Orreco’s FitrWoman and FitrCoach apps can help to normalize conversations around female athlete health and provide an educational resource for athletes and coaches alike.
Main image: The new FitrWoman app includes cycle tracking for diverse menstrual cycles and hormonal contraceptives use as well as personalized content and recommendations informed by cycle status and symptom logging. [courtesy of Orreco]
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FitrWoman remains free for all users. The companion FitrCoach app — which helps coaches and sport scientists working with female teams — also received an upgrade and now offers both a free and premium option.
Users can input health information, such as symptoms related to the stages of the menstrual cycle, and receive educational resources catered to their specific needs at that moment. Among the enhancements is the ability to select a type of hormonal contraceptive for further personalization, with FitrWoman now offering eight user journeys instead of just one.
“We’ve increased the amount [of content], really translating that research and giving evidence-based material for a female health topic that is often taboo,” Orreco Female Athlete Specialist Jessica Freemas said. “We really want to normalize the conversation, and I think this app really helps do that through the resources that you can search and find specific to physiology, nutrition and symptoms all around how to train at your best and be at your best and really bring that body awareness and identifying patterns within yourself.”
The technical director of Orreco’s Female Athlete program, Georgie Bruinvels, is the science lead for FitrWoman and FitrCoach. Among the earliest adopters of FitrWoman after it launched in 2018 is American swimmer Allison Schmitt, a 10-time Olympic medalist who joined Orreco’s Female Athlete team last year.
“It really fosters a deeper understanding of your own health and well-being,” Schmitt said. “I think it really helps with knowing your own body — we always say, ‘Be the CEO of your own body.’”
There is growing research into the physiological impact of a female athlete’s cycle on her performance, with some early indications that the body has greater capacity of different types of exercise — such as cardio or strength training — at particular intervals.
That type of understanding hasn’t evolved enough for definitive recommendations but does warrant some guidelines for each user to internalize based on her own experience, noted Freemas, whose PhD studies included research on the effects of menstrual cycle hormone fluctuations on female physiology and performance.
“That’s so specific to physiology that not everybody might feel that effect,” she said. “It really depends a lot on the sensitivity to those hormones for each individual. And so the app is not prescriptive or diagnostic, it’s really just, ‘Hey, the research says that you might have increased readiness, you might have increased glycogen storage during this phase.’ And so take that as you will, if you feel those effects, learn about it and alter maybe nutrition or exercise performance and training. But there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach yet.”
Wearable companies Oura and Whoop are among those conducting research in this area as well. For now, FitrWoman relies on user-inputted data, but a technology integration is possible in the future.
Orreco, which received SBJ Tech’s Best in Athlete Performance Technology Award in 2022, conducted research that found two-thirds of women report changes in performance due to their menstrual cycles while barely one-quarter receive any information about it. Schmitt said the topic was never discussed in her swimming career until she developed significant physiological problems.
“The [Orreco] team really helped facilitate that, and my coach was very open to be on calls with the team and to discuss my period, which you would think is a very private thing,” Schmitt said. “But in a sport and especially when you’re working with a team, it’s very important to understand all aspects of the human body and it’s a little bit more complicated with a female athlete.”
The FitrCoach platform integrates with the app and offers a dynamic dashboard and athlete profiles for coaches.
Helping bridge that gap — especially in more socially delicate situations of a male coach and female athlete — is FitrCoach, whose dashboard enables team-wide monitoring.
“The coolest thing is really the streamlined communication between FitrCoach user and athlete because the coach can see, ‘OK, this athlete has logged low back pain as a symptom for the last three cycles. I’m going to send her resources through this platform,’” Freemas said. “Maybe they’re not comfortable [with other] communication because it can be an uncomfortable topic of conversation.”
Freemas added that one of the other new features is the ability to add positive symptoms, a less-discussed portion of female physiology that she has personally researched.
“Oftentimes your menstrual cycle narrative is really that it’s a burden to exercise, performance and training and that it disrupts quality of life, which is true, but there are positives that come out from these hormonal changes,” she said. “Estrogen acts on the serotonin dopamine pathway that could improve mood at certain times. And so we want to bring that body awareness to a positivity of the menstrual cycle as well and be able to really harness your hormones as a superpower.”
The US Women’s National Team in soccer, USA Swimming and USA Volleyball are among the enterprise adopters of FitrWoman. And Schmitt makes clear that the reliance on this app is intended not as a crutch but as a resource.
“It’s also very important for us to have users understand that our product and our education is not to create an excuse because, if I’m at the Olympics and at an Olympic final, and I am not at my best, or I’m on my period, and I don’t feel like I’m at my best, I’m not going to be able to postpone the Olympics,” she said. “But we’re able to know that months in advance and really prepare and be proactive beforehand to best prepare me for that day.”
Dr Amal Hassan at Harlequins Women explores a much misunderstood aspect of her players’ health and suggests ways in which coaches and practitioners can help.
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“What I’ve learned supporting rugby players,” she began, “is that periods can be a barrier to participation in the first place, a perceived barrier to skill and technical development through a season, can have health implications that really impact their performance, and it possibly keeps players from developing at really crucial points.”
Hassan was speaking as part of a panel discussion on the physiology of the female athlete at September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium. She spoke alongside pelvic health physiotherapist Emma Brockley and Dr Nicola Brown, an Associate Professor in Female Health & Performance at St Mary’s University.
Session moderator Claire-Marie Roberts, who has just been appointed Performance Director at English Championship club Coventry City, homed in on Hassan’s reference to skill acquisition.
“A training season won’t discriminate,” said Hassan in response. “You’ll be needed to train on any given day of your menstrual cycle, if you’re off contraception, for example. So you need to be able to show up the best you can. However, at certain points in certain individuals, it may be that their menstrual cycle fades, where the symptoms or dysfunction they experience may actually be medical and the impact on their ability to train, to show up as the person they want to be to their coaches and the staff they’re working with, and, on game day, you can imagine how that might translate.
“That’s not to say that every day is going to be a different flavour of menstrual cycle dysfunction for an athlete, but there might be really key points in, say, a season or a cycle where they have to be absolutely present and engaged in their training for their skill acquisition to develop at the pace we want it to. If you can imagine not thinking about this component and the effect it has on athletes’ development, we’re just expecting them to be able to cope as long as we control for medical, load and other aspects of sports science, but we don’t consider this other very important aspect that is across the board for all of our female players if they’re off contraception, then we’re missing a trick.
“And what I find interesting is if you ask athletes if they think it’s impacted their skill development, they might say yes and more often than I would expect.”
Hassan noted that it is important to separate menstrual dysfunction and symptoms. “Symptoms could be normal,” she continued. “What we don’t understand fully is what is a normal menstrual cycle for an athlete or not. We’re good at delineating that from their perspective; I can tell you what’s pathology or not according to a certain criteria, but we don’t actually know what’s normal for an athlete. So it could be normal that you do expect symptoms and that’s not dysfunction. That’s just part and parcel of your menstrual cycle.”
In this article, Hassan, who has also worked in ballet, reflects on the support that all teams and organisations can provide for athletes as well as the implications for those female athletes playing collision sports.
