By Sarah Evans

Recommended Reading:

Talent Pathways – Some Essential Considerations

How the Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan Is Tackling Some of the Most Pressing Questions on Talent Pathways

Are your Talent Pathways Considerate of Non-Linear Progression?

Framing the topic

This topic-led virtual roundtable delved deeper into the topic of player evaluation. It has been a topic which often comes up within the membership, and we looked specifically at how our members balance evaluating their players based on their potential versus their current abilities.

We picked out four key points from our discussions:

1. What does it take to win?

Understanding what the key characteristics are within your sport that are more likely to lead to success. These can be physical, technical/tactical attributes, but most importantly in many cases, the psychological or behavioural traits which are harder to quantify. Gather as much data on the athletes in relation to these as possible and track these over a long period of time.

Performance. Physicality. Personality. One organisation explained how they grouped their key traits into these three headings, and they are then mapped out as current vs potential. Some elements of these continuously develop and some cap out. Therefore it is important to figure out where they are in that stage; knowing how much opportunity there is left for growth or development allows you to make a more informed decision on the player.

Elite performance qualities. This is a tool one of our members use to rate the players and evaluate their performance. The players are asked to rate themselves based on some key characteristics such as teamwork, competitiveness and adaptability. The coaches or leadership group then also rate the player, and the most important part is then the discussion between coaches and players about the ratings. The power is in the conversation and understanding the players better.

2. Individual Development Plans (IDPs)

Have IDPs as player-led exercises, rather than coach-led. Have the athletes become an integral part of this process, where ideally the player is bought in and contributing or co-creating the plan.

Understanding the athlete’s capacity to learn is critical in understanding their potential. In their IDP, instead of having ten areas of focus, have one or two goals at a time, so you can assess how quickly they progress and learn. Also assigning a practitioner as a mentor to help them with that main goal will enable them to be more effective.

1. Scouting reports

Scouting and coach reports can be one of the most effective tools in player evaluation. Having multiple eyes, multiple times, on players avoids bias and increases effectiveness.

However, how do you ensure longevity of the scouting process? How are you evaluating the evaluators and ensuring you have quality and consistency in this process over a long period of time?

It was stressed that data is only ever a discussion point. It is always the experts whose opinion has the most weighting.

4. The importance of habits

Player. Person. Performer. Measuring the non-tangibles is so hard, therefore understanding an athlete’s inherent motivation and drive becomes crucial. Looking at their performance habits, what they are doing day in day out, is an indicator that they will have the internal motivation and drive. Often it is doing the basics and having the love for the game which become the fundamentals for success.

For those working within academies or with younger children, making sure you speak with the people that spend the most time with them is critical. This is often the pastoral members and those who spend time with them in their dorms. Understanding them as a whole, what their habits are, will provide you with the most insights. The interconnectivity between these departments then becomes critical and, again, stresses the importance of open communication.

Image courtesy of Gemini Sports Analytics

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Jake Schuster’s work as a strength and conditioning coach led him to jobs in seven countries working with pro and college athletes in even more sports: rugby, field hockey, track and field, tennis, golf, soccer, swimming, basketball and volleyball. He then spent a year as Vald Performance’s Senior Sports Scientist, managing 500 global clients across a broad spectrum of elite sports.

A common refrain permeated his experiences and conversations, prompting Schuster to start Gemini Sports Analytics. In partnership with Snowflake’s cloud computing and DataRobot’s artificial intelligence, Gemini adds a no-code layer of predictive analytics on top of a team’s existing data infrastructure, whether it be an athlete management system or bespoke team dashboard.

“In those travels, what I saw reinforced what I’ve seen in my career up to that point, which is that teams have way too much data than they know what to do with,” he says. “They don’t have the bandwidth or the capacity to wrangle it. It’s not for lack of trying, it’s not for lack of talent.”

Gemini was working with beta partners — the UFC, as well as teams in MLB, the NBA, international rugby and European soccer — in continuing refining the product in advance of the baseball winter meetings in December.

Among its key executives are a pair of former developers in the Houston Astros’ analytics department, Chandler Evans and Nate Verlin, as well as former Catapult Senior Business Development Manager Mathew Young and former Oklahoma City data architect Troy Carter. Miami-based GSA is a recent graduate of the leAD Sports & Health Tech accelerator in Lake Nona, Florida, and raised a $1.5 million seed round co-led by Florida Funders and the Florida Institute.

The pain point for so many clubs has been that, despite the relative ease of deploying new data-collecting cameras and sensors, the management and interpretation of those end products is a more onerous task. The soccer partner, despite have an above-average data science pedigree, didn’t have the personnel or resources to employ machine learning. So much time was spent cleaning, organizing and visualizing the raw data.

“They actually hadn’t run a single predictive model in a year and a half, and we ran 168 in under two weeks,” Schuster says, adding, “Our engineers are a force multiplier.”

Duncan French, the VP of Performance at the UFC Performance Institute, understands the issue acutely. Of the UFC’s 650 fighters, he says 87% work train with PI programming, and about 250 are in residence in Las Vegas at any given time. His team has distributed more than 500 Oura rings for sleep monitoring, accounting for more than 60,000 nights of data.

