The McLaren driver joined a panel discussion at the Tribeca Festival in New York City and described his use of the simulator and how the team behind his team continues to iterate the tech on his MCL60.
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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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In addition to his racing credentials, Norris is the founder of Quadrant, an esports team and lifestyle brand partnered with Veloce, a racing and gaming media brand. In June, Norris appeared alongside McLaren Racing CEO Zak Brown at the Tribeca Festival in New York City, which was sponsored by McLaren crypto partner OKX.
Norris and Brown discussed how technology is permeating the racing industry, from the extensive use of simulators to weekly enhancements to the car; Brown estimated that 80% of the livery changes over the course of a season. The car is packed with 300 sensors and produces about 1.5 terabytes of data during a race weekend, with McLaren having enlisted DataRobot to help apply AI algorithms to make the best use of that information. (Note: This Athlete’s Voice is primarily derived from a post-panel interview, with some of his on-stage thoughts included as well.)
On playing racing games as a kid…
I started when I was a kid, like a lot of kids do. I was never into the bad games, shooting and all of this. I never played any of these games, my parents didn’t let me. But driving [games], my parents allowed me to do. I guess the basics, understanding the very simple things of how to drive a car — lines, techniques — you learn such simple things at a very early age.
These skill sets develop and continue to develop even to where I am now. I’m still learning things. I’m still trying to perfect whatever I can perfect. And for me, I think it’s an advantage that I played these games, and I did at such an early age — six, seven, eight years old — and that definitely helped me become the person I am and the driver I am today.
On his extensive use of a simulator…
I don’t have to fear driving a simulator compared to real life. Cost is a lot less. So I’m not scared of crashing and not scared of Zak telling me off or something. And the [simulator], you don’t have a different approach to how you want to go and do things. But you’re still learning in every single thing that you do, whether it’s real or fake or whatever. You’re still learning good things and bad things. And then you take that to the track to improve.
I use it, the whole team use it. So many things now are prepared in a simulation before they’re actually done for real because you’re always going to want to test everything you do. Because you can’t afford to make mistakes. Any way you can test something to see how authentic it is and how correct it’s going to be, from driving to designing your front wing and designing the whole car or making decisions on race day. Things are always checked as many times as possible until they actually get into action.
On his involvement with iterating technological changes on the car…
I’ve tried, in a way. I stick to do my job at the end of the day, so I just drive the car. But you try in as many ways as possible to help give whatever indication of advice you can give to the guys, who are some of the smartest guys in the world. These are people who are creating things that have in a way never been created, that are coming up with ideas.
Formula One is all about innovation. There are so many things in normal life now in road cars that everyone drives on a day-to-day basis, which these guys have come up with within Formula One. So in the end of the day, you can use all this information. But it’s only helping us make the decisions — us as humans who are still the ones that are applying it to our everyday work, who are coming up with the actual ideas. And therefore, I still stay firmly in my position on driving the car, but just being as helpful as I can when my words and my advice are needed.
For me, the most important thing is the minds of the humans, us as people who are still the ones who are applying this information, using the information, using AI. But how we apply it, how we use it in filmmaking or designing cars or driving cars. It’s all us in the end of the day, we’re actually doing it. So I think that’s the thing you can never forget.
On whether he can feel the dramatic changes to the car over a season…
It depends. Sometimes you have things which are there to change the driving style. Sometimes that’s where the improvement comes. An improvement can also be something that you don’t even recognize: you just go a little bit quicker when straight, or you just go a little bit quicker in the corner because you just have a bit more grip. So sometimes you’ll notice a massive difference. Sometimes you’ll hardly notice the difference. But it’s also gradually, it’s rare that you bring something in that’s just like, so noticeable. And also, when you do put something on, drivers are, within a few laps, make that feel like it’s normality again.
So when you go from the beginning of the season to the end, because it slowly happens over that whole period, we don’t really notice that much. But if we were to jump back in the car at the beginning, and you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, this has changed a huge amount.’ So you’re reacting to what’s happening and what’s changing, and you’re just getting on top of that. And because you do it so quickly, things become normal very quickly at the same time.
On managing decision-making in the car…
You train yourself. You learn from a really quite an early age, so you kind of get used to it over time. But there’s still times now where there can be an information overload. And I guess it just has to be said to the team, if they’re talking to me too much, or telling me to do too many things. We go to Monaco where you don’t have really any time to think of changing all these dials. You think your strategy, you think of tires, you also just trying to focus on not crashing. There’s a lot of times when there is still so much information, it’s still like, how can you get the most important bits of information across? But it’s just understanding, I guess, everyone has their own limitations or abilities. Maybe sometimes some people can do more, some people can do less, but I’m just making it known when it’s too much or when I can accept more.
On reaction time training…
Yeah, of course, [it’s] one of the most important things, just for natural driving. The start is one of the most important parts of the race so reacting to the lights, the pit stops. Reactions are probably one of the most important things that create a Formula One driver, but it’s also not just a reaction. A lot of people who can’t drive a car can have quick reactions. It’s the knowledge of knowing what you’re reacting to and how to then apply whatever the correction is.
On how he reaches his peak performance…
It is trying to understand how I drive in the best way that I can, whether that’s getting really pumped up before a race or qualifying. For me, it’s more the opposite, the more relaxed, more chilled I can be, the better. The more subconscious I drive, the better. So if I’m consciously thinking, ‘OK, I need to try and brake here, and do this and do that’ — game over, I’m terrible. So the more I can just know subconsciously what I need to do and just not even think of it, the more I can feel like I’m just going for a drive, then you look down, Wow, you’ve done such a good lap. The more you can feel like that, the better it’s going to be. So trying to recreate that and get in that space as many times as often as possible.
I’m just using the people that I have around me — simple as that. I have a very good team, starting with the McLaren side with my engineers, my mechanics, [team principal] Andrea [Stella], Zak. Using everyone in the best way possible, using their connections and relationships. And then from my side, my manager, to my trainer. to my parents. Using the people I have beside me to get the best out of me, with the training with all of these things. I hate training so much. But it’s part of what you’ve got to do if you want to achieve that one goal, which you know will satisfy you more than anything, which is to win a championship. You have to reach these other targets in order to achieve that, and you’ve got to make the sacrifices along the way.
On the vision for his brand Quadrant…
It’s in an early phase, I would say. From what I would love to achieve with it, it’s still got to grow a lot more in several spaces. One, which is the teams that represent Quadrant in various games. At the minute, we have Halo, we have a team for Call of Duty, we have Rocket League. So having, I guess, like a McLaren but within all these different categories, all these different games, because I love them. I’m terrible at a lot of these games, but I know I get very excited watching my own team. I get very nervous, like my heart starts pumping when they’re in a game and so on.
Expanding on the apparel side — that’s probably one of the best things. Just creating stuff that people like to wear. Hats off to [Veloce CEO Daniel Bailey]. Daniel has done a very good job with this side of it. Creating stuff that you or anyone would happily wear it’s just something that’s cool, but trying to sometimes keep racing involved in it, but also sometimes not.