Note: Hassan’s responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
The importance of menstrual tracking…
If you’ve got the resources, tracking is important. And that might be tracking done by your sports science team with the consent of the athletes. In the absence of those resources and that expertise in-house, that might look like the athletes receiving some education and taking it upon themselves to track their menstrual cycles. Ultimately, I believe this should be player-led or athlete-led so that an athlete can come to you with any concerns, but what you want to do is you want to pick up any patterns. It’s going to differ between athletes. It might be that you can pick up some really important trends in sleep dysfunction, in cravings, in core recovery, in back pain in certain parts of the cycle, otherwise it can start working proactively against a team, which is there to support an athlete ahead of time so that it doesn’t become a reactive approach. It becomes very proactive and built into a programme.
The gold standard in supporting athletes with their menstrual cycle…
I don’t think we’ve necessarily reached it anywhere and explored the full capabilities. It must span medical and performance because you might pick up some medical issues but it’s very much aligned with your performance programme or your sport. The gold standard within your team will look like setting out everyone’s roles and responsibilities, in a team environment tracking across the team, getting buy-in from individual athletes, collecting as much data as possible so that you can be accurate about your planning. Now, that might be impractical even in some elite settings in women’s sport but where there’s full professionalisation, athletes are full-time, you’ve got the staff resource to do it.
Steps that all teams can take…
It’s important to recognise where you don’t necessarily have the expertise in-house. So some sports may have doctors as part of their teams, they might be full-time, they might not be, they might be junior doctors in their training, or they may be consultants, they may be consultants in orthopaedics but have no medical training in terms of gyno health or endocrinology. So it’s really important to understand where you’re at and that if you don’t have that expertise in-house you have onward referral pathways in place for any pathology that you pick up. In the middle, you’ve got the option, for example to use a platform like Fittr Coach and be able to access that with the resources that you have; your performance medicine team might be able to do the tracking, involve the athletes in collecting the data, and you can try to pick up any patterns there. At the other end of the spectrum, athletes can use a free app to track their periods, check their cycles are regular, keep a diary of any issues, any symptoms, try and relate that to training, to any recovery, nutrition, their psychology. It can get quite complicated but if you just have a structure around it and you do it every day it becomes simple. You will then want to signpost to that individual’s GP if there are any issues. Obviously a GP is not going to be experienced or qualified at discussing performance but there are quite a few resources available for athletes to read or podcasts to listen to. It’s not going to do any harm for them to consider that the menstrual cycle might be a component in planning their training or their recovery.
The ethical considerations…
If you’re encouraging a practice, there’s got to be a structure around it. So who’s leading on that? Who’s driving the education? Who’s the go-to person for questions and answers? I think you have to be really intentional in the rollout of teamwide services or strategies like this. Everything needs to really be in place so that you don’t come across issues by surprise. I think you could have this problem even within an environment that has a great structure. Ultimately, the big one is supplements. A lot of athletes will think about particular supplements that might help them with symptoms, with recovery, and they just need to make sure they’re not breaching anti-doping guidelines; and that you are encouraging across the board, you’ve got nutritionists, doctors, etc. open communication about anything they want to try. We do want to empower athletes to be the best they can be but just within the realms of safety.
On athletes approaching pregnancy and birth…
This is a space that’s continuing to develop and that development should aid and increase the confidence within the performance medical team and within athletes in approaching training through pregnancy, continuing to be part of your sport during your pregnancy and then return, post-natal, post-partum. If you think about it from a framework perspective, it’s really important that pillars that include HR and contractual factors, the players’ wishes, their psychology during pregnancy, the skillset and experience within your team managing that athlete, your protocols, your emergency action plans from a medical perspective, your forward planning and programming from a rehabilitative perspective towards return-to-play and the facilitation of preparing for birth and the early post-natal phase, which is a really crucial period of time in any woman’s life, are proactively managed. It can seem really overwhelming if you’ve never done it before and I would encourage any institution who has never done it before to not wait until it does happen; to be proactive in building policies and protocols ahead of time and developing the skillset you have in-house, so that you are ready when it does happen, because it eventually will. If you think of the period of life where an athlete’s fertility is peaking, it’s merging with the performance time in their careers generally.
The impact of a collision sport on menstrual dysfunction and symptoms…
What we tend to see in sports that are typically endurance sports or aesthetic disciplines like ballet is that greater maturation is at risk of being delayed because of the energy demands and the chasing of an aesthetic goal from a physique perspective. So in those sports you might see there is a delay that might impact bone health, they might go on to be at risk of stress fractures, broadly speaking. In rugby, what you have to consider is the load, the impact of stress on the endocrine system, and then you’ll swing more towards menstrual dysfunction and symptoms and poor under-recovery impacting their endocrine system. What you also tend to see, and this is really anecdotal from my perspective, having worked in ballet and having worked in rugby, what we see in ballet is a lack of periods and amenorrhea as a risk. What we see in rugby is you’re more likely to be struggling with something like PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome]. With PCOS, you see higher androgen levels, that will translate into some sport-enhancing metrics in terms of how strong you are potentially. And this is not proven, this is just anecdotal, with that what you get is more menstrual symptoms relating to the hormonal imbalance. So I think it’s down to really understanding our sport. We don’t have that data, we need to understand across the board what the typical issues girls and then women playing senior rugby are struggling with and I guess it’s a call to action for research. I can just rely on my own anecdotal experience at my club. It needs more effort across the board.
What are the implications for you and your team?
Main image: The PGA Tour demonstrated its generative AI virtual assistant at the Pro Am for Amazon’s re:Invent event in Las Vegas in late November. A video clip was generated after the AI assistant answered a question. Then the player would attempt to replicate the shot. [courtesy of Amazon]
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Limitations were apparent early — answers are not always factual, and there’s pending litigation challenging copyright protection on source material — but ChatGPT’s arrival forced everyone in every industry, including sports, to consider how generative AI might aid their end product or internal workflows.
“I would say it may be overhyped in the short term,” said Anil Jain, Google Cloud Global Managing Director for Strategic Consumer Industries, “but it’s definitely underhyped in the long term.”
AI has existed in sports for a quarter-century but not like this. Generative AI, the field that underlies ChatGPT, creates new data and content. Even what the public saw a year ago was not truly new technology, but it marked a change in scale and availability. It was officially ChatGPT-3.5; the original version, ChatGPT-1, was released in June 2018.
“The tech capabilities are a bit of an evolution — we’ve seen elements of this for the last couple of years — but the accessibility has become very revolutionary,” said Shaown Nandi, AWS Director of Technology for Industries and Strategic Accounts.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI may have grabbed the early headlines — and ChatGPT becoming a generic term for generative AI — but there are numerous entries in this space including those from Big Tech, such as AWS’s Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and Meta’s LLaMA, as well as other players like Databricks, Veritone, Pramana Labs and more.
Drawing on insights from more than two dozen leaders in the sports and technology industries, Sports Business Journal has identified applications of generative AI across media and content, operational efficiency, athlete performance, data analysis, marketing, customer service, ticketing and cybersecurity.