“Having aggregated a pretty significant amount of information and data, having built out a pretty decent data architecture to this point, the next iteration of that development was into our ability to harness the power of the data in a more automated fashion,” French says. “One of the things that we have is a capacity issue. We don’t have data scientists on our team, right? So it’s either our own staff, or it doesn’t get done.”

French was happy to be a testing partner for Gemini, in part because he says the UFC’s innovation mantra is “be first.” He also had gotten to know Schuster through his S&C travels over the past decade, with French crediting the GSA team for understanding the daily workflow and reality of applied sport science in the elite environment.

“We’re providing, hopefully, a pretty robust performance infrastructure, which can challenge and interrogate their software,” French says. “And hopefully in return, we’re going to get access to a system that will allow us to ask some high-level questions and harness the power of our data, perhaps more so than we have been doing.”

At all the most heavily resourced sports clubs, data science staffing lags behind what’s needed to make proper use of all the information collected. Whether it’s evaluating the soccer transfer market for a good tactical fit or building activity and recovery profiles based on the type of match play, GSA is seeking to empower everyone in the organization to utilize AI for insights.

“These non-technical stakeholders like assistant general managers, strength and conditioning coaches, high performance managers, they want to work with data, they’re the right generation to be working with data, but they’re not coders,” Schuster says. “They’re not going to write Python and R scripts. They need to have a tool to do data queries with, to ask questions of the data.”

Another differentiating factor for Gemini, Schuster says, is his academic background. While some AMS providers provide some concierge model building services, he says GSA puts the tool into the teams’ hands and, importantly, won’t produce an opaque solution without showing its work. Schuster and collaborators have prioritized publishing research papers explaining some of their models, such as two using NBA data, about effective use of force plate testing and on injury forecasting.

“We are never going to hide behind a black box,” Schuster says. “We’re going to put the tool in users’ hands, and the model should be open source because scouts and GM should understand why things are happening the way they are in their team.”

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

A Human Performance Article Brought to you by our Main Partners

By Sarah Evans with additional reporting from Oliver Escritt

Recommended reading:

How People Learn: Designing Education and Training that Works to Improve Performance

What Sports Can Learn from Approaches to Wellbeing in the Business World

Why Wellbeing and Performance Are Indivisible

Framing the topic:

Our first topic-led virtual roundtable for 2023 looked at how our members were balancing wellbeing and performance. We have seen a shift away from the ‘win at all cost’ mentality towards ‘winning well’ but understand elite sport is a results-driven industry, so we asked our members what they were doing to continue to push for high performance whilst also balancing wellbeing. What is working in terms of wellbeing support and where do the challenges and opportunities remain?

The discussion spanned many different areas, but we have picked out five key ways in which our members were able to balance wellbeing with performance:

1. The importance of language

• The difference in changing one word from the wellbeing approach to our wellbeing approach, and what an impact that can have. ‘Human optimisation vs wellbeing.’
• Being intentional with the language we use. Seeing wellbeing as an enhancer rather than an inhibitor of performance. Shift this narrative from within through the coaches and staff so that they can champion the messages.

2. A whole club approach

• Have wellbeing integrated into everyday life in the organisation, and engrained in the fabric of everything they do.
• Weekly staff meetings – sharing of information around players and if there are any red flags. Start with injured players as this could be a difficult time for them and their mental wellbeing.
• Informing and educating the environment so that the more people who understand this area, the better. Mental Health First Aid training for staff, providing a bigger network of people caring for one another, whilst also supporting existing relationships.

3. Recover. Support

• It is important to prepare the athletes for adversity and build resilience to be successful in the high performance world, but then allow them times to recover and make them feel supported.
• Encouraging an environment of high challenge with high support.
• Coaching the coaches to understand this process and to weave wellbeing and the messaging into their environment.

4. Begin wellbeing work with younger athletes

• Plan monthly meetings with every academy player. Have performance lifestyle advisors checking in and helping the athletes to be more engaged with wellbeing and how it can enhance their performance.
• ‘Wheel of life’ exercise where the athletes reflect on different aspects of their life and assess the quality of their choices and time dedicated to each. This allows the athletes to understand themselves better and to see themselves as whole people and not ‘just athletes’, where their self-esteem isn’t wrapped up in performance outcomes.

5. Having a long-term vision

• Taking a step back and looking at how you can implement a framework together around balancing wellbeing and performance, and creating a vision aligned to this that everyone buys into.
• Understanding your athletes from the outset, their strengths, weaknesses and values.

Here are some of the key takeaways from our members on the call:

• What it means for a head coach to deliver challenging news and the impact it has on the player and them as a coach and language moving away from wellbeing to human optimisation.
• Wellbeing (optimisation) is not a trade-off with performance but an integration. We must understand the demands of our environments, such as, hiring, onboarding and developing staff/athletes appropriately.
• Be intentional about the timing around wellness programmes, reframe them as another normal tool for athletes, reframe as optimisation instead of a trade-off or something separate.
• Understand what the intent of your programme is. What your needs are. Main actions and objectives. Then constantly review and refine with transparency.
• Lots of quality discussion on the value of wellbeing as another tool to get athletes and/or your programme better. This should let the message resonate with everyone from the athletes and coaches to the organisation as a whole.