And expand a lot more on the opportunities of working with different people. Whether that’s within programs or different athletes and different things, expanding to working and creating cool things, events or whatever it is. And not just being, say, an esports team that plays games or just makes a video or does that — but expanding much more beyond that and helping athletes discover their talents or further their talent and just creating content out of a lot of these things at the same time.
On his interest in gadgets and tech…
Since I was a kid, I loved and I always was really into computers and games and things. And I loved it probably too much when I was a kid — my parents hated it. But anything, I just find it very fascinating, how just pieces of metal and stuff comes together, and it creates such incredible things. I also enjoy taking it all apart and destroying it at the same time. It’s just that I enjoy it. Puts a smile on my face. It’s fun. Often sharing it with friends, whatever it is, creating competitions out of it, those kinds of things. Just something that brings me joy, so simple as that.
On storytelling via digital media…
You have the two sides. I guess [there’s] the social media side, which is very much just me, who I am — behind the scenes a little bit, things that you don’t probably ever see on Netflix, even on Formula One TV, documentaries. It’s even more just me and what I do, and even though a lot of it is still Formula One-based and pictures of me driving a car, blah, blah. And then I even have my photography page, which is just more me taking photos here, what I do here when I’m just being an old person, and I’m not even in a race car.
And then you have the Netflix side, which is still trying to capture the difference of you as a Formula One driver, and as an athlete, and then you as a person at home with your family, friends, and so on. So I wouldn’t say I do anything different, but it’s how things are captured and portrayed, which is different.
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Leaders Performance Advisor Dr Megan Popovic sets out her requisites for a wellbeing strategy that creates a culture of care, resilience and excellence.
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A memory
The energy in the building has dialled down, music in the gym turned off. Our players have gone home after a practice day and the remaining staff members in the building are quickly shuffling to finish their tasks and head home early as playoffs are around the corner and time will be a fluid flow of ‘rinse and repeat’ until the end of the season.
I decided to stay late and bypass the rush hour traffic, sitting upstairs in my office and hear a knock on the door and look to see who may be there. A respected, veteran player with a gruff demeanour and hardened external shell, whom I have always had a jovial, albeit distant relationship with, is there. His massive physique fills the doorway. “Do you have minute to talk?” he asks in an atypically soft way.
I see his beyond his professional shield, calloused from decades in the league, that serves as a barrier for emotional safety into his wild blue eyes that reveal the depth of emotion in their stillness. He almost collapses in the chair and takes a few breaths before the words cascade from his heart.
The moment
“I have a good friend from home that I’m really worried about,” he releases into the space. “I don’t know if you can help, but I don’t know what to do.”
The softness in the building, plus space and time to speak, allowed us to talk until he all details on his mind released. A crumbling marriage, drinking to excess every night, the distance from family who he could lean on in this dark time, the deterioration of a career and panic that lies within thoughts of the future, and the obsessive thoughts that his life may not be worth living.
My player was deeply concerned for his hometown childhood friend who lived hours away in a different country. He wanted to help and yet did not know where to start, what to do, or what his role in this relationship should be. His empathy was palpable and I now wonder if his friend’s raw vulnerability allowed him to access fears and pain that he himself had buried deep inside himself for many years in the league.
I assured him that even if I am unable help his friend directly, I will provide him with information to pass along for his friend to consider and make the necessary steps to mend their challenges and find peace.
Creating a method
While this circumstance was different than the day-to-day mental health and wellbeing issues that came forth from players and staff in my role, it did not come as a surprise. What rang the bell of truth was the stark reality that if and when you create a space for people to come forth with their struggles, it is impossible to predict who or what real-life situation will stand in your doorway and trust you to help them find healing.
A few years prior to this moment, when I launched into the role of ‘wellbeing and performance’, it became apparent immediately that our club needed a system in place that would ensure a greater level of care, education, and knowledge of supports available. We had intentionality and energy to cultivate a new high-performance culture at the club, team-of-teams, and individual levels, yet a clearly articulated infrastructure of what, who, when, and how to respond to this newfound openness toward emotion, wellbeing, and mental health was yet to be constructed or implemented. Quite simply, if we build it and they come forth, what will we do? How can I/we create mental health and wellbeing processes that support players and staff in efficient and emotionally safe ways that make sense for the temporal, transactional, political, and employment realities of professional sports?
I knew that not all players or staff would open up to me, which in fact was both humbling and freeing. It was a beautiful thing to know that an improved workplace culture would invite stronger connections within the organization and potentially multiply the bonds amongst players and staff that could hopefully create a safer and trusting professional environment. The challenge though was similar to the player scenario above, how do I help upskill and train our player and staff to both understand themselves more fully and also know what to do if and when struggle occurs?
What I believed was needed at the maturation stage of the club to do was come up with a clear system – a simple method – that all players and staff could follow to feel more comfortable if and when another teammate and colleague opened up about their struggles. I needed to craft a manual that I have since called the Organizational Wellbeing Strategy: Creating and Sustaining a Culture of Care, Resilience, and Excellence. In the segments below, I am sharing the three sections from this manual that I believe will help any club design and implement their own wellbeing system.
Phase 1: identification
Player identifies concern for his own mental health OR someone else identifies concern for player’s mental health (e.g., team doctor, medical staff, coaches, management). Try to objectively connect what they are saying and doing to the Red Flags (see Red Flags below).
Phase 2: connection
Player is pointed via text, phone call, or in-person to club’s key point person on staff to discuss options for next steps. This person needs to be consistent and all staff should know that they are the hub of resources, education, and information. The person in this role should receive additional training to support their knowledge and skillset.
Phase 3: education of options
The club’s point person has conversation with player or staff member in crisis in-person (ideally) or over-the-phone about their options: It is also important that they player or staff member in crisis understands the limits of confidentiality within this professional setting and how each option could influence their career. While this is atypical for high performance sport, to educate a person so that they consent to whatever form of care they choose, they must know that ramifications upfront to make an informed decision. This knowledge and truth must by shared as a standard of ethics.
Phase 4: action
The player or staff member goes forth to take action in their lives.
Phase 5: follow-up
The club’s point person should follow up as necessary to support the person and be a resource, as requested by the player or staff member in crisis.
It is very important that all players and staff in the organization are knowledgeable and educated on the most common ‘red flags’ that occur in high performance sport. This could be done via an in-person training session; however, I believe it is very important that these red flags are accessible to the players in their private moments. Thus, if your club has a team app (e.g., Kairos, Teamworks), it would be wise to have a tab for wellbeing/mental health resources.
By creating awareness, what you want to avoid the progression to the aforementioned and worsening if the player is already presenting with these symptoms. These were the Red Flags that we created with the focus of being objective, observable, and rooted in our sport cultural norms.
i) Thoughts of suicide (most serious)
ii) Changes in behaviour
iii) Changes in thinking
iv) Behaviour and thoughts on games days (on ice, in dressing room)
For the complete wellbeing program to work, players and staff need to become more comfortable knowing what options are available for them to take action if and when challenges arise within the club. It is inevitable that within a season, multiple players and staff have struggles. The greater familiarity everyone has with the club’s process, the more seamless the provision of care can be and also a sense of calm in the heightened times of chaos and emotion.