Already it’s being tested to fuel content in the NBA app, played a role in baseball operations for the World Series champion Texas Rangers, and automated commentary for highlights of tennis Grand Slams and the Masters in golf.
In some sectors, it will be a necessary cost center; in others, it can drive revenue. More use cases will emerge. And everyone stands to be involved.
“The uniqueness here is ChatGPT was the first time it was introduced to the public, and it was in an easy interface,” said WSC Sports CEO Daniel Shichman, whose company uses AI to automate the creation of video highlights. “It was not just behind the scenes. Everyone can interact with it. Everyone can see the magic of AI.”
CrowdIQ applies computer vision to generate crowd data from high-resolution photos. [Image: Detroit Lions]
WSC Sports does something that was unthinkable a decade ago. It ingests audio and video, recognizes the action and excitement, adds metadata tags for the archives and then generates video reels based on requested criteria, all without human intervention beyond the initial query. It has described its technology as “automagical.”
“It’s a very blurry line to say what is actually generative AI and what is just AI,” Shichman said.
Prior uses of AI in sports involved machine learning, computer vision and deep learning. Those sub-disciplines of AI had wide-ranging capacity to automate tasks, to scour through data for unnoticed trends and to track human and ball movement. Deploying machine learning on a CRM to identify fans’ needs is deeply useful, but it’s the creation of something new that more fully captures the imagination.
The closest one can find to a consensus definition for generative AI is that it requires — warning, gory tech terms ahead — a transformer-based neural network. A transformer is a deep learning architecture invented by Google researchers in 2017 that enabled more parallel processing for faster task completions and required less training time. (The GPT in ChatGPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer.) Generative AI can create in a variety of media, including images and videos, but it is commonly built on top of a large language model to create the conversational text exchanges.
“That’s a huge democratizing force,” Jain said of generative AI, describing it as “the ability to really understand and reason out, what is the intent of the words that are being strung together and how do we put those back. It’s all really complex math in the end. It’s mathematical representations of all these patterns and connections between words and ideas.”
Different models meet different needs. Google, for instance, developed Bard as its consumer-facing generative AI tool and Vertex AI as its enterprise offering. It’s an important distinction: ChatGPT, Bard and the like are trained on wide-ranging data sources, not all of them fact-checked, and such broad AI models are prone to “hallucinations,” which are fabrications generated to compensate for gaps in the training data.
Any product a sports property puts its name on for fan consumption or uses to drive business decisions will demand higher rigor. There’s a necessity for curated, verified datasets.
“The challenge with generative AI — and where you see a lot of fear and uncertainty being thrown out — is, because it’s creating new data, you then have to start asking about, ‘Did it create it with the right guardrails? Did it understand what was accurate as a source and what was inaccurate?’” Nandi said.
Creating a vocabulary of sport requires a bimodal process, Stats Perform Chief Scientist Patrick Lucey said, noting the prevalence of text and visuals. Stats Perform developed a tracking solution, Opta Vision, to extract data from video and bridge that gap. It can work on broadcast footage, using generative AI to model actions by players who are off-screen.
“Sport actually doesn’t exist in natural language — it’s a constructed language,” Lucey said. “At the heart of it, sports data is the language of sport. It’s how we communicate it, we understand it, [how] it’s codified.”
R&D for these large language models and generative AI algorithms has accelerated rapidly over the past year. One example: Microsoft has reportedly invested a total of $13 billion in OpenAI, with $10 billion allocated last January. (Training the most recent ChatGPT-4 model is said to have cost more than $100 million.) And it’s not just financial might, but collective brainpower concentrated on the field that’s rare in human history, with the recent exception of the scientific and medical communities concerting their efforts after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Researchers and people from all over the world shifted from working on many other verticals, to researching and working on large language models and many implementations of generative AI,” Shichman said. “And I think that’s why we see this domain is moving so fast.”
An informal survey of North American sports leagues didn’t find much immediate traction except for the NBA working with Microsoft and WSC Sports to test some content in their app. The NFL has assembled an artificial intelligence task force from multiple departments to examine possible applications.
“That AI council has been meeting with some of our large partners to really figure out the landscape and where we need to go in this space but also trying to understand the regulatory things that may be coming down the pike,” said NFL CIO Gary Brantley.
“We’re not moving slow,” he added, “but we’re not sprinting.”
Amazon generated synthetic data to test scenarios around its Just Walk Out stores. [Image: Amazon]
On any given tournament weekend, 144 golfers compete in a PGA Tour event. That’s about 10,000 shots per day in the opening rounds. To superserve its audience, the tour first leveraged AI in 2018, partnering with Narrative Science to create automated written recaps for every player on the course.
That same year, the PGA Tour began collaborating with WSC Sports for AI-produced video highlights. By 2021, the tour adopted AI further through a new partnership with AWS; machine learning began helping power Every Shot Live.
Earlier this year, the PGA Tour became a launch partner of the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center. Scott Gutterman, the tour’s Senior Vice President of Digital Operations, said generative AI can create a chatbot that can answer historic questions (Who has the longest consecutive birdie streak?); betting analysis (Do Rory McIlroy or Jon Rahm have an advantage based on a certain pin location in the current weather?); or even logistics (What is the bag policy for fans at this week’s tournament?).
Between the voluminous ShotLink data, which is about to receive another enhancement, as well as the 160,000 hours of video in the media asset management system, the PGA Tour can provide multimodal replies: text, video and/or data.
“We have a lot of great content, but it’s in a lot of different places,” Gutterman said. “Generative AI can basically bring all that together in a response that allows you to ask that question and give you an answer.”
One burgeoning area several tech companies are exploring is automated audio. Using WatsonX, IBM debuted AI commentary this past year through analysis of specific golf shots and tennis points by drawing on past data — both numerical and unstructured text — to layer insights on video clips.
“We’re always focused on maintaining and building fan engagement,” said Monica Ellingson, IBM iX practice lead, sports and entertainment. “We all recognize the popularity of podcasts and audiobooks, and so not everyone just wants to watch their sports — they want to listen, out and about, they want to be caught up in what’s happening.”
Stats Perform and Veritone partnered last year to do the same. That product is “very close,” said Corey Hill, Veritone Senior Director of Product, noting that they will offer markers to insert ads into the commentary for monetization. What’s left is further refinement of that “compelling and engaging sports commentary vibe that you would get with watching a live match,” he added.
The automated voice can be programmed in any number of languages simultaneously and — with strict security permissions in place — can be produced using cloned voices of celebrities, athletes or newscasters. Because the AI engine can be programmed to never utter an expletive, the typically required latency could be eliminated, too.
“The other exciting, forward-looking concept is that, since we are actually not having to deal with broadcast delays, we’re actually faster to present commentary than the linear TV shows are,” Hill said. “So from a betting perspective, I think that puts us in an interesting space.”
That can be democratized to any level of sport, especially when combined with AI-powered video capture, such as Pixellot, which is researching the idea.