By John Portch

In 2022, the Premier League, Football Association (FA) and English Football League (EFL) celebrated ten years of its Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP).

The EPPP was launched in 2012 to overhaul the English boys academy system and ensure the development of a higher quantity – and better quality – of ‘home grown’ players at a time when English talent pathways were widely considered to be lagging behind their counterparts in nations such as France, Germany and Spain. The EPPP was adopted across the academies of the English men’s football pyramid from the Premier League to League 2.

Today, the top line numbers released by the Premier League, FA and EFL indicate that the EPPP has had a positive impact. For example, there are 762 more academy graduates with professional contracts in the English leagues than there were during the 2012-13 season. There has also been progress at international level, where the England youth and senior men’s teams have enjoyed considerable success in recent years. The EPPP faces the constant challenge of trying to satisfy all its stakeholders, but English football is better at transitioning home-grown talent than it was in 2012.

The plan is overseen by the Premier League’s Director of Football Neil Saunders, who spoke about the progress made in the last decade at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium.

Saunders’ appearance came shortly after the publication of the EPPP’s first 10-year review and, here, the Leaders Performance Institute highlights six ways in which the initiative seeks to address some of our members’ most pressing concerns around talent pathways and player evaluation.

1. The predictors of success

What are the best predictors of success in youth and academy football? No club or organisation claims to have all the answers, but the EPPP has been designed to maximise the opportunity for those who enter talent pathways from under-nine and upwards. The approach is based on the Four Corner Model for long-term player development. The ‘four corners’ – technical, psychological, physical and social – were applied to the FA’s Future Game Plan in 2010, which according to the EPPP review, ‘has been adapted and tailored by each club according to their own playing and coaching philosophy.’ All clubs have developed an Academy Performance Plan in line with its vision, philosophy and strategy. These Academy Performance Plans also integrate ‘core programmes of the EPPP, such as: education, games programme, coaching, and performance support.’

2. The value placed on coaching expertise

In the discourse around talent pathways, some have bemoaned the fact that coaches have not always been credited for their inherent expertise, that they are too readily dismissed for not being objective. The EPPP works at a systemic level to underline the value placed in coaches and, since its inception, there has been an increase of approximately 50% in the number of coaching hours available to young players at English clubs. ‘Changes to the coaching offer since the EPPP have been led by three key factors,’ says the review. The first is ‘quality’. The EPPP set standards that focused on elements such as ‘different aspects of the game as a player progresses, including age-specific coaching and coaches.’ Then there is ‘access’, which is where the EPPP tried to bring coaching hours ‘in line with leading practices across multiple sports and disciplines’. Finally, the question of ‘development’, which is the effort to offer coaches ‘new individualised programmes and qualification requirements, tailored to each phase and Academy category.’

3. Collecting varied and valued views when player profiling

Through the aforementioned Academy Performance Plans, the EPPP enables multidisciplinary player profiling. ‘Performance support staff work closely with other key Academy staff groups to aid and inform player identification, development, and transition along the pathway,’ the review says. ‘Academies have increasingly taken an integrated and holistic approach to delivering individual programmes, tailored for age and stage of a player’s development’. ‘Generally, [the EPPP] has led to more informed discussions and a genuine appreciation of the capacity an individual player can express given the physical and mental limitations imposed by their stage of development,’ wrote Edd Vahid, the Head of Academy Operations at the Premier League – and Leaders Performance Advisor – in 2021 while still working at Southampton’s academy.

4. Combatting biases and underrepresentation

The fear of biases undermining decision-making in talent development and evaluation is universal. For its part, the EPPP has taken steps to abate the effects of relative age effect. ‘As a global phenomenon,’ says the review, ‘a higher proportion of boys in the Academy system are born in the first quarter of the academic year’. The system has organised festivals for children born towards the end of the academic year, but ‘analysis has shown that this bias does not necessarily translate to the likelihood to succeed in the professional game’. Indeed, the provisions of the EPPP understand that the transition to senior football is not one-size-fits-all, that player journeys are unique.

There are, however, three broad player ‘archetypes’ found across English football, according to the review. First is the ‘fast-tracked’ player, such as Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-Arnold, who broke into the senior team as a 19-year-old; second is the ‘focused development’ player, such as Harvey Barnes of Leicester City, who took targeted loans (temporary transferral of his registration from his parent club to a loan club) before making his Premier League debut; third is the ‘tiered progression’ player, such as Aston Villa’s Ollie Watkins, who had extensive lower league experience (including some targeted loans) before making his Premier League debut at 25.

There is also the question of underrepresentation of players with Asian backgrounds in the academies of English football. During the 2021-22 season, and within the auspices of the EPPP, the South Asian Action Plan was launched in partnership with the anti-racism football charity Kick It Out. Says the review: ‘It aims to ensure that every player has the opportunity to achieve their potential in football through the delivery of research, staff training and Emerging Talent Festivals focused on equal access and improving pathways through the Academy system.’ It states that 648 players attended an Emerging Talent Festival during the 2021-22 season and there has been a more than 60% increase in academy scholars from black, Asian, mixed and other backgrounds in the last ten seasons. There is, however, much work still to be done on that front.