Below is an example that we generated for ‘Substance Use (Drugs and Alcohol)’.
Step 1: identification
The player either:
a) Self-identifies to the Director of Wellbeing, team medical doctor, another staff member, or a teammate
b) Is screened by player’s union and tests positive for prohibited substances
What would players say that is considered “self-identification”?
Step 2: connection
Invite the player to go speak with the key individuals in the club who are trained to corral and direct the player of his options. This is typically a player wellbeing / welfare role, team doctor, or mental health consultant.
Step 3: educate player of his options
Communicate with the player his options in a way that he receives the details and can make an informed decision that aligns with his values, wants, and career.
The options I presented to players (in this order) were:
A very important component to the ethics of this communication with the player is their understanding of the limits of confidentiality. For instance, if they work with the team doctor or psychologist, what must be shared with the GM/coach and/or on the medical technology platform file that goes with the player to every club he plays for? If he works with the union, what is the club’s relationship to that external body and how can we / not engage unless he shares information? What is the league’s TUE process and its connection to the team and medical director?
Step 4: player (hopefully) takes action
From here, the key is to support his decision fully and without veiled personal interest. Too often I have heard of staff members in elite clubs using ties to the athletes (and insider knowledge provided to them in this trusted relationship) for their own personal and professional benefit. It is fundamental and ethical to encourage to player to make informed actions that align with his values and goals, and to be there to support him, if and when asked.
Step 5: follow-up
The subsequent relationship will be contingent upon the player, his or her needs, how much he wishes to engage and the severity of need. Follow-up could look like:
Being in service of momentum
After the player left my office, I sat still in a long pause to consider the ways in which our conversation landed for him and if I was moderately helpful in his state of unknowing. What I knew for sure is that my player relaxed within himself by having a listening ear, some advice, and that he had something tangible to bring to his hometown buddy. It was a start.
A few weeks later I check in with my player to see how his friend was doing. This conversation was more succinct, a blend of the original professional guard combined with a known feeling of connection through shared experience. He told me that he reached out to his friend shortly after our call to talk. The nervousness of not knowing his role or what to say was softened by his understanding of the Red Flags. He shared these with his friend and encouraged him to speak with someone trusted as soon as possible. This gesture of support was the life preserver his friend needed, at the right time, to be of service to stop himself from drowning. His friend called his parents and asked for their support. What he was hiding from them the last few years, as he lived in a different city, tied to keep his marriage afloat and be somewhat together as a father, was no longer a silent source of shame and pain.
The healing process had begun.
‘Our core is working with the coaches to give actionable insights to the player and coaches between pitches,’ says former MLB pitcher Zach Day, who helped launch NewtForce Mound.
Main Image: NewtForce
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A key reason he chose to join LSU’s program was the chance to work with Pitching Coach Wes Johnson and the advanced technologies at his disposal. One of the tools Skenes has credited for his improvement this season is the NewtForce Mound, a sensor-laden, turf-covered slope that tracks a pitcher’s ground forces throughout their delivery.
It’s similar to work Johnson did in his prior role as pitching coach for the Minnesota Twins. After the club traded for pitcher Kenta Maeda in 2020, Johnson recognized that the right-hander’s mechanics were much less efficient out of the windup than out of the stretch. Using NewtForce to quantify the discrepancy, Johnson helped Maeda improve his tempo out of the windup and ultimately finish the season as the AL Cy Young runner up.
Johnson identified the need for the NewtForce Mound as a pioneering coach in the tech-savvy Dallas Baptist baseball program, at a time when ball-flight tracking and motion capture technologies proliferated in the sport, leaving the foot-mound interaction as an unexplored frontier.
“My mind doesn’t stop a whole lot, so I’m constantly trying to find an edge for our guys,” Johnson recounted to MLB Network. “The piece we were missing was ground force.”
For help in solving this need, Johnson turned to one of his oldest friends, Kyle Barker, a former Sylvan Hills High School classmate in Arkansas who started his own aerospace engineering firm, AeroNatique. Former MLB pitcher Zach Day, who met Johnson through his work at TrackMan, joined the founding team and helped launch NewtForce.
The smart mound is used by seven MLB clubs and five college programs, including LSU, who competed in Omaha last month. (Johnson, who recently accepted the head coaching job at Georgia for next season, is not officially affiliated with NewtForce but has been a big supporter of the effort.) There are also installations at private facilities such as P3 in Atlanta and the Florida Baseball Ranch.
The NewtForce mound collects ground reaction data while synced to two high-speed cameras for careful review of granular mechanics. The data and visualizations are available immediately after each pitch so that pitchers can still remember the feeling of that last delivery.
“Real and feel, combined, make all the difference for development,” Day said, referring to the objective data and subjective experience of the pitcher. “Like TrackMan, we provide the actionable data in between pitches. So that’s our foundation, our core, is working with the coaches to give actionable insights to the player and coaches between pitches.”
Unlike competing products available, NewtForce doesn’t use embedded force plates but rather a “cousin technology,” Barker said, that enables the mound to collect force data no matter where the pitcher’s lead foot lands. Barker acknowledged that there were several developmental missteps along the way, but a project in his day job using sensors to gauge reactive forces in aerospace components led to a breakthrough.
Image: NewtForce
“We were doing some testing for a major aviation manufacturer, and if you took a deep breath and cleared your head and backed up far enough from it, you can envision a way to get ground force reactions out of a surface with what we thought was infinitely more reliability,” Barker said.
Barker declined to get too specific about the company’s proprietary competitive advantage but said the concept of stiffness-to-weight ratio on an aircraft wing — heavily engineered to be strong, yet light — was critical, as was the collaboration of his lab manager, Paul Wanamaker, who is now NewtForce’s hardware lead.
“My aviation background, oddly enough — and it makes no sense to many people — was just perfect for an instrumented pitching mound,” Barker said.
Among the two dozen metrics collected by NewtForce are acceleration and deceleration patterns, impulse (total force over a period of time) and what they call the clawback, which is the duration of time the lead leg is planted on the ground.
Some early machine learning research using data from the NewtForce mound by Randy Sullivan and his team at Florida Baseball Academy suggests that impulse is a key metric for velocity production.
While progression typically takes time, Barker recalled witness some fairly immediate improvement in one particular pitcher during a site visit to an installation at Vanderbilt.
“I’m no coach, but I’ve seen Vanderbilt’s coach take a kid that was, call it 92 and minus command, and intuitively, after seeing the force charts, have some idea about what his kinetic chain was to cue him verbally,” he said. “And then in two or three pitches, you see better velocity, ballistic spin efficiency.”
Particularly younger pitchers, Day said, tend to have under-developed deceleration patterns in their lower halves. Building arm strength is less the issue than efficient movement in the legs and hips.