Julie Souza, AWS Head of Sports, Global Professional Services, said it could create a thrill for her school-age son: “You think about what a professional sports broadcast looks like — you’ve got talent and color commentary and all of this — I mean, wouldn’t it be great if gen AI could create color commentary for my kid’s hockey game and make it sound like it’s Paul Bissonnette and Henrik Lundqvist?”
Pratik Thakar, Coca-Cola’s Global Head of Generative AI, presented on the topic from the stage at Leaders Week London, noting the prospect of the technology in producing creative content.
“TikTok made everyone an entertainer,” Thakar said. “Maybe Instagram made everyone an influencer. Generative AI makes everyone an artist.”
The Texas Rangers Celebrate winning the World Series in October 2023. [Image: Getty]
On MLB’s Opening Day late last March, Ryan Murray, the Texas Rangers Senior Director of Baseball R&D, entered a prompt into Dall-E, OpenAI’s image-generating companion to ChatGPT, to envision the Rangers winning the World Series. He had several of the results printed on canvas and distributed to his department, which adorned their desks throughout the season.
Generative AI didn’t exactly predict the World Series — with the Rangers indeed winning, their first title in club history — but the new technology did play a role.
Baseball clubs have vast quantities of data to consider, both in text via scouting reports as well as news coverage and especially in video, which spans game video, motion capture recordings from the biomechanics lab, high-frame-rate clips taken by scouts and more. The Rangers began implementing generative AI to help process all of that information for the sake of efficiency.
Before last MLB season, an OpenAI tool generated what a World Series win would look like for the Texas Rangers. Then the team experienced the real thing. [Image: Texas Rangers]
Booth acknowledged that, though a work in progress, generative AI’s use has “a lot of buy-in in the organization.” Some areas of continued refinement include ensuring that the algorithms understand the sport’s peculiar lexicon.
“The vernacular that a lot of the scout-specific authors use is pretty unique to baseball,” Booth said. “You may say something like, ‘This guy is built like a truck and throws gas’ — and that’s very, very positive — that he’s got a tree trunk arm. But your off-the-shelf generative AI model may not necessarily understand that. So while we can use pre-trained models to help do a lot of this aggregation and summarization, we’re really looking towards building and fine-tuning our own internalized model that is trained specifically on the baseball language.”
Databricks Head Evangelist Ari Kaplan was an early pioneer in baseball analytics, having worked for or advised more than half of MLB franchises in the past 30 years. He first used AI to make a personnel decision as an Astros consultant in 2007, using machine learning to make the case that Hunter Pence should be promoted to the big leagues. The Rangers are one of Databricks’ MLB clients, and they are developing sentiment scores to assess natural language evaluations. They can also determine if keywords such as “instincts” or “aggressiveness” have any bearing on performance.
“If you have a player who has 20 reports on them over the years, it’s frustrating for me to go through them,” Kaplan said, “and they said, ‘He is good at this. He’s inconsistent. But he has great bat speed. But occasionally he’s lazy running the base.’ I can’t make heads or tails over what’s the bottom line. Does the scout like him or not? So with gen AI, I could just summarize pros/cons or give a sentiment score. ‘This one report is 10 out of 10. But over a dozen scouting reports, the consensus is he’s a 6 out of 10.’”
For now, the Rangers are presenting the information via a retrieval-augmented generation model, a process by which users upload additional pertinent information to guide the algorithms. This can still be presented through a chatbot-style interface.
CrowdIQ CEO Tinus Le Roux envisions a future in which every employee has such a tool to serve as a personal data analyst. His company’s technology takes high-resolution photos and applies computer vision to generate crowd data — tracking its demographic composition and even fans’ attention. Such information can guide team decisions on start times, merchandise offerings, in-venue music and videos.
“Someone in game-day presentation won’t even know what to ask the data science people to improve what they’re doing,” Le Roux said, “but you can give them an app and say, ‘Make recommendations about how I can create a better vibe.’”
Pramana Labs has already begun implementing such automated assistants, who can use prose prompts to access enterprise data. “It’s a sea change in the way that people are going to do work,” CEO Corey Patton said. “I need to empower my subject matter experts to do things at scale.”
One such idea: Comb through typically siloed marketing, ticketing, sponsorship and viewership data to identify brand exposure. Patton shared an example: “‘When so-and-so driver is in the lead more than four laps, viewership goes up to X at this track on Sunday afternoons,’ and you’d be able to then sell sponsorships for that type of logo on a car.”
In addition to content generation, Noah Syken, IBM Vice President of Sports and Entertainment Partnerships, detailed customer service, human resources and code development as areas ripe for disruption through generative AI. Bundesliga is an early user of AWS CodeWhisperer, an AI-powered coding assistant. Google’s Jain explained how his team helped Fox Sports index its 1.7 million archival videos by adding more complete and consistent metadata, enabling clip retrieval by a natural language search.
Another area where generative AI is already helping businesses is in the training of other AI models. While developing Just Walk Out technology, the checkout-less retail experience, Amazon generated synthetic data to “create all these different possible scenarios, even unlikely ones, to be able to make sure that we were capturing everything and fraud was negligent,” AWS’s Souza said.
Asensei, which uses motion capture data for automated feedback, deliberately does not use generative AI in a consumer-facing manner, instead applying “old-fashioned AI” to ensure its human-led coaching expertise drives the user experience, CEO Steven Webster said.
“For generative AI in particular, the more exciting applications are when it gets buried inside a toolset in a product that you’re probably already using, and it makes that toolset and product better,” he added.
But, like Amazon, Webster noted that the generation of synthetic training data makes its markerless motion capture algorithms more effective. Even with the cost of compute power, generative AI is still cheaper and less error-prone than human data collection.
“One of the challenges of computer vision is you don’t want all the training data to be me in the same garage, with the same lighting, wearing the same clothing, with the same skin color, with the same body shape,” he said. “Because you’re really not training the machine to recognize the diversity of the real world it’s going to be out in.”
Souza and Webster both noted the circular nature of using AI systems to train AI systems. Webster took it a step further, saying, “What I’m really excited about is where the technology now exists — and I’m hearing myself just about to say this to you, and I’m like, ‘This is insane’ — that Asensei will be able to teach itself a new movement.”
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Google’s Jain spoke to SBJ while still reeling from the Arizona Diamondbacks’ World Series loss, so all of his hypothetical examples invoked his favorite baseball team. Among them: the creation of a pseudo-linear feed dynamically generated and completely personalized. Diamondbacks stars Corbin Carroll and Zac Gallen would be fixtures on Anil’s Baseball Channel.
“There’s a lot to be figured out there because I think the technology exists,” Jain said. “The question is, how do we make that feasible and viable and monetizable for media companies to be able to do it?”
The barrier to creating content is lower than ever, but balancing the P&L sheet could be a challenge, at least in the early going.
Technology research consultancy Gartner projects that 80% of large enterprise finance teams will rely on generative AI trained with proprietary business data by 2026. But a VentureBeat survey indicated that, while 73% of companies are either using or experimenting with generative AI, only 18% actually plan to allocate budget for that purpose.
“To use it at the enterprise scale and actually do things of value, there’s a significant cost to it,” Pramana’s Patton said. “So it will provide value, I am certain of that, but I’m also a little bit skeptical of the cost not being a barrier to the output in the future.”