5. Self-evaluation for players and coaches

The EPPP provides a uniform structure to academies, who then issue players with bespoke individual development plans (IDPs). IDPs are useful for assessing how a player is developing against the principles set out on an academy’s talent pathway. The resulting contrasts can often validate the methods being used, one of which is self-reflection. IDPs provide the space for players to self-reflect with increasing emphasis as they progress along the pathway. The review says IDPs aim ‘to be aspirational and provide the right level of challenge to encourage the individual to maximise their potential as a player and as a person’.

Teams also place an emphasis on player and team analysis. ‘Academy players fully understand the demands of the game, with a deliberate focus on performance analysis education to equip them with the skillset to drive their own development, underpinned with a unique club philosophy and data-driven approach.’

The EPPP also supports a player’s academic progression and seeks to provide both life skills and what the review terms ‘life-enriching experiences’. According to the review, more than 20,000 players have attended the academy life skills and personal development programme since its introduction.

As for coaches on the EPPP, they are invited to join a ‘community of learning’ as part of English football’s Integrated Coaching Strategy, which is ‘a multi-stakeholder partnership to deliver and sustain world-leading coach and manager education, development and career pathways across English Men’s and Women’s professional football.’

6. Continual reviewing and updating of the plan

During its ten-year existence, the EPPP has never stood still. Tweaks have been made across the board, whether it’s the academy games programme, which was redesigned and enhanced during the 2013-14 season or the creation of the Professional Game Academy Audit Company, between 2018-19 and 2020-21, which provides ‘an independent and comprehensive audit of rules and standards to clubs.’ Competition rules will continually be updated, new processes introduced, and priority areas identified.

By John Portch

• Do you guarantee the quality of experience for your athletes?

• It can be helpful to look over the fence but don’t be swayed by external noise.

• Fill your ranks with specialists coaches and reward them suitably.

Experience is everything

Are you creating an environment where everyone – athletes and their parents or guardians – wants to be? Don Barrell, the Head of Performance Programmes & Pathways at the Rugby Football Union [RFU], believes it is essential. He told the Leaders Performance Institute in 2021 that, “If your primary driver is the quality of experience that people have, both the player and all the surrounding stakeholders, you can create a model where people want to be there and choose to come into your programme as opposed to others and that’s where we’ve positioned our programme.”

Establish age-specific priorities

A smart talent pathway recognises that what an athlete needs as a teenager is not necessarily what an athlete needs at 25. “The whole purpose of it is that you’ve got two or three years to look at players and  for them to be nurtured and developed; go through puberty, grow, change, held by some really core principles,” said Barrell. “One of the big challenges is when the top of the game says it needs A, B and C – at 14 that will look very different and we probably don’t need to see A, B and C, we may just focus on one thing.”

Stick to your guns

Being aware of best practice is one thing, but once you have established your guiding principles, stick to them. Barrell said: “If you keep compromising because someone else will do ‘something’ and you feel the need to react then you’ll end up with six-year-olds in academies as everyone races to the bottom. We have set a clear line based on solid evidence and practice.”

Ask: who is the athletes’ main point of contact?

Talent pathways at club and international level are inevitably different in English rugby union and Barrell was keen to avoid stepping on the toes of the clubs with whom the RFU works. “The whole myth of age-grade international programmes – and I’m not trying to talk myself out of a job here – the majority of contact is at the school, club, academy. Pre-18, it is not with an international programme. Age 18-20, it’s still not with an international programme – 80 percent of your contact is still within your club,” he said. “The international programme’s job is to add value to the journey and act as a critical friend to the clubs, working with them to develop the players. We have excellent people who work with the academies and schools to help shape practice.”

Employ both specialists and agitators

Any talent pathway needs its specialist coaches who are happy to work at academy level. “If we want world class development systems then we need to reward those world class practitioners who want to specialise with young athletes. Having your most knowledgeable people working in the pathway, a good pathway will make your senior teams better and add huge value,” said Barrell. “You will always have some coaches that want to go in and progress to a senior role. That’s fine, but I’d suggest if you’re running the system, you need to understand how many of those you’ve got versus how many people you can install who want to stay in development.”

Temper the input of senior coaches

Beware the input of the senior coach. “One big challenge you find across all sports is the idea that senior coaches have all the answers the whole way through,” said Barrell. “Senior coaches often specialise for the here and now, ‘how do we win this weekend?’ Bringing expertise at the top end of the game is critical, as this is where our players end up, but is it always right for the developing player?; the same way I don’t need my primary school kids being taught by a university lecturer.”

Images courtesy of Q-Collar

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Tom Friend

Perhaps the most dangerous play in the contact sport of soccer — and, yes, soccer’s a contact sport — is the sky-high goalie punt.

Meghan Klingenberg of the NWSL’s Portland Thorns FC cringes at the thought of it. She has been taught, as a defender, to circle under even the most towering kick and head it away from her goal, which is basically tantamount to getting kicked in the skull.

“Have you ever stuck your face in front of a ball that’s going 60 miles an hour?” Klingenberg asked Wednesday. “That’s what it is.”