“Sometimes the eyes are going to deceive us,” Day said. “There’s times that you’re going to think a guy is using the ground well, and the data is just not saying that. So the way guys move can be deceptive. That’s one thing we’re learning is, Yeah, it looks good, and often it actually is good. But there are times that it looks good, and it’s not. And there are times that it looks bad and awful, and it’s like, you have the best lower-half efficiency out of anybody.”
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The Gatorade Sports Science Institution will enable athletes to drill down into their unique fueling, rehydration and recovery needs.
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The sports drink that became Gatorade was invented nearly 60 years ago, in 1965, but that initial thirst-quenching rehydration solution has evolved into a multi-billion business with more than 50 flavors across a broad portfolio of products supporting active lifestyles before, during and after exercise. The AI-powered algorithms in the Gx app and company website offer more than 91,000 variations of the Gatorade Fuel Plan.
This new facility is GSSI’s clinical research headquarters, situated in the sleepy suburban town of Valhalla, as part of a larger R&D facility operated by parent company PepsiCo. Life sciences is one PepsiCo’s four pillars, and the GSSI is “one of the crown jewels” within the division, Chief Medical Officer Dr Pietro Antonio Tataranni said.
“It’s a group of highly skilled individuals who look at the science out there and tries — most of the time, successfully — to translate it into products, technologies or services,” he added.
The multiple laboratories at the GSSI can assess athletes’ physiology, biochemistry, exercise performance, energy metabolism and mental performance. The research conducted here will support Gatorade’s burgeoning product line, which includes drinks spanning several categories: lifestyle (Propel), energy (Fast Twitch), rehydration (Gatorlyte), refuel (classic Gatorade) and recovery (Muscle Milk and its plant-based protein counterpart, Evolve).
SBJ Tech’s own Joe Lemire underwent several of the aforementioned assessments at the GSSI. You can read his takeaways here in the latest edition of our Sandbox Series.
This shift to a broader Gatorade portfolio was first revealed in a Super Bowl ad and reflects a shift in marketing tone. Brand affinity is born from “a mix of aspirational and attainable,” said Carolyn Braff, Gatorade’s Head of Brand Strategy.
“When Gatorade puts a whole bunch of sweaty football players on all of our ads, we’re excluding half the population,” she said. “We don’t work that way now. So you’re going to see a big step change from us in how we think about athletic performance, athletic wellness, speaking to everyone who’s moving their body with purpose and welcoming them into the Gatorade family.”
Image: Gatorade
On a recent morning, the two-time Olympic gold medalist and two-time World Cup champion Lloyd visited for an assessment. At one point, she was strapped onto a treadmill, with a respiratory flowmeter affixed around her mouth. Measuring her exhalation can identify the type of energy she’s burning, fat or carbohydrate. (Asked later what she learned, she quipped, “I learned that I’m retired.”)
But Lloyd, a former FIFA World Player of the Year who hung up her cleats in 2021, is a poster child for proper fueling. Overhauling her nutritional intake after criticism from the former US women’s national team coach gave her more energy and led to better performance.
“I remember, it was Pia Sundhage, she was not going to renew my contract in 2009,” Lloyd said. “So I had to do something to make myself better and change. And 2009 was when I really started to change my diet, eating organic, eating healthier — I noticed a huge difference.”
Gatorade’s ambition is to democratize sport science. Members of the media were invited to undergo a similar battery of assessments, testing force production, body composition and muscle fatigue. The Gx Sweat Patch and Gatorade Fuel Plan are mass-market attempts to put, as they say, “a sport scientist in your pocket.”
Matt Pahnke leads the GSSI innovation program, meaning he may be the proverbial sport scientist in everyone’s pocket, has tested elite triathletes competing at the Ironman world championship in Kona. He determined that the average participant lost between 40 and 45 ounces (1.2 and 1.3 liters) of fluid per hour — but individuals ranged from 10 ounces (0.3 liters) to 85 ounces (2.5 liters), a huge discrepancy washed away by the mean.
“That’s why we developed the patch system so that an athlete, on their own, can understand what their individual needs are,” Pahnke said.
Ironmans are grueling affairs, no matter the conditions, but Kona is especially harsh due to the heat. Football players wearing pads during summer two-a-days can relate, whether they are in high school or the NFL. The GSSI includes an environmental chamber to enable heat testing up to 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) with 80% humidity. “Basically, we can mimic any environment,” said GSSI R&D Director Lindsay Baker.
The updated GSSI is now fully open for business, and the broader Life Sciences team is conducting a series of pilots through PepsiCo’s Advanced Personalization Ideation Center. “We have what we aspire to be a platform, and from there, you can bolt on different technologies,” said Tristin Brisbois, noting tech’s potential to “bring a differentiated consumer experience.”
The API Center seeks to operate as a startup within broader PepsiCo, relying on partners in technology and academia and utilizing AI, wearables and more. Its mantra is to “learn first, scale second” with early prototypes undergoing testing.
While the results of the Sweat Patch and Fuel Plan will, of course, refer users back to Gatorade products, it won’t do so exclusively.
“You don’t want your recommendation engine to just push out Gatorade products — you’re going to lose credibility immediately,” Brisbois said. “The products are designed to give you the nutrition and hydration that you need in a short period and a very convenient way. So you could get there with water, banana, and 10 soda crackers, or you could consume this Gatorade. But there is the option there for the consumer to make the choice.”
Her team is concerned not just with innovation but consumer behavior. Users need to find enough value to share data, but the tool can’t require so much that it turns them off either. There’s a “tipping point” they need to find, Brisbois said, adding, “If you’re working in the personalization space, it’s almost like you can over-engineer it. And for a lot of these things, the more complicated it becomes, the more niche it becomes, too.”
Image: Gatorade
And Gatorade is cognizant that it can’t make its portfolio too convoluted or involved, or else the messaging won’t resonate with the fleeting attention of the average consumer strolling through the grocery aisles.
“Honestly, we learned that when we launched the G series in 2010. We had 01, 02, 03, Prime, Perform, Recover, G Series Fit, G Series Pro, Classic G Series — it was way too complicated,” Braff said. “And so we’re not going to do that again. The best thing we can do is tell consumers what’s in the product and let them choose for themselves. And so our billboarding on the front, primary display panels for all of our products is really simple.”
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This recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable gave Leaders Performance Institute members the opportunity to define mental skills and discuss their application in their environments and what we can all be doing to optimise their implementation.
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Providing some additional content and provocation for the start of the roundtable, we listened to some of the thoughts and experiences of Dr Duncan Simpson who is currently serving as the Director of Personal Development at IMG Academy – Duncan is also on the Executive Board for the Association of Applied Sports Psychology in a Research & Practice position. The premise of the first section of the roundtable was to engage in some stimulus around the ’what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ as it pertains to mental skills training.
The ‘why’ of mental skills
Simpson kicked us off by sharing this definition of mental skills training: ‘The systematic and consistent practice of psychological skills aimed at enhancing performance and personal well-being’ (Vealey 2007). There are two key components to this definition – the systematic and consistent practice and the other focusing on what is the purpose of that practice? When we think about mental skills, if you just do it without an intended outcome or purpose, it will lack any impact or substance.