The market is changing rapidly, in favor of democratization. Enough tech companies are building their own large language models that few will need to custom-build it; they will just apply what’s available.
“The cost to train a model could have been tens of millions six months ago, but now you may not need to train the model,” AWS’s Nandi said. “You have all these small models popping up. You may just need to add your data, and in a month or two, you may not need to add your data. You may use a Bedrock agent to constrain it.”
For those who do have proprietary data, it can be a new revenue source. The PGA Tour’s Gutterman noted the importance of cybersecurity for IP protection and what’s known as “red teaming” the models — industry slang for rooting out toxicity and bias — but having the tour’s golf data available for licensing could boost the bottom line for third parties wanting to engage with golf fans.
The definition of “rights holder” could evolve, too. “Another challenge/opportunity, which we’re already starting to see and hear in talks, is media rights,” Shichman said. “What does it mean to have media rights now that you can start to generate new things that didn’t exist before? Who is allowed to do what with generating content, A, on the training side of things, but B, on creating a type of content? What is considered to be part of the rights package that you acquired and what isn’t?”
The experts interviewed by SBJ saw AI improving workers’ productivity more than replacing them. And there could even be a new job description that emerges.
“We were joking that more and more companies are soon going to be needing to hire CPOs, which is chief prompt officer,” said Uplift Labs CEO Sukemasa Kabayama, whose company uses computer vision to analyze athlete biomechanics. “I think gen AI is going to be just as ubiquitous as the internet.”
The sports scientist behind recent British and Irish Lions tours discusses the real value of finding the right tech and the balance between domain expertise and leadership.
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The question is posed by Brian Cunniffe of the UK Sports Institute [UKSI], who is Joe Lemire and John Portch’s first guest on The People Behind the Tech podcast for 2024.
Brian, a performance lead at the UKSI who works primarily in canoeing and who also served as the British and Irish Lions’ sports scientist on tours of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, is discussing the power in gamifying training, particularly for younger athletes.
“There’s a slight irony in there but how do we bring it back to the stuff that matters, not just for players but for staff as well?” he continues.
“How do we help coaches on a journey to understand not just the stuff that players have completed but maybe some of the decisions that we need to take on a journey and learn from that so that we’re not replicating or duplicating and can be more efficient with our time?”
Elsewhere, Brian delves into:
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Dr Nicola Brown of St Mary’s University explores an unregulated market where anything can be labelled as a sports bra.
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“We know that half of schoolgirls drop out of sport because of their breasts,” she added. “One in three adults see the breasts as a barrier to participation. Then we also have that performance aspect. We know that if we change breast support, because the breasts will move during activity, that it will change how an athlete moves, it will influence their confidence, it can change their breathing, it can change their muscle activity.”
In September 2023, Brown was speaking as part of a panel discussion on the physiology of the female athlete at Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium. She spoke alongside pelvic health physiotherapist Emma Brockwell and Dr Amal Hassan, who serves as Women’s Team Doctor at rugby club Harlequins.
“We know that the majority of women wear the incorrect size bra, and you can have a great sports bra, but if it doesn’t fit properly then it’s not going to be effective.”
In this article, Brown reflects on the sports bra market and the importance of athlete education when it comes to breast health.
Note: Brown’s responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Sports bras: a confusing marketplace…
The sports bra market has massively increased, which is a fantastic thing, but it does then make it a very confusing marketplace for women. It may be very difficult to find the right sports bra. There’s no such thing as the best sports bra. What might be the best sports bra for me might be very different to someone else and we know that key issues around sports bras are knowledge of the types of sports bra that might be suitable for small breasts versus large breasts; and also the fit of the bra.
Why athletes should not rely on official apparel suppliers alone…
If there’s a very limited choice of products, particularly if you’re working with a team of athletes, it’s unlikely that those products will cater for the entire team. I think we need to be careful about mandating some kind of product that is actually having a negative health implication on an athlete. Anything can market itself as a sports bra. There’s no kind of criteria the bra has to meet. That’s another thing that makes it quite challenging to find the right breast support.
There are three types of sports bra on the market…
Firstly, a compression bra, which is kind of like the crop top that goes over your head with an elastic bottom. They tend to be better for smaller-breasted women. Larger-breasted women will probably be more suited to an encapsulation bra, which encapsulates each breast separately. The third type is a combination or a hybrid bra, which combines elements of the compression and the encapsulation bra. So you have the separate pockets for each breast and then with a compressive layer of material over the top. You might make the assumption that if we combine both types of bra we’ll get the best one but that’s not necessarily the case. It is again about that individual fit or the person.
Why compression bras are so popular…
Depending on the sport they are playing and the activity that they’re doing, an athlete may choose different sports bras for different types of activity, but the key feedback that we get, particularly from athletes working at the very top level, is that they often use a bra that is compressive because they are trying to look as if they don’t have breasts. They want to compress their breast tissue as much as possible because they’re concerned about what they look like and how people will comment on social media or in the crowd, and they want to be able to focus on the game and not be concerned about their appearance, so they will try and make their breasts look as small as possible.
The importance of education and empowerment…
There’s always that fashion aspect that comes into play but I think the most important thing is education about what a good sports bra can do. If we can try to promote the benefits that will come from that then we’ll hopefully have athletes making more informed choices. I think it’s also important not to assume that an athlete will recognise that it’s a problem. It wasn’t until 2015 that it was reported that the breasts are a barrier to activity – and I don’t think something happened in 2015 that meant breasts became a problem – it’s just the first time that anybody asked women. And so a lot of women will just assume that the issues they experience are just part and parcel of what they have to deal with. But if we can raise awareness of the fact that there is a potential solution in the form of well-fitting appropriate breast support then it just opens up their opportunities to try and reduce those negative consequences of the breast function.
Deciding what option is best…
Make sure they try it on before they buy it. The fit is one of the most important things. You can get it professionally fitted in-store, but I think particularly for sports bra fits, there’s no real regulation or training for those fitters, so I’m very much an advocate of empowering the athlete or any individual to know what bra fits them. Then it doesn’t matter what bra they pick, they know what to check and whether it fits them. And when it comes to the sizing, just not assuming that you’re one size and that you’re that size for the rest of your life. I think that’s something that happens. You get fitted with a bra at some stage of your life and then you wear that bra forever more. But different styles of bra, even the different colour of a bra, if you wear a black bra versus a white bra of the same design, just the colour can make that tighter. Your breasts might change size and shape through various stages of life, through stages of a medical cycle, so it’s making sure that you are aware that you need bras that are fitted and that your breasts may change. And more expensive doesn’t always mean better. It’s very much not the case. So it’s finding what works for you. Then, once they put it on, jump around in the changing room, simulate some movements you’d do during that activity, make sure that you feel supported.
The gold standard in breast support services…
At the top level with unlimited resources and expertise to hand, we could do a biomechanical assessment of an athlete’s breast movement doing a sports-specific activity so we can establish the optimal breast support for them and then design a bespoke bra; and then they can exercise in that. We’ve done that with some athletes and they report that they feel more confident in their performance, that they perform better, reduce pain and so on.