“It’s spiraling down out of the top of the stadium, and you know it’s going to suck, but you have to [head] it. It feels scary. It feels like shit when it hits you, and it’s not something anybody wants to do. Like the worst thing ever. I get so mad at those goalkeepers.”

That, in a nutshell, explains why Klingenberg is practically on a crusade to promote the Q-Collar, an FDA-approved [US Food and Drug Administration] device worn around the neck that gently compresses the jugular vein to increase blood flow to the skull — theoretically limiting the brain from shifting around dangerously on contact.

The Q-Collar, a neck-worn device that provides stability to protect the brain from head impact, has gained popularity among the Portland Thorns as Meghan Klingenberg along with teammates Emily Menges and Rocky Rodriguez.

During the NWSL championship game in late October — when Portland defeated the Kansas City Current, 2-0 — it’s no coincidence that Klingenberg’s teammates Emily Menges and Rocky Rodriguez also wore the Q-Collar. The technology, developed by Q30 Innovations and first available on the US Market in September of 2021, is being deployed in physically volatile sports such as football and lacrosse. Dallas’ running back Tony Pollard and tight end Dalton Schultz are among those wearing it this season in the NFL, and every player from the men’s Premier Lacrosse League has been equipped with the device, as well.

But Klingenberg, who organically heard about the Q-Collar while watching a biomimicry special on Hulu about five years ago, is taking it all a step further. She wears it proudly during games, dives on the field like a banshee and will advocate the device to anyone and everyone who asks.

“We block shots with our heads, we go up and take elbows to the face to try and get a header before another player — it’s a very physical sport,” she told SportTechie. “And so whenever I’m defending in the box, I might not head a ball, but I might be bumping attackers and making sure they can’t get to the ball. And you might fall over, you might run into the goalkeeper. It’s all of these things.”

“What I like most about the Q-Collar is I don’t have to worry about that ever. I just throw it on, and then I know that I’m protected, and then I can just go out and be me. And, honestly, that’s the most valuable thing it does is allowing me to be me. Because when I’m me, I kick ass. And when I kick ass, my team does well.”

SportTechie Daily: Subscribe to our morning newsletter for sports technology news and analysis.

Klingenberg’s quasi-campaign to inundate the sports world with Q-Collars is partly subtle, partly fear, partly — and this is her word — synchro-destiny. She is a vegan who drives a hybrid car or e-bikes, takes long walks through Portland’s Washington Park and has always been “environmentally conscious.” And when she saw on that 2017 biomimicry show that the Q-Collar was inspired by the odd behavior of woodpeckers knocking their heads against trees, she knew this was a science for her.

“I just don’t believe coincidences are coincidences,” she says. “I think they’re like little winks from the universe, and I try and like follow them whenever they happen. And this just seemed to be too great of a wink from the universe to pass up.”

Aware that she had been crashing on soccer fields since she was six and figuring she’d suffered a myriad of minor concussions throughout her journey from the U.S. National team to the pros, she “cold-called” Q30 Innovations for a demo of the device. Because it was still being researched in 2017, they told her: ‘sorry, another time’.

That time came approximately a year later when she wrapped it around her neck for the first time. She wasn’t sure if it would choke her, cut off her circulation or set her free. Turned out to be the latter.

“Well, anything around the neck feels weird,” she says. “We’re not used to that kind of pressure being around our necks. And I think for some people, at the beginning at least, can be a little triggering. Like, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got this pressure around my neck. I don’t like that.’ But… after wearing it for about a week, I barely noticed it.”

“I haven’t noticed any concussions or any dizziness since wearing this, and, honestly, I don’t even notice that I’m wearing it at all. I actually notice it more when I don’t wear it now. When we have a run-through practice where we’re not kicking any balls and we’re just literally stretching and things like that, it feels weird to be on a field without it on. That, to me, is the best part — that I get all that protection without thinking about it for one second.”

It’s never been her plan to shove the product down (or on) people’s throats. But ever since she began wearing it, she’s found that a popular Google search query has become: Meghan Klingenberg’s neck. As for her teammates, they don’t have to Google her; they just started asking about the technology straight to her face.

“My teammates are like, ‘What are you doing? What are you wearing? And they’re very skeptical at first because anything new in soccer is like, ‘Nah.’ But honestly, the best analogy I give them is: if you take a plastic water bottle and you fill it up halfway and you put a marble in there and you shake it around, it hits the walls of the bottle really hard. But if you fill it up all the way and put the marble in and you shake it around, it doesn’t hit the walls as hard. And that’s what I tell people the Q-Collar does for my brain.”

“And the light bulb goes on immediately. And they understand. They’re like, ‘Ohh, that makes so much sense.’ So I just really encourage my teammates to try it in the offseason and see if they like it. Honestly, I say, ‘Give it two weeks. If at the end of two weeks, you’re still noticing it, then it’s not for you. But if at the end of two weeks, you haven’t noticed it, then this is definitely for you.’”

Her two teammates — the defender Menges and the midfielder Rodriguez — each wore the Q-Collar this past year, and defender Becky Sauerbrunn has promised to try it this current off-season. And that’s not to mention the dozen NWSL opponents who have sauntered up to Klingenberg to ask about the device, as well.