Now we’ve explored a definition of mental skills and some core considerations, why is this topic of much interest and relevance to the high performance sport industry?
Recent meta analyses corroborate decades of research regarding mental skills training having a positive effect on sports performance and vital psychological factors (Brown & Fletcher, 2017; Lochbaum et al., 2022).
However, some coaches and athletic directors have not adopted mental skills training due to perceived barriers, such as lack of time, cost, and concerns over relinquishing control (Wrisberg et al., 2010; Zakrajsek et al., 2013).
To summarise this first segment of the roundtable – we know that mental skills is important because there is a significant body of research outlining the positive impacts, but we also know it’s not being implemented across all levels of sport consistently.
What? ‘Questions are the shepherds of your mind’
We have to begin thinking about the implementation of mental skills. We may want to ask ourselves some questions because these will help direct where we want to go without on programming. Below are some considerations Duncan shared when thinking about the programming of our mental skills training:
What does the athlete or team want? What are we hearing from them around what they want? Do they want to become more resilient, confident or focus – what are the areas they want? This is a really important step, in particular having the connection with the athlete to collate that feedback. Where we have seen mental skills not work is when we put the programming to the athlete and try to make them receptive to it.
What does the athlete or team need? An audit or a needs analysis, working with coaches and support staff to understand what they actually need. When we start to collate the information around what they want and need, we are much better informed around what the programming and training needs to look like.
When you think about the sport in the context in which you work, what’s the greatest return on investment? If we want to improve the resilience of the team, is that going to have the biggest impact upon performance and wellbeing? Are we strictly focused on performance or is it a combination of both? We need to evaluate what is actually going on in order to make a difference.
It’s also worth thinking about an opposing question such as ‘what’s the lowest hanging fruit?’ What’s the easiest thing, not just the greatest thing? What are the things that are no brainers?
Addition and subtraction. When we think about organisations and teams, a lot of times coaches have this idea of needing to do more; and mental skills training is another one of those things we have to do, work and focus on – it’s an addition. We can actually reframe this. Mental skills and psychological work can actually be about subtraction. Here’s an example to bring this to life – if we are to focus on team building and culture working through the lens of subtraction, an element of this might be that when we make a mistake, we don’t criticise each other. We’re not doing anything extra, we’re just stopping criticism.
Finally, and when thinking about the ‘what’ behind mental skills’, what can you provide? What are your areas of competence?
What do we mean by ‘mental skills’?
Skills, in this case mental, is an ability and capacity acquired through deliberate, systematic, and sustained effort. Below are a number of key mental skills we often seen aligned to the practice.
Mental attributes
Attributes are qualities or characteristics of a person or team. Below are some of the things you may hear from coaches or support staff around how we want our athletes to be. The below examples are the outcome, this is what we are leading towards and we’re going to practise some mental skills in the aim to reach these outcomes:
Behaviours
A behaviour is the way a person acts or reacts in response to a particular situation or stimulus. They are observable actions that express psychological attributes. What does it look like when somebody is confident, when somebody is resilient?
Collaboration and agreement between performer, coach and support staff is an important aspect here. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether your definition of an attribute is slightly different to another member of staff or the athlete, the collaboration and agreement is the most important.
It’s also important to be sport-specific. What does that behaviour look like in your context? We are also in a position now where we can be objectively recording and capturing data based on these behaviours.
Skill learning is a relatively permanent change in behaviour as a result of practice (Magill, 2016). If we are just psycho-educating our athletes and they don’t actually change their behaviours, they probably haven’t learned it. Seeing a change in behaviour is key.
Consider this flow: one of the outcomes is that we want an athlete to take more calculated risks. When we can define what that means based on the sporting context, what do we need to allow that to happen? We need the athletes to be more confident (the attribute), what are the skills that can support that confidence (self-talk)?
Skill = Self-Talk → Attribute = Confidence → Behaviour: Take More Calculated Risks
In practice reflection
Think about reflection. Below are some questions we can ask ourselves as performance support staff and coaches.
Ultimately, when you are looking at your team, organisation and athletes:
Group reflections & insights
At the end of the call, attendees were asked to share a key reflection from the roundtable that they’d like to take forward:
Smith’founded Crux Sports, a consultancy for women in sports, with a view to grow women’s football and give females the support they need whether in the boardroom or out on the field.
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Rebecca (Bex) Smith is among the most connected people in women’s soccer. She captained teams for Duke University, Vfl Wolfsburg and the New Zealand national team, competing with the Football Ferns at two World Cups (2007 and 2011) and two Olympic Games (2008 and 2012). Smith also played professionally in Sweden and Germany before her career ended in 2013 due to a knee injury.
Smith, now 41, went on to work at FIFA for nearly five years as Competitions and Event Manager for all FIFA Women’s World Cups — the flagship event as well as the Under-17 and Under-20 versions. She went on to become the Global Executive Director of the Women’s Game at Copa90, a podcast host co-produced by the BBC, UEFA venue director and now Founder/CEO of Crux Sports, a women’s sports consultancy. In May, Crux Sports published research, in partnership with YouTube, on the value and impact of DAZN making the Women’s Champions League available for free on the social streaming platform.
She earned three degrees, speaks four languages and is either a board member or advisor for numerous companies and programs, including AI-powered injury risk platform Zone7 and the Isokinetic Conference, the largest football medicine conference in the world. Smith will also co-host the daily morning show for Australian broadcaster Optus at the upcoming Women’s World Cup being held in Australia and New Zealand.
On what she’s building with Crux Sports . . .
My company was born out of the fact that I had a very diverse background coming from playing to then governance and managing one of the biggest women’s sporting event on the planet to then going into media content production to then working with big brands to doing branded content and working with athletes. So I really just wanted to have a place where we could help all stakeholders so whether it is brands or governing bodies or content production or athletes themselves to either get into the women’s game or to help fuel it.
So it’s really about driving sustainable positive growth into the women’s game, but then helping stakeholders to increase their bottom line or to work on their marketing or figure out their strategies for integrating women’s sports and female athletes into their propositions as well. So it’s very diverse. I work with YouTube and Google and helped them do a research project, all the way to Champions League to working with big brands like Xero on their partnerships with the FA or FIFA to working with on content production or working with athletes directly, helping them work on their post-career transition and maximizing their commercial opportunities during their career.
On her interest in player health and wellness . . .
It comes from my own experiences in football and sort of more negative experiences, I would say, throughout my career where I found that there was a lack of support. Despite the fact that I had three degrees on the side and was trying to work at the same time — because I was trying to just set myself up for post-[playing career] — I still felt really unsure, insecure, going into that post-career, post-football life and having to do so with a really bad injury. I hurt my knee, and then it was not very properly looked after at my club. And I was continually playing on a very swollen knee. And in the end, I can’t run anymore. So for me, it was really important.