Steps that all teams can take…
We should go right down to the lowest level with something as simple as putting a bra fit poster in a changing room or on the back of a toilet door. Some little nudge, that thought about ‘have I checked my bra?’ or ‘have I changed my bra recently?’ ‘Does my bra fit? Something that might spark that conversation to discuss breast health issues more openly. And then in between offering bra fit assessments, if you can get the expertise on hand. Anything from signposting to educational leaflets. There are educational resources and videos and things available to signpost. Obviously we’re not all going to become experts in all of these areas of women’s health overnight and know everything, but we can at least signpost athletes if they do come to us with those issues to the resources they might need.
Where there is more work still to be done…
There’s been a lot of work done on breast support for different population groups and at different life stages, but very limited work done on pregnancy or breast feeding post-partum. So I think work needs to be done in terms of making sure there is the appropriate breast support for athletes to facilitate breast feeding if needed but also to facilitate the return to sport to ensure the breast support they’re wearing is appropriate and to support their needs. And obviously the anatomy of the breasts is going to change substantially during that period. And again, I would promote education about those changes and how team can best support their athletes. Breast injuries: we don’t really know the long-term consequences of breast impacts. That’s another area where we need to be better at collecting that data. We ask athletes about all sorts of other injuries but don’t necessarily ask about breast injuries and they don’t necessarily report it. In rugby, I know there are steps being made within injury surveillance systems to actually start incorporating breast injury data. I think that will be a really important step forward, to try and understand the prevalence, the severity, the mechanisms of those injuries, whether it’s contact with the player, contact with the ball or contact with the ground, but also the consequences of that.
Diamond Kinetics and Marucci Sports have have developed the industry’s first smart bat with a fully integrated swing-tracking sensor that never needs to be removed and charged.
Main image: Marucci Sports / Diamond Kinetics
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The new product, a limited release from Marucci called the CATX Smart, relies on new battery technology to provide a lifetime charge and is the first to be approved for in-game use by the United States Specialty Sports Association (USSSA), which governs a wide swath of youth baseball.
Users will have access to data, interactive games and content through the DK app. Notably, the Marucci CATX Smart bat retails for the same $299 price as the current CATX bat without the embedded sensor.
“The drive here was a very graceful, magical user experience,” Diamond Kinetics CEO/Co-Founder CJ Handron said, adding, “Overwhelmingly, this is taking the thinking out of it for the user, so the idea of having to thoughtfully say, ‘I need to get a sensor, put it on my bat, make sure it’s charged.’ That entire user experience is very doable — we’ve done that for a long time with lots and lots of people — but this is a completely mindless exercise.”
The CATX Smart bat connects via Bluetooth to iOS devices and can record more than 100 swings locally on the hardware when not connected to the app. Image: Marucci Sports / Diamond Kinetics
The CATX Smart bat is a one-piece alloy made from AZR aluminum that has the same weight and shape as its sensor-free counterpart. It connects via Bluetooth to iOS devices and can record more than 100 swings locally on the hardware when not connected to the app.
Marucci and DK first created a smart bat with a sensor embedded in the knob back in 2017, but that was for a wood bat and required extraction to charge the device. Prior to that, all sensors were affixed to the bottom of the knob.
“To be able to create a bat where the sensor is in the bat and it doesn’t need to be charged for the life of the bat was a really big deal for us,” said Marucci CEO/Co-Founder Kurt Ainsworth. “We didn’t really like the one that wrapped over the end — we wanted it in the bat because it’s also better for certifying bodies for it to be inside the bat where the bat can’t be altered. That was a big part of this.”
The USSSA is the first sporting group to certify the bat, but the goal is to complete the process for other leagues, including the BBCOR standard that has been adopted by the NCAA and high schools.
Bat sensors are currently prohibited in MLB but have been permitted in varying forms in the minors since 2017. Initially, only external sensors attached to the knob were allowed but, by 2019, embedded sensors were allowed at all levels of the minor leagues.
Though this new embedded sensor technology is available only in a limited release CATX Smart bat for now, Ainsworth predicted that “you’re going to see this in a lot more bat lines of ours moving forward.” When asked if DK might collaborate with other bat manufacturers for this type of sensor, Handron demurred, saying “we’re really focused on the relationship with Marucci.”
Marucci, whose parent company was sold by private equity firm Compass Diversified to Fox Factory for $572 million earlier this month, intends to produce training bats with the tech for older players who can use the bats in practice, even if they aren’t sanctioned in games, as well as for fastpitch softball.
Ainsworth praised DK’s app for gamifying baseball training while also providing young players the data they need to be successful.
Users will have access to data, interactive games and content through the Diamond Kinetics app. Image: Marucci Sports / Diamond Kinetics
“What can that data do for you?” Handron said. “For us, that’s where it kind of hops and walks over into the app experience that we’ve developed, which is really meeting this generation of kids where they are, which is, What are the interesting and fun social digital experiences that you can marry together with physical play?”
Both men believe this will become universal, as reflected by intentional decision to list the smart bat for the same price as the one without the sensor.
“Why wouldn’t you hit with it if you had access to it?” Ainsworth said. “Why would you use another bat without it?”
“Marucci and DK are aligned on feeling like this can and will be the future of bats,” Handron added.
In this recent edition of SBJ Tech’s Athlete’s Voice Series, Johnson discusses how training has evolved since his retirement and how it has influenced athlete development.
Main image: Omorpho
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.
* * * * *
Johnson, 56, has worked as a media analyst for track and field, mostly in the United Kingdom, on air for the BBC and in print for The Times and Daily Telegraph. In 2007, he opened Michael Johnson Performance, a training facility in Texas that has worked with Olympians, amateurs and Arsenal FC’s youth academy, among others. The physical building recently closed as the curriculum has moved into a fully digital model.
Recently, Johnson met Omorpho CEO/Co-Founder Stefan Olander and learned about the company’s “gravity sportswear,” micro-weighted apparel to improve the results of training. A connected app offers on-demand workouts for the proprietary MicroLoad products. Johnson recently became a brand ambassador of Omorpho, which in November announced a $3 million seed funding round led by KB Partners & Thirty-5 Capital, LLC, bringing the total investment to date to $16 million.
On his introduction to Omorpho…
I met Stefan, the founder of Omorpho earlier this year through a mutual friend, and as soon as he started telling me about what he was building with Omorpho, I was immediately interested. I’ve always been interested in training. After my athletic career, I started Michael Johnson Performance, my sport performance training and advisory organization, so I’ve been in and around sports performance and innovation over the years since my own retirement.
There have always been weighted vests and that are kind of cumbersome. And I’ve seen myself with the athletes that we would train, and you put it on them — it’s not comfortable, they want to get on with the training. It was really interesting to hear from Stefan how they were approaching this with the vest but also with apparel as well, which I’d never actually heard that before with weighted apparel.
On trying out the product himself…
Stefan said, ‘Okay, well, I’d love to send you some stuff,’ which I wasn’t going turn down free stuff. People are amazed — even when you’re an athlete and you’ve got the endorsement deals, which I had — you still get excited about free stuff. So anyway, he sent me some, and I was immediately just hooked on it and loved it.