“Oh yeah, they’ll ask me in the tunnels, after games, when they’re just chatting,” Klingenberg says. “They want to know. Some people are like, ‘What is this?’ They’re like, ‘Is this a way for your coach to communicate with you during [games].’ I’m like, ‘There’s no frigging chance I would ever wear something like that. There’s no way I want somebody chirping in my ear in the middle of a match. No chance.’ But then I give them the quick spiel about the water bottle and just chat about that, and they seem really interested. I would say probably like 30 to 40 percent of people want it.”

“I mean, I would advocate this for every kid in the entire world who’s playing a sport. Because, I mean, I wish that I had this since I was 6 years old. I’m serious. It really bothers me that I have 20 years of experience of heading a ball without the Q-collar on.”

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

A Human Performance Article Brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

“All the great coaches that I’ve been around have good foundations and the method is irrelevant.”

Ty Sevin, the President of Keiser Corporation, was speaking at a lunchtime masterclass at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Twickenham Stadium.

The session, which was titled ‘Engineering Human Performance: utilising the principles of elite sport and bringing them to the boardroom’, placed Sevin onstage with Matchroom Boxing’s Head of Performance Dan Lawrence as they discussed their favoured high performance pillars, bridging performance gaps, and taking the standards of elite sports training into everyday life.

“[Performance Coach and Professor] Andy Galpin said ‘methods are many and concepts are few’,” Sevin continued, “and I feel like there’s a fundamental lack in the understanding of concept – basic fundamental principles that guide us in human performance – and more performance coaches [are becoming] dogmatic about their methods.”

Sevin, a former athlete and coach with three decades of experience at Olympic and collegiate level, was addressing the question of why coaches often overcomplicate performance. “The method is the means to the end but they don’t focus on being dogmatic about the concepts, they focus on the methods. So you have to understand what kind of engine you’re building and that totally depends on what the requirement of the sport is. And once you can simplify that, evaluate the athlete, evaluate what they have to perform on the field, it doesn’t matter what they do in the weight room if it doesn’t transfer on the field of play it’s a total waste of time.”

Physical-tactical-technical-mental

What sets apart podium-potential athletes from the rest? “There was not a physical gap between the people who won and who didn’t: it was the extreme ownership and it was the passion that they had – the soft skills,” said Sevin, perhaps reflecting on his time as the Director of the Track and Field Residency Program at the United States Olympic Committee’s Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, California. “It’s the relentless pursuit in many cases of going where no one had gone before.”

He highlighted specific traits: belief, consistency, compliance, hard work and dedication. In underlining his point he referenced the reflections of British Olympian Dina Asher-Smith, who spoke onstage earlier that day. “You have to have a team built around you,” he added, suggesting that community may be the most important factor behind those traits.

They all provide the foundations for Sevin’s winning “triad” of an athlete’s physical capability, tactical and technical ability and mental competency. The coach’s role is essential at that intersection. “You’re trying to address each one of those things individually and then going back to your basic concepts of ‘what does this athlete need? What are their strengths?’ Doing a simple SWAT analysis on an athlete, which is something that came from the business world that I incorporated at a very young age. You’ve got to know the strength of an athlete and what their weaknesses are; and within those three pillars you can address almost anything that happens as long as the principles are being met on top of it.”

Better coaches are better guessers

Sevin was immersed in the traditional coaching ethos of being athlete-centred, coach-driven and science-based. However, he prefers to switch ‘science’ for ‘results’.

“Science seeks answers and training seeks results,” he said. “If you look to science, you have to have pragmatic experience. The reason that coaches I think do well over time is not that the coach is so much better than the coaches they’re competing against, it’s because they have the opportunity to work with athletes over a long duration of time where they learn knowledge and they see all these different holes that athletes can have. So if you’re a young coach and you’ve got no mentor or progress and you see a hole or a deficiency in an athlete, you’re practically guessing; and as you become more experienced as a coach you become a better guesser.

“Someone asks: ‘how do you get to that level?’ It wasn’t because I was a better coach, I got involved with really good coaches at a really young age and you learn from the athletes. There’s nothing you can learn in a university setting that will help you on the field; and that’s the art of coaching.”

Sevin, who also worked as a stockbroker upon leaving college, feels that the lessons he learned in that world were readily applicable to his future coaching. “I had that foundation of understanding of how to do strategic operations planning and I applied it to an athlete,” he said. “And when you identify every criterion that’s necessary for whatever they’re competing in and you have a pretty good idea of that athlete. [You have to] test, evaluate, prescribe.

“So I test. I’m matching that test up against what the demands are of that position, that body type, that skillset, that metabolic need; what are the limb speed requirements? What are the power output requirements? What do they have to do to become resilient? That all falls in that onion of the human capabilities. You test, you evaluate, and then based on your education, based on your pragmatic experience, you implement.”

Sevin explained that he sees himself more as an educator than a coach, that he focuses heavily on the ‘why’ with an athlete. “I like it because a lot of coaches don’t know the ‘why’. They really don’t know the why, they just do it because that’s the way they were trained or that’s how their mentor did it and that’s where the dogmatic approach comes from.”