When I was at FIFA, we did a whole medical study on the athletes and players, and what their medical setups were. And in the end, we couldn’t publish it. So I gave it to my buddy at FIFPro. So they did the very first employment study. So it was based off of a lot of the data and research that we had done. And yeah, it’s just really about trying to better the situation for the next generations. And it sounds so hokey, and so cliché, but it’s so important that we continually improve the game for the athletes because they are at the heart of the game.
On her work with athletes . . .
So many people work in and around sports, and they run this or they run marketing, or they run broadcast, and they’re very important, they make loads of money, but at the end of the day, if the athletes are continually getting burnt out and injured and aren’t taken care of properly, then it won’t be sustainable. So for many reasons, one, the health and mental health and safety of athletes because they’re human, but secondly, because it’s a business, and it needs to be sustained as well. And you have to take care of your people in the business. So they’re at the core.
Do I think it’s gotten better? No. I wish I could say that it has. I think in some areas, in some clubs, there’s better medical care and a little bit more investment in that, but I still think that it’s a huge gap, which is one of the reasons why I work with a lot of athletes. I don’t really market it, they just come and I work with them to help them get prepared mentally and also just physically — what are they actually doing to prepare for it. So, ya know, there’s still a really long way that we need to go for that.
On Zone7 . . .
Not just because I’m a strategic adviser to them, but I think something like a Zone7 [can help]. I really wish it was around when I was playing. And I’ve said that before. But to have the technology that we have now — AI — that did not exist when I was playing, or was not, let’s say, mainstream when I was around, and to be able to have those types of algorithms where so much data is going in that is being perfected constantly and tinkered with and filtered down, that you can really get to the point where you can say, ‘This is the percentage of risk that you are at for this type of injury, and therefore you should change your training to do this, this and this.’ It’s mind-blowing.
I come across lots of tech companies or people trying to help out with athletes, and it’s all — even what I do — very time-consuming and very one-on-one, whereas this is a mass market product that that can really help. Now they’re in leagues as well, so it’s not just with individual clubs or teams.
So far, that’s the most incredible thing that I’ve seen that I think would just really help reduce injury in a huge way, really quickly and very significantly. But other than that, there needs to be a lot more investment by clubs and leagues and those that are making money off of athletes. They need to have a certain percentage invested back into the athletes, that would be my standard approach to things. But good luck trying to get them to invest back into their players.
On her recent project for YouTube and Google . . .
I did a research project with them around the Women’s Champions League. So because they put the Women’s Champions League, through the rights with DAZN, on YouTube free-to-air and global, it meant that there were a lot of knock-on effects. What they were measuring was traditionally just the live match number — what’s the audience watching this live match? Which is obviously lower than if it’s on normal TV in in France, but that’s because a lot of people didn’t know it was on YouTube.
So we were really looking at the value and impact more broadly on the different stakeholders. So from media, players, the teams — so I interviewed 15 out of 16 teams that participated in the group stage — got their opinions on things, talked to the players that were involved, talked to media and then we did a big fan survey.
On her work with the Global Esports Federation . . .
That’s quite fun. I sit on the players’ commission, and that’s really interesting because I’m learning more than anywhere else, I’d say. It’s really understanding how athletes in the gaming space are being treated, what their challenges are, how the Global Esports Federation can help support athletes better. From my former career as an athlete, but really looking at gaming as one of the biggest, fastest growing industries on the planet. And my goodness, every kid is involved in it.
On the importance of New Zealand co-hosting the Women’s World Cup . . .
It’s pretty massive and not likely to ever happen again. It really is a one-off opportunity, I think, for a country the size of New Zealand that always punches above its weight anyway in its sports teams, but in terms of the size of the country and being able to host such a massive event, it’s huge. And obviously, co-hosting with Australia has been a large part of that as well and will be truly beneficial for both parties. You still have some of the beauty of New Zealand and a totally different vibe and a little bit closer to be able to travel within the country, as opposed to Australia. I’m hoping that all the fans are going to come and turn out and really support the teams down there.
On the broader growth of the women’s game . . .
What the women’s game has suffered from prior is that we have big, big moments, and then it really drops off. So you have the World Cups and obviously the women’s Euros this last summer in England — and then with England winning, that really pushes everything forward quite quickly. You have 1 billion viewers from the last FIFA Women’s World Cup in France, but then we really have struggled to translate that into the [domestic] leagues and Champions League.
I think this year has been one of the first years where we’ve really seen massive pickups of numbers of people in stadia of sellout crowds. Literally every single week, I’ll open something on my phone, and it’s a record being broken of some club or some stadium being sold out. We had the Arnold Clark cup here. They had it in Coventry, and it was the biggest game they’ve ever had in sports — and that happened to be women’s football.
So it’s just it’s growing massively. So I really think that this Women’s World Cup is no longer going to be just another pinnacle event that will see the drop off after. I just think it will help to increase that level so that the trajectory just keeps going up. Obviously the time zone is going to be a challenge. So I think the on-demand elements of it, the highlights and things will be really, really important.
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The Leaders Performance Institute explores approaches at Notre Dame, Penn State and in European Soccer.
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“Broadly, one of the gaps is cultural,” John Wagle, the Associate Athletics Director of Sports Performance at the University of Notre Dame, tells the Leaders Performance Institute.
“Highly competent, well-intentioned people who are tasked with providing best-in-class support to athletes in development or preparedness mistakenly use time spent as a proxy for the value of their contribution.”
“If you have a high performance team all operating in that manner you can appreciate quickly that the athlete’s time becomes limited; and that loss of autonomy, that loss of educational opportunity, that loss of ownership leads to a lot of sub-optimal outcomes.”
Athlete recovery is a potential casualty and the situation can be compounded in team sports, as Carwyn Sharp, the Head of Human Performance at Italian Serie A side AS Roma, explains. “Implementing change in a large organization is much more difficult than going to an individual athlete and individual coach,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “Here at Roma, we’ve got to think about how it affects numerous players.”
Sharp currently works with a larger staff than he did during his time working at the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee between 2018 and 2021. “With the Paralympics, I could just go downstairs and talk with medicine. Here, I’ve got to talk to many individuals in many departments, even though they’re all under my umbrella. Take something like compression wear, I’ve got to talk to IT about how we’re going to implement and monitor its use. As well as the kitmen who will manage handing it out and washing it, as well physiotherapists that will note if the Players are wearing it, and obviously the Sport Science staff and Players.”
The NCAA is a world away from Italian football, but Sam Marsh, who recently finished playing with the Pennsylvania State University men’s volleyball team, had access to a similar array of recovery modalities and needed similar advice, particularly as a student-athlete balancing playing and studying. “It would be wrong to say I knew exactly what to do all the time in terms of preparation and recovery,” he admits. “We have a lot of guidance, resources. The help is there if you need it.”
Here, we explore the steps taken by Notre Dame and Roma to create efficiencies in workflow management, while providing athletes with education and development opportunities around recovery. We also reflect on Marsh’s recent experiences with Penn State as a varsity athlete.