I live near Malibu and do a lot of hiking. I’m always looking for ways to challenge myself more. I loaded up with everything I could — the gear with the vest as well — and just immediately loved it. So that’s how I got involved. Then we started talking about how I could help with what Omorpho was trying to do and getting this out there and helping athletes and people in the fitness industry to understand the benefits of weighted training.
On prior alternatives…
You’ve seen the parachutes for, not necessarily adding weight, but adding resistance. There’s all sorts of rudimentary ways in the past that people have done that sort of thing, to try to create more load when you’re training to increase the effect of whatever that activity is that you’re doing. The problem in the past has been, it’s always been adding stuff that doesn’t actually fit and that may not be intended for that particular purpose. Even though the parachutes are built for people to run with, parachutes aren’t for running. So even in that, it’s very cumbersome.
And at the end of the day, with what people are training, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an athlete, or whether you’re a fitness enthusiast, or you’re training just for weight loss, or whatever it might be, you just want to focus on the training — he movements themselves and the endurance that it requires and all of the athleticism that it requires to actually train. It’s hard enough and more difficult when you’re adding all of this stuff.
On how he added load in his sprinting career…
I just looked up on one particular ability for me to add load in my training. I had a chronic Achilles problem about the middle of my career, which caused me to not be able to use spikes, which don’t have a heel are very, very tough on your Achilles and all of your lower extremities, but good for training to actually hit the times that you need, to lighten the load and provide all of benefits that you do with spikes. And it simulates racing as well. But I wasn’t able to wear spikes because of the Achilles issue. So I had to run in regular shoes with a heel and with a little bit more support. Initially, of course, my times in the reps were slower because I wasn’t wearing spikes. So then that became my goal is to, wearing the heavier shoes, to be able to get down to the same times I was when I was wearing spikes.
It obviously creates a situation, when you’re actually able to put that load on, where physiologically now, you’re obviously getting stronger, no doubt about it, when you can hit the same sorts of times with that load. But it’s a huge psychological benefit as well. And so for me, then I never went back to the spikes. In fact, my coach, and I just decided, ‘Let’s go up to a heavier shoe, the same shoe I would do on my warmups.’
We decided just up the ante and go ahead with the with the heavier shoe that I would wear in my warmups so I already was very familiar with this loading effect before I even joined Omorpho. And I believe in it, and I’ve applied the same sort of thing to what I do now in my training when I’m hiking. Of course, I time everything. I’m just kind of obsessed with that, and I’m getting back to my same times when I was able to do it without the weight.
On improper added-weight training…
It affects your biomechanics. It affects your movement, which is really, really important for most training, regardless of what you’re doing. Let’s just say you’re doing plyometrics: obviously landing, it’s really important to land in the right position, otherwise, you’re much more susceptible to injury. And if you’re wearing some weight or something that’s not designed to move with you, then that’s going to create some counterbalance movement, and you’re now not focused on executing the actual plyometric movement.
Your focus now is on trying to make sure that you counteract whatever that piece of equipment you’re wearing is doing. Your body knows and will protect itself to try to make sure that it actually counterbalances that [extra weight], but then you may be off-balance and more susceptible to injury. and then mentally you’re just not focusing on the actual movements that you need to be and the workout was designed for —and that becomes frustrating. What we find is ultimately people just take it off and stop wearing it because it’s just not working for them.
On the evolution of his Michael Johnson Performance Center…
We closed brick and mortar, so we’re all digital now. We license all of the programming, all of our coach education courses and all of our youth programming to other organizations that actually are selling those types of programs and providing those services either to their own teams and athletes. Or they’re actually providing it through an app or something like that. Most of it is white label, but some of it is still our brand.
I’ve never actually been a coach. I’m an entrepreneur. I have the greatest respect for coaches. I know what it takes. I’ve hired more coaches than I could possibly imagine — over 100 coaches — as a big part of my business is coach education and we train coaches. So I understand coaches and what makes them great, and I don’t have that skill set.
On helping coaches with innovation…
I could certainly see [incorporating Omorpho]. Every coach has their own program, and it depends on what they’re trying to achieve. But there certainly are workouts for athletes of all sports and in fitness as well that benefit from loaded training and could be beneficial to the objective of the training program. So I certainly recommend it. Our clients are always looking for what’s new and more effective ways and more efficient ways that we can train. It’s just making them aware because a lot of coaches are scouring for what’s new out there.
On getting athletes on board…
You have to get buy-in from athletes. It’s really, really important, and it’s really difficult to do that when — whatever it is that you’re wanting them to do — is going to be disruptive to the training and it’s going to be cumbersome. Athletes are willing to do a lot of things, but at this point with technology and all of the innovation in the world, especially young athletes who grew up with this stuff, their position is like, ‘Why should I have to do something? There has to be a better way.’
We didn’t question it back in the ‘90s. There wasn’t all of this innovation that we have now. But young athletes are much more likely to question that there has to be a better way and there’s no reason for me to be putting myself through this. And that’s why I think you can get buy-in from athletes on Omorpho as well. It looks cool, which is pretty important now. Most people post their training on social media. It’s not behind the scenes anymore. So they want to look good — you look good, you train good. You train good, you compete good. So that’s another important factor. And I think, again, from a coach’s standpoint, that helps get buy-in.
On his use of Oura and what role modern tech would have played in his own career…
This Oura ring provides some great data to inform me about my sleep. If you have the latest one, it actually also tracks metrics throughout the day as well. It informs a lot that helps me make better decisions about my training, better decisions about what time I go to sleep, better nutrition decisions – all of those things, which helps me be better. If I’m competing and I have that, if everybody else has that, then it’s all the same for everybody. If only I had that, then yeah, I have a huge advantage. But that’s never been the case. Never will be the case. Everybody has access to the same technology.
The NHL Hall of Famer’s new helmet has received a five-star rating from the renowned Virginia Tech safety testing laboratory.
Main image: Jim McIsaac / NHLI via Getty Images
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.
Over those 15 years, he scored 468 goals, added 545 assists and holds the all-time record of 1.17 points per game among American-born players. LaFontaine’s No 16 was retired by the Sabres, and he was included in the league’s 2017 list of the 100 Greatest NHL Players of All Time.
Though LaFontaine had a great career, it ended sooner than he would have hoped. He suffered a half-dozen definitive concussions but estimates the real total may have been twice that. The neurologist who treated him throughout his career — Dr James Kelly, a professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who previously held a leadership position at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center — became a friend.
“Jim and I became very close over the last 25, 30 years,” LaFontaine said. “He was the doctor that cleared me to play, and he was the doctor said, ‘OK, that’s enough.’ I’m extremely grateful to him.”
LaFontaine, now 58, and Kelly are also now co-founders in a new venture, Valor Hockey, that has made a highly-rated helmet. The Valor Axiom received a five-star rating from the renowned Virginia Tech safety testing laboratory, the first new helmet to garner that best mark since 2017. The Atlantic Amateur Hockey Association, which is affiliated with USA Hockey, is the first league to partner in promoting the Valor helmet that retails for $299.
