, teach you how the marketing game actually runs for an athlete. And we were able to do that and really kind of standardize his search around picking an agent. So we were interviewing CAA and Klutch and Octagon, and all of these under the parameters of what are the requirements for the family.
On convincing his first client…
This is where I realized this was different. Because whereas CAA and Klutch are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars recruiting players to get them to sign with them, I did it on a Zoom. But on the Zoom, I had Warren Sapp. I had Horace Grant. I had Gary Payton. I had Brian Jones. When his mom and dad turn on the Zoom and sees us, I tell Mr Anderson, ‘[I see] the scowl on your face. You’ve probably met with a thousand agents — we’re not agents. We don’t want anything from you. We want to be able to see if we can help you. These guys have been through the same thing your son’s going to go through. Our parents went through the same thing you guys are going through, trying to figure out who’s real, who’s not. And we would love to help you. And the difference is, it’s us. This is not a third-party coming through. You’re working directly with the guys who have actually been through it.’ Literally Mrs Anderson was in tears at the end of the call because she was so overwhelmed from the agents.
“All of this information and stories and intelligence, the recruiting process, college, pro, financial planners, agents, NIL deals, all of that, [Edge3] gives it to the generation that actually needs it.” Image: Edge3
We started to build out a plan for them that got them to the draft. It was really amazing because we were sitting in rooms with Klutch and CAA, listening to pitches that we heard 30 years ago. Our thing was, well, with all of this data available, we already know what Will’s going to make based on his draft position because we have enough information to know that these days — thanks to fantasy, thanks to betting — any datapoint that can possibly be had on a player, we have. So why are we not interpreting that for the athlete and the parent to understand, This is what the agent actually does. This is the value of what he brings. And understand that it’s a marketing game. And by that I mean this, the athletes on the field get their money. Agents are there to represent and present that in a way that leverages more opportunity for them.
But the data is the same. So if I have access to the data, you have access to the data. Why am I paying you 3%? And I’m not to say that they don’t deserve a fair shake. But at the end of the day, every vertical has changed. I looked at the finance industry, I looked at the legal business — I look at Legal Zoom, for instance. And as I said, 15 years ago, you had to walk in and to a lawyer’s office to create an LLC. Now I can go on LegalZoom and do with the templates, and if I need an expert, here’s a attorney and expert there. So why are we not doing that in sports when all of this information and data is available?
On how coaches benefit…
We believe it’s a lead generation for the schools as well. Because as we were talking to coaches, what they were trying to say is, ‘If you look at all of the media platforms that cover recruiting, one kid may be 6’2” on one site and 6’5” on another. He may be running a 4.8 [40-yard dash] on one site and 4.5 on the other.’ They have to sort through all of that data as well. So why are we not narrowing down the scope?
[They are] looking at this, from their perspective, as a roster management [tool] and the more information we take on kids, and the more information we understand about what they’re doing in their systems, we can figure out a better match. That’s really where IBM Watsonx has come in because it’s able to actually put into machine learning a lot of these data points because we’re asking the right questions from both sides. What does an athlete want? What does a coach want? What is the school looking for? What is a parent looking for? All of those things are what we’re putting together in the engine.
On developing the product with Watsonx…
We also worked with Next League who handled our discovery. Dave Nugent and those guys were awesome because they gave us a roadmap on how we can build this out and conceptually understood what this looks like. Because I have seen so many different platforms — I’ve worked with Opendorse, I’ve worked with Teamworks, I’ve worked with Microsoft — I’ve seen all of these technologies in bits and pieces. And they may have one piece of the solution, but not the totality of it, which is why we don’t see a lot of new technologies being implemented in sports.
One of the things I was talking to IBM about was, ‘We see the probabilities around tennis. What if we could take that predictive engine that you already are using and apply it to this industry the right way? By having subject matter experts sitting here telling you, no, here’s the information we need to retrieve from all of this data. You figure out how to get it to me and give me the answer.’
On the business proposition for college programs…
To be able to go into an athletic department, sit down with the AD, figure out their financials, and where they’re spending money on recruiting, being able to sit down with a position coach and say, ‘OK, how are you narrowing down your field and communicating who you want to offer to the head coach?’ Going to the front end analysts saying, ‘How many players are you evaluating? How are you bringing that data in and communicating that upstream to a CEO, which is, at the end of the day, a head coach making a decision?’ So we approached this from just a business standpoint, with information needing to be gathered, needing to be analyzed, and needing to be collaborated with within the organization.