Education and communication are the coach’s trump cards. “It’s an evolution of understanding the athlete, how is your relationship with them, how do you communicate with them, but if you can identify the problem, tell them why this is hurting their performance, and have a game plan, and be honest about it and say ‘this could work or it may not work’, with the honesty and the communication you fill the gaps in over time.”

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

• It is your choice as staff, coaches, mentors and leaders to support the entire person.

• Being able to self-report is pivotal – make sure that players feel safe and that it’s OK to not be OK.

• What brings an athlete joy? Encourage athletes to look outside of their discipline whenever possible.

There is an appetite for self-reporting

When Tish Guerin served as the Carolina Panthers’ Director of Player Wellness between 2018 and 2020 she was one of the first in the NFL. Yet far from finding herself at a loose end, she was able to hit the ground running. “One of the things I found interesting was the immediate self-reporting,” she told an audience at the 2020 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Charlotte. “That was how I really started to measure the psychological wellbeing of our players.” Guerin was also proactive in her approach. “I had to make sure I was at the forefront, that they knew they could come to me and get that confidential interaction with me.” It worked. “Players came to me pretty much within my first week and they weren’t necessarily talking about the weather or their favourite restaurants – they were talking about real life issues that they were dealing with and wanted to combat those.”

Work out their normal

Right from the moment then-Head Coach Ron Rivera invited Guerin to address his players in the locker room, Guerin was visible around the practice facility come hail, rain or shine and joined the players at mealtimes. They knew they could check in at any stage and it enabled her to establish “behavioural baselines”, as she puts it, for each player, which is no mean feat on a roster of 53 athletes. “I know what their normal is,” she said. “I know what it looks like when a player has a good mindset and is emotionally balanced because I know what their levels are and I see them every day. That’s the benefit of being able to interact with them day in and day out.

“It’s about being able to recognise if, during a play, they struggled and I know it’s not something they struggled with typically. That’s where I’m able to go in and say, ‘hey, I noticed you hesitated before you made that block and in this play that’s not normally something you would do. Why is that?’ That’s addressing that potential performance anxiety and working through it.”

They may best respond to someone else

“One of the things that’s been important for me is acknowledging that players may not respond to me,” she said. “That meant I couldn’t come in and have an ego about that. When Coach Rivera brought me in, he let me get up in front of the team and give my spiel and I let them know right off: ‘if you prefer a male, that’s perfectly fine. I’m happy to refer you to wherever you’ll get the best treatment from’. You have to be aware of who you are serving, who those athletes are, who they might best respond to.”

Life beyond sport

Guerin explained the importance of providing players with coping skills, which are, “just those things you do to help you keep calm; that give you balance. You want to encourage activities that give the person a sense of peace, balance and a way to relax.” She also delved into tackling the ever-present threat of performance anxiety. “You want to change the thought process so that instead of a player thinking ‘I’m not going to make this block because this guy has two inches on me and about 30lbs’ you think ‘I’m going to keep my feet planted on the ground, I’m going to dig in all the way through and I’m going to hold them off with everything I have in me.’”

“Changing how you look at things can be instrumental in helping to decrease performance anxiety,” she continued. “We encourage our athletes to look outside of their discipline to something else that gives them joy. I don’t care if it’s a cooking class; we’ve had a player who’s learning to be a pilot; one guy was interested in being a glass blower. ‘I don’t know why but, hey, do your thing.’

“It helps the creative process and it helps them to buy-in more to being on the football field because now they have some balance.”

“I often talk about the difference between fixing broken and creating awesome,” Rachel Vickery tells the Leaders Performance Podcast.

The performance coach, who guides and supports high performers to excel, lead and thrive in high pressure and high stakes environments, is discussing the importance of preparing athletes for the high pressure scenarios they face in competition.

“You don’t need a ‘get out of jail card’ in the first place if you haven’t ended up in jail in the first place,” she continues.

“Performance under pressure is less about what happens in the moment of pressure, it’s more about ‘what have you done?’ everywhere else that’s led you into that moment.”

In the course of our chat, Rachel, a former gymnast who works across the worlds of sport, military and medicine, to name a few, explores:

• The importance of helping athletes to build buffer and front-loading strategies to deal with human stress responses [6:00];
• The need for awareness and understanding of those stress responses so that athletes don’t feel they are ‘going crazy’ [13:00];
• The role of impostor syndrome in feeding arousal states during competition [23:00];
• Why it is necessary to aim for excellence rather than perfection [28:00].

Check out Rachel’s website here.

John Portch: Twitter | LinkedIn

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Andrew Cohen

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. This series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.

* * * * *

2017 U.S. Open champion Sloane Stephens is one of the brightest stars in women’s tennis, having reached a career-best world No. 3 ranking in 2018. She’s won seven singles titles on the WTA Tour and beat Serena Williams as a 19-year-old at the 2013 Australian Open.

A native of Fresno, California, Stephens also returned from a foot injury to win the WTA Comeback Player of the Year in 2017 and was a finalist at the 2018 French Open. In February, she beat Marie Bouzková at the Abierto Zapopan tournament in Mexico to capture her first WTA title since 2018.