Victory by a thousand conversations
When it comes to recovery modalities, “it tends to be the older or younger guys to engage the most actively in the process,” says Sharp. “We have a number of guys who come here from the primavera, the under-19s. They know it’s tough to get in so they’ll do everything. They’re in the gym doing extra weightlifting, the prehabilitation. I talk to them and they ask ‘what else can I do?’ Then it’s most of the older guys who are at the point where they’re thinking they want to stay as long as they can.
“For these people, we can improve our processes because we’re getting the feedback and it’s easier to monitor them, collect the data, and make sure it’s accurate.”
At astute programs, there are opportunities for education. “We start by identifying student-athletes at higher risk of being fatigued. Using a variety of data from different disciplines, we have processes that help us classify the student-athletes accordingly,” says Wagle of Notre Dame’s approach. “If fatigued, they are directed to a recovery points system that scales up based on severity. We assign more point value to modalities that are more rooted in empirical support and less point value to those that are not as well-studied or have a small effect. We can build systems that simply nudge behavior rather than prescribe in a more transactional or passive manner. That’s a lot more powerful and sustainable because it creates productive conversations. If they ask ‘why is getting eight hours of sleep more points than something else?’ then you get an educational opportunity around sleep hygiene. Maybe prior to that they didn’t have a realization of its impact. It fosters more victories by a thousand conversations than this one-time transaction that happens in many environments.”
At Penn State, Marsh and his teammates understood the value in recovery but favored modalities often depends on your peers. “It generalizes around which guys live together,” he says. “The guys that I came in with, we all lived together. So when we decide we’re going to go into our facilities and get in the contrast tubs or stretch for a little bit, we all go together. It was like a group mentality in that regard because other guys that lived together may do different things.”
Familiarity was not a barrier. “I came here and was using things for recovery that I’d never done,” Marsh adds. “Contrast tubs, compression boots, stretches that our strength & conditioning coach gave us that feel very good in the long run but hurt when we do them. It was new but we were willing to try a lot of things just because of the amount of stress and pressure that we put on our bodies.”
To provide scalability in its processes, Roma introduced its ‘One Roma’ concept across all of its age-group and senior men’s and women’s teams. “We are big believers that the health and viability of our first team doesn’t just sit with our first team,” says Sharp. “We’re going to have a much bigger impact on the health of this club if it’s something we can scale for.”
It also helps with player education and is gradually shifting the culture around recovery. Sharp adds: “With ‘One Roma’, when players move up towards the first team, we want them to know that what they’re doing at 17 or 18 is very close to what the first team are doing. It’s not a big jump and it’s easier to make that transition.”
For the 2022-23 season, Roma also introduced its own internal athlete management system. “We’re now much better at monitoring our recovery strategies on a daily basis and in real time.” This has facilitated better conversations with players, with data complemented by their subjective feedback. “With a better relationship we can ask more of the players and they are willing to do more too.”
Managing trade-offs
Of the potential trade-offs, Wagle returns to the idea of incentivizing athletes. “We’ve been very careful to evaluate the recovery modalities that we deploy alongside the commitment they require,” he says. “Just as we try to incentivize those things that have a greater impact or the most empirical support, when all is equal, we will then prioritize the tactic that takes less time as a secondary feature of sorting for student-athletes.”
However you approach workflows within your organization, Wagle stresses the need for “personal humility and shared ambition”. “Those ingredients together are really going to be meaningful to our athletes because they let you achieve excellence but they also let you sustain it.”
Sharp concurs. “It gives us an opportunity to look at ourselves and say ‘we’ve done a good job educating this player or athlete, because maybe their sense of whether it’s working or not depends on how well we’ve educated them’.”
Are there other metrics of success? “Finding out what the question is,” says Wagle. “Too often we skip ahead and think that we know the right question to ask and the impact ends up being smaller because it was misdirected.”
Sharp believes it comes back to how Roma players feel. “If an injury takes 7-14 days to recover from, based on the literature, and the player recovers in three, we’re beating the average so that’s meaningful,” he says.
“Whether we quantify this with them in some way or not, part of all of this is how they feel about and the job we’re doing. If they feel like they’re improving and getting better, they’re going to have trust and faith in us in the things we’re asking them to do.”
Marsh, for his part, placed his trust in his Assistant Athletic Trainer at Penn State, Brianna McDuffie. He says: “The amount of times we can just go in and say ‘alright Bri, my shoulder’s hurting again. Can we do some rehab?’ And you’ll end up spending every day for the next two weeks with her.”
The messaging was always clear for Marsh and his teammates. “If you put the work in that’s all well and good, but you have to do the other stuff that some people don’t want to do to be able to reap the benefits.”
The startup’s InFlow product can be installed in toilets to measure hydration in real time for users.
Main image courtesy of Intake Health.
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World’s shortest elevator pitch: “Intake Health automates hydration testing for elite sports.”
Company: Intake Health
Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
Year founded: 2016
Website/App: https://www.intake.health/
Funding round to date: “We are self-funded.”
Who are your investors? “We have no external investors. We’ve been invested in with grants, SBIR funding from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, as well as founder funding. We’ve raised about $2-$3 million.”
Are you looking for more investment? “Not at the moment, but we will need some in probably 12-14 months.”
Tell us about yourself, Co-Founder & CEO Michael Bender: “I’ve always been drawn to technology – I had a computer in the early days – as well as entrepreneurship. Creating, selling things to buy what I needed to as a child. I was always excited about the option of software being low cost and something you could build and solve problems for others. I started companies in college, as well as right out of college. I started working for a software company right out of school for about four years and became an owner of that company. We sold that company three times. I created another software company I ran for 10 years before starting Intake Health. After doing software for so long as an electrical engineer, I thought it might be nice to get back to building physical things and use some of that education. I teamed up with my brother, who is a biomedical PhD engineer out of UCLA. He brought the science to the table, I brought some business experience and funding and electrical computer experience. We merged that together to build Intake Health.”
Who are your co-founders/partners? “My younger brother, Brian, is my Co-Founder. He has a material science undergraduate degree and has a PhD in biomedical engineering. I have experience in entrepreneurship, successful companies. Other people looking to start companies seek you out when you have that kind of background and most people just want you to do it for them. I gave him advice to quit his job. He had come to the table looking to measure his dietary intake. He thought there would be a better way to do it than blood tests with doctors and waiting and scheduling appointments and ‘What am I eating today? I can’t just take pictures and track it.’ That was the genesis of the company – to make it easier to track your intake. I told him to quit his job, he had some interesting ideas and concepts, and to double down on those and research those. That’s where I put up some of the initial funding. We created benchtop results that were successful enough to start landing the grants. What makes him special is his aptitude for science, his ability to understand the bigger business picture in conjunction with that and being a very easy guy to work with.”