Thanks to the transfer portal, we found that schools now have 48 hours to decide, ‘Do I keep recruiting this high school kid? Or should I take a kid out of the portal?’ And from athlete side, what we now know is, let’s look at the average age of a roster. If the average age of a starter is 23 years old, and I’m 17, 18, it says a lot. So when we talk data, it doesn’t really need to be this complicated process. We’re talking, simplify things that can give an athlete a better sense of my success at a particular school and on the other way around: what’s the risk of me taking this athlete and him being on my roster for three or four years and being productive within my system? And so we believe those are two core questions that we can help answer on both sides.
On leveraging playing experience…
Everyone’s got access to the same data. It’s how we look at it, and there are certain traits that every coach is looking for, no matter what the positional room, no matter what the team. This is a poll that I did with a lot of players: I would send tape out of a kid, and just say, ‘Give me five things that you see.’ They were all consistent with what they all saw. It was the same terminology — hip mobility, feet, I want to see his eyes, things like that — that I was like, ‘Well, what if we standardized those things?’
If Warren Sapp could develop an assessment for defensive tackles based on his eyesight — and what people didn’t realize is that Warren on a Saturday is watching multiple college football games with a Telestrator, sending me and the other partners on my team clips of what a defensive tackle is not doing. And I’m like, ‘Warren, first of all, you’ve got to stop this.’ But that’s how deeply we watch games. My wife gets irritated with me because I can see two plays and be like, ‘He doesn’t bend fast enough. He doesn’t work his head.’ Just automatically. And if you talk to any former player, they’ll tell you the same thing. They watch the game differently. I want linebackers that understand the linebacker position to evaluate linebackers.
On projecting college recruits’ performance…
We live in a world that a star system has been created by media companies to determine the value of a player. We have all ingested that as the standard. What I will ask you is, if a five-star is truly a five-star, how come all of them are not first-round picks? Because a five-star to one roster may be a three-star to another, based on the system, based on who they’re playing with, based on historical look at the coach, based on the fact he may be going out of state — there are so many other factors to determine the success.
We have a history that we can baseline now and then backtrack to start predictive models around the kids that are coming in today. [We have] a group of guys that we know who can actually dig in and understand the game and then look at it and re-engineer the solution backwards. Start with what we look for in a position and then build out from there. We haven’t even touched the surface yet. Yeah. Because everything that we’re looking at now is from what we know. I believe, with the help of IBM and Watsonx, that’s going to start to tell us things that we can’t see within those data patterns.
On how he started his career in tech…
When I retired, I didn’t know what the hell I was going do like any other athlete. I met a guy on the plane who worked at Oracle. He said, ‘Hey, I think you’d be good at sales.’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything about technology.’ He said, ‘I can teach you technology. What I can’t teach you is what you already know, and that is an understanding of people and markets.’ So I went to work for Oracle, which then taught me that there was software being built for individual verticals based on the processes of those verticals. Well, sports is as a vertical so who would know those processes better than me?
And so I took a gamble on myself. And in 1999 I started with what was called Rasheed & Associates. My first client was Interactive Systems Worldwide, which provided a real-time, play-by-play betting system that was in Las Vegas. I introduced them to the NFL, NBA, Concacaf , and all of them said, ‘Too closely resembling gambling. We will never touch it.’ This was at the NFL offices when I was 27 years old. Then I said, ‘OK, what if we had a game and a contest piece off of that,’ and I got to Kirch Media through Concacaf, and [Kirch] ended up licensing the technology for $250 million [over 14 years]. We were using it in SkyBet overseas as an interactive betting system.
On his next career steps…
So I was in betting well before and then two years later, someone asked me about a health smart card. Can we put our medical records on a card and take it with us? This was in 2002. And I was like, ‘What if the NFL players had their medical records on their player card?’ So I started polling trainers, then I found out about HIPAA, and then I started going out to teams.
I created what they called the Player Record Library System. I got everybody at the Combine, all 32 teams, to use the system. I took all of their medical information and put it into an API that they could access during the draft. Prior to this, they were FedExing medical records back and forth. I did not know anything about technology. I didn’t understand programming, and I wasn’t in the medical industry. But at 28 years old, I’m presenting to Paul Tagliabue, [NFL EVP and Chief Legal Officer] Harold Henderson, the medical council, and it changed how the Combine operated.
It taught me how to commercialize a product from concept, which is what we’re doing today. And then in 2015, when everyone was talking about fan engagement, I got into Global Payments. Mercedes-Benz Stadium is the first stadium that did a direct deal minus Ticketmaster, established payment and fintech within the sponsorship divisions within the sports industry. And now look at where we’re at right today with cash-less stadiums. So all of these purviews have given me an understanding of how this stuff actually works, how it can be commercialized, how we can build a product, and how to actually sell it, and have an instance where they can actually use it on a wide-scale basis.
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.