Stephens, 29, has earned more than $17 million in career prize money and is currently the 37th-ranked singles player on the WTA Tour. Earlier this year, she partnered with Icy Hot, joining Shaquille O’Neal, NFL tight end Darren Waller and USWNT soccer star Rose Lavelle as ambassadors for the company. She recently promoted the new Icy Hot PRO cream and dry spray pain-relief products while attending a pickleball event in New York City alongside the National Athletic Trainers’ Association.

“If you’ve used Icy Hot, you know what it’s like, but this version is just little bit stronger, it works faster. It’s for that everyday person who’s training, getting massages with their trainer,” Stephens told SportTechie at the John McEnroe Tennis Academy.

Stephens is also a member of the Women’s Performance Collective, the research initiative from wearable fitness leader Whoop to study female athlete performance. She is also a proponent of tennis expanding its use of Hawk-Eye, the electronic line-calling system that replaced line judges at the 2020 US Open and 2021 Australian Open. Hawk-Eye’s camera system remains limited to video review challenges in most ATP and WTA Tour events, and it isn’t used at all at the French Open.

On supporting Hawk-Eye but being conscious of the jobs that could be lost . . .

I grew up with line judges, with referees. Just a few weeks ago in Guadalajara I had a terrible line call against me. We were using Hawk-Eye and the chair [umpire] made a mistake. That was a human error. Hawk-Eye didn’t make the mistake, but the linesperson made an error. We reviewed it on Hawk-Eye, it was a mistake. Then the umpire made another bad call, and I ended up losing the game. There’s a lot of human error element that we no longer need. We don’t want it either, but we don’t need it because there is automatic calling. We don’t need people to be on the court.

Mind you do that does take away jobs, it takes away livelihoods of a lot of people. But I feel like in sport, there’s too much money on the line, ranking points on the line, contracts on the line, for people to be making human errors in the sport where we’ve advanced so much that we can see line calls live as they happen. We shouldn’t have any errors in our sport, especially when you’re playing for hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars. That little bit can change the course of a match. And that makes all the difference in the world.

From a chair umpires’ perspective, you have to be ranked super high to be a gold badge level umpire, which people work their whole careers for. And now we’re being like, ‘Okay, we don’t need you anymore, because we have automatic calling.’ So it’s kind of a double-edged sword. You lose jobs, but you gain a lot of clarity in the sport, which I think is important. But obviously, tennis is a very traditional sport, any change is always very hard to make. It’s always something that has to be thought of for like 10 years before we actually do anything. So we’re in that phase now.

On her partnership with Whoop …

It’s great because it’s for sleep, recovery, it’s to track all of those things. There’s been fitness trackers before and all those things before but this one is a little bit more advanced, tracking your menstrual cycle, your HRV [heart rate variability]. In sport, every little bit matters, especially when you’re at the top of your sport, the top of your game. So being able to monitor your sleep and your routines, like if you didn’t get enough deep sleep, or your sleep [score] decreased because you slept more. All those things matter when you’re performing at a high level, especially day in and day out whether you’re training or you’re competing in tournaments. So being able to partner with Whoop is amazing, because it helps not only me, but all of the players — men and women on the tour, it helps everyone.

On data ownership and using Whoop to further women’s health research …

We don’t have a union. We have our Tour, which owns the data because the partnership is with the Tour. But we own I believe all of our own personal data. They can use it and have access to it and can do research on it. But we own all of our own data. We’re all technically independent contractors. So we own all of our stuff.

But obviously, we use it to help other athletes. We use it to help monitor menstrual cycles of top performing athletes and then help people who are just weekend warriors or people training for tennis. And women just don’t have enough data and enough science behind all of these things. There’s not enough research. So being able to contribute to that has been super helpful. Just helping the next generation of athletes because we are collecting data for women in sport, we’re trying to make it more advanced and we’re trying to move the needle a bit. All of these things and all these things that we’re monitoring help a lot

On strides the WTA has made to support mental health….

There’s always work to be done everywhere, but I think the WTA does a great job. We have people on the road, therapists on the road that we can talk to in person and make appointments with. There’s a lot of support on the road just because we are all isolated and by ourselves most of the time. A lot of us do need that little extra support, we travel 40 weeks out of the year away from family, friends, husbands, wives, whatever it is, and it is difficult. The WTA has done a good job to support us to make sure that we do have those people on staff and on hand week in and week out.

And I think that’s been super beneficial, especially because COVID through us all for a loop so we are kind of getting back to normal but in a way that we feel more supported and have more access to things that we didn’t before like Modern Health and the Calm app. All of these things are just extra little things that we can use to help self-soothe ourselves and whatever it may be whatever we need in that moment. So the WTA has done a good job at trying to make that happen for us.

On how she uses Hyperice’s massage and recovery products …

I am an investor in Hyperice. I use NormaTec, all of the Hyperice gadgets — the Hyperice Go, the Hypervolt, which has been super helpful. It’s something you could travel with, be on the road with. I use [Hyperice products] for warmup and then I just use it when I’m sitting in my bed, laying around. It’s good post-match, too, but post-match, I’m getting more manual massage with my trainer, my physio so that’s a little bit different. But you can kind of use it wherever, I just did it on an airplane.

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