On the origin story of Valor…
It actually started when Dr Kelly and I looked into doing something in 2004. A company had a material that was 40% more absorbent and could deflect and absorb impact I think better than what EPP was at the time, which was the mainstay. What we found out was they went into an IP lawsuit issue with the material. So we tucked it away for a little bit.
We started talking again around 2016 or so. There was an opportunity with another impact material that we were looking into. The irony was [the helmet] was originally designed by a guy named Jose Fernandez. He did X-Man, he did Batman, he did Ironman. So it was more of like, ‘If you could do a futuristic, cool design of what a hockey helmet is in the future.’
We spoke with a gentleman, a designer and partner now, named David Muskovitz. So David did the engineering and did the final design, but we took an initial design and said, ‘OK, how do we make this safer? And how do we make it perform really well, fit really well? And then how do we make sure we can manufacture it? And most importantly, make it safe?’
We created a monoshell, which is a one-piece shell. I think one thing it’s important I want to say 98%, 97% of all helmets are two-piece shells, which we found interesting. All the NFL and motocross and lacrosse and Major League Baseball [helmets] — why are they one-piece shells? So we came up with a slogan ‘beyond traditional safe’ because in the hockey space, two-piece shells are traditionally safe. Then we found out making a one-piece polycarbonate injected shell is not easy with that kind of a design. But if you build a really good one-piece, and a really good two-piece, the one-piece will always outperform and be safer. Why? Because of the impacts will be distributed more evenly versus a two-piece.
On the shape of the helmet…
Dr Kelly described this in a really good way. We literally took that design, and we created smoother, slightly rounded edges around the sides of the helmet, and then the back and then the front. We made a lower profile with a little bit of an angle for deflection. The way he puts it is, so take a cue ball and then take a Rubik’s cube, and the cue ball hits the cube and it kind of grabs it, torques it, spins it and sometimes breaks it up because it’s got more flat spaces. Well, then take another cue ball with a billiard ball and hit it. And if it’s got more slightly rounded, smoother edges, it’s going to deflect and ricochet and glance.
On minimizing the magnitude of impacts…
You’re not going to stop a concussion — nobody’s going to stop it — but now knowing the science and the testing, you can minimize damage. And over the course of somebody’s career, you think about some of these catastrophic hits, these big hits, then you think of these every day compression hits, over a period of time, the brain in the head isn’t built to sustain those.
I don’t know exactly what the measurements are, but if somebody says you could get a Grade 3 concussion with one helmet, and potentially a Grade 2 or 1 concussion [with another helmet], that’s significant. You accumulate that over a period of time. Minimizing the damage makes a massive difference in the livelihood.
On the helmets he wore as a player…
Dr Kelly said something very profound to me along the way. We didn’t have the testing and the science behind the linear and rotational testing — we didn’t have that back then. This is just the way it was back then. The helmets were what they were. But if it was graded today, it was probably a zero to a one star.
Knowing now what a five-star [helmet] is, and the impacts that it takes to distribute the force load, and Jim actually said to me, ‘I can professionally and publicly be able to comfortably say, after knowing what I know about science and the testing, that you would have most likely had between 50% and 60% less damage during the course of your career. And to me, that’s profound.
On his own experience with concussions…
I’m here telling you the story because I lived it. I went through post-concussion syndrome twice. I went through one extremely dark period of time where things got really scary and depressed, and I really didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. I know what can happen if you hit your head enough, and you can do damage.
Fortunately, my brain found its way back. I was able to get that enthusiasm and excitement back. Dr Kelly was willing to let me go back again but warned me, ‘If you take another one, you’re probably going to go through a [dark] period of time again because there’s a threshold that you cross. What used to take 10 days to two weeks to recover is now taking you months. I probably had about six to seven [concussions] documented — when I broke my jaw, we never documented it, but I guarantee you I had a concussion. And then I probably had another handful of dings that I saw stars but we didn’t count them. I’m somewhere probably around double digits, 10, 12, concussions.
I went through six months [of rehab] twice. The second time wasn’t as severe. But even then, there was a part of me relieved that I didn’t have to make that decision, and then a part of me had to let go of something I loved since I was a kid. So it was still difficult to deal with. But I heard something really profound. I read this book called Legacy about the All Blacks rugby team. There’s a quote in there that talks about if, you’re a true servant and leader of your sport, then you have a responsibility to leave it better than you found it. My wife struggled watching my son play. He had a couple of concussions, then she couldn’t watch, having lived through what her husband went through. Now we have a little grandson who’s three, whose name’s Patrick. And you know what, I know that, should he choose to play hockey, that there’s going to be safer products for the next generation.
On how hockey shaped him…
I’m grateful for what we had when I played. This is something to take and [ask], how do we create an evolution of where safety continues to go and I think that should be a natural thing to do anyway. Listen, if I didn’t retire after 15 years from concussions, there wouldn’t have been a service and purpose for me to do this. So I always believe, in life, your experiences, good, bad or indifferent, whether you realize it or not, prepare you for what’s to come next in your life.
I believe your experiences shape you into your service and purpose. And hockey was always a stepping stone. I’m grateful for what the sport has done for me. But it’s put me into a place in my life where everything I learned from those experiences, has taught me how to give back in a purposeful way, a meaningful way and a service way. And I have a mantra in my life, whether it’s my foundation, or whether it’s what we’re doing with Valor, “Score your goals when you’re young because, when you get older, life is about the assists.”
On the values instilled by hockey and in the Valor brand…
Being a player, I was blessed, and it was a privilege and an honor to play in the pros as long as I did and represent my country. The game was my life, and it still is. I say that, even though I don’t play as much, the game still lives inside me. The character lessons, the life lessons, the values, the life skills, leadership, teamwork, getting through adversity, getting enough discipline, the friendships, the relationships, all of those things that you learn in the sport of hockey still are so much a part of who you are in your life going forward, which is really a big part of what the brand is built on.
The Declaration of Principles which we launched with the National Hockey League — the tip of the spear, that north star — and we were able to get the global hockey community to sign off on values and principles to aspire to live to. So part of the Valor brand is based on those declaration of principles and bringing those to life, whether it be in products, programs, technology, services. From my perspective, it’s so important that sports play a role in our society and our next generation, so creating a positive and safe environment is right up there as one of them.
Zendler speaks to Joe Lemire and John Portch about her work with Rimkus and the NBA and NBPA’s Wearables Validation Program.
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The Program Manager of the NBA and NBPA’s Wearables Validation Program is discussing her first steps in the role with Joe and John on the People Behind the Tech podcast.
“Academic-type folks, we don’t like to set thresholds that exist for pass-fail,” she continues, as she explained the process of speaking to players and coaches and taking in all the relevant research.
“We want this to be rigorous, we want the players to have confidence in these devices, we know they’re generally hesitant to wear them and there is pushback.”
Zendler also spoke of balancing the need for commercial viability with real-world application, which chimes with her role as a sports science consultant with Rimkus, a worldwide leader in technical consulting and forensic engineering.
During the course of the conversation, we also discussed:
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