How does your product work? “It’s a physical product called InFlow. You buy it and it measures hydration in real time for users. It’s installed in a urinal in just a couple of seconds with suction cups. You get it out of the box, install it in the urinal by pressing it into the back wall. In the locker room, as athletes are coming in and using the bathroom, they urinate on it and it fills up with a little bit of urine and they instantly get a very bright green, yellow or red indication of their hydration status, along with a graphic that goes over the urinal that tells them the next step depending on what that result is they got.”
Image: Intake Health
What problem is your company solving? “Hydration testing happens quite a bit in these environments already. Some teams don’t actually have the capacity or resources to do it, even though they would like to do it. Others that have the capacity to find time for hydration testing with their staff can’t really do it frequently enough to change the behaviors of the athletes and keep it top of mind frequently enough to improve the hydration behaviors of their athletes. Proper hydration is really critical to get that extra 1, 2, 3% out of athletes. It improves decision making, keeps them healthier on the field and playing longer. It reduces cramping and injuries and improves recovery. All these things that very elite teams are looking to do is why they have these hydration protocols. Frequently, it starts to become deprioritized or they can’t get to it as often. Our technology allows them to distribute that and automate that process. Now, you have hydration testing in every urinal and the athletes are aware of their results and can act on them immediately instead of waiting for a large number of staff to collect urine samples, do all the testing and write those answers down. There’s a significant lag between existing processes for hydration testing compared to having the instantaneous, hands-free hydration testing in the urinal today. We’re able to bring hydration awareness to the top of mind for athletes and actually change the hydration culture among the team. We’re seeing great results.”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “The product is sold primarily through distributor channels. It retails for $2599 for a four pack. Our target customers are elite athletic programs. We sell globally, so professional sports, Division-I universities. Any sports program that can leverage these effectively to improve hydration.”
How are you marketing your product? “For marketing, we started with targeted emails and standard outbound tactics like LinkedIn and calling on people listed on desired customer websites. Since gaining traction, we now see a lot of organic inbound from word of mouth and are shifting to rely on our new distribution partners – Henry Schine, School Health, and Alert Services in the US and Perform Better in the UK – to increase awareness. We also go to conferences quite a bit. You’ll see us at a lot of sports conferences and our distributors will be representing the product. A lot of times, we’ll install the technology at the conferences so people can use it.”
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “To scale the company, we are relying on distributors. We’re bringing on more distributors globally to help push the product out. As far as working with our partners to ensure product availability, we have manufacturing partners we’re ramping up to produce the product with the quality we demand, as well as support the customers with the support they deserve as we scale up. There’s a pathway of additional products in what we plan to do next and new markets we intend to take the market to. The sports world is interesting. We want to support it and we’re dedicated to supporting that industry and it’s a very large, global industry. When you’re looking at the elite and the top levels, it’s on the edge of a venture-backable business. Our intent is to get technology that measures wellness on the toilet of everyone in the world. Right now it’s hydration, but there are other indicators. Our strategy is to figure out: ‘How do we get this on everyone’s toilet?’ With hydration products specifically, we are just now looking into workplace safety markets, so construction, mining, warehouses, agriculture. We can have a large impact there keeping people healthy and safe by improving their hydration. We’re also looking at military and tactical environments, like fire, police, first responders. They also have existing hydration protocols and understand and need their people to be hydrated to perform at the level they’re working at. We’re expanding into those markets.”
Image: Intake Health
Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “When it comes to hydration testing, there are competitive options. Most of them are devices, so people are just selling products that help you measure your hydration. I don’t think there is anyone doing real-time hydration monitoring for professional sports in the toilet. Our competition seems to be more status quo, what people are doing today than an actual company producing a competitive product. Our product, when it comes to measuring hydration, whereas for a dipstick or an optical or digital refractometer you don’t have to use your hands. It’s hands-free. No one has to collect a urine sample to use our system to test hydration. The results are instant, so there’s no lag time between running a hydration program and delivering that information and acting on it with the athletes. They can act on it in real time and produce impact before they get to the field instead of often after they hit the field with existing products. The sweat patches can help give a one-time understanding of a person’s sweating capacity and what happens, but it’s not really an ongoing use case that keeps hydration top of mind. That may be more of a symbiotic product instead of a competitive product with a slightly different use case. When looking at other companies that are trying to measure stuff specifically from the toilet, like health indicators not specifically hydration, one thing that sets us apart and is important is privacy. Our technology is standalone, you install it and it does not collect personal, identifiable information nor health data. It’s meant to empower the user in real time. We’re able to bypass a lot of the privacy concerns that some people may have as they’re collecting the data and bringing it up to the internet and doing things like that.”
What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “We definitely have patent-pending technology around measuring health indicators from the toilet. The team we’ve built is pretty impressive. We have people from the industry and the sports world specifically that are trying to solve this problem. We have customers that want to come join the team. That’s what it comes down to. We have a good team and novel technology.”
What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “Bringing on the distributors was probably our first milestone. We’ve been able to launch a product, get early traction and then attract distributors. You have to have a product the market cares about in order to have distributors place larger stocking orders. We’ve been able to create a product and validate it. We only launched the product last September, so it hasn’t been very long that we’ve been selling the product. In a very short time period we’ve been able to prove market demand and we have something useful for the market and for our distributors.”
What are the values that are core to your brand? “Transparency and trust are critical. We publish papers and make our data well-known. That is important in this industry, especially where a lot of people try to maybe sell you snake oil. Everyone is looking to get that 1-2 % and some companies take advantage of that. We want to put this on everybody’s toilet and improve health for everyone. Our mission is to help people live healthier longer, instead of us having decades of life at the end of life and degraded health where we can’t do stuff with our grandchildren or we’re going to the doctor’s all the time. We want everybody to be healthy until their final days. Hydration is our starting point but, to get there, trust and transparency is absolutely critical. That’s also why our device does not collect, store or transmit any data. We don’t want to muddy the waters with, ‘What are we doing with all this data we could be collecting on health indications?’ We’ll roll out data collection and connectivity later as customers demand it. Medical rigor is another one. We are not a medical product today, that’s definitely in our future. We appreciate the level of intentionality behind building a medical device and medical product and how the medical industry treats health information and rolls out products to make sure they are safe and efficacious. That’s really critical to us as well.”
What does success ultimately look like for your company? “The entire world living healthy until their final days.”
What should investors or customers know about you — the person, your life experiences — that shows they can believe in you? “We have a good bit of experience already. We’ve built successful companies and I’ve built successful companies. We have customers using the product. We have a history of doing what we say and delivering on what we say, whether that be with this business or previous businesses or life experiences. The team we’ve built is a very credible team with lots of experience in the industry for customers. You don’t get that far in life and build up a reputation without being trustworthy. That goes back to trust and transparency. We’re not new, we’re not the 17-year-old founders out there. We’re 40 years old and have been doing this for a while.”
What examples are there of how Intake Health has benefited a team or partner? “We have a case study with Millwall FC. They adopted our technology. That had an existing hydration protocol in place. After using our technology for a couple of weeks, they saw those results go up and decided they could stop doing their hydration protocol which was time-consuming. They improved their hydration, improving time and money for the organization, which is what we are hoping to do for all teams.”
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