A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Andrew Cohen

The NFL is expanding its mouthguard sensor program to four additional college football programs: University of Florida, University of Georgia, University of Pittsburgh, and Vanderbilt University. Players at each school can opt-in to wear the instrumented mouthguard during games and practices, and the head-impact data will help inform the NFL’s decisions on rule changes and equipment upgrades such as position-specific helmets.

Programs at the Universities of Alabama, North Carolina, Washington and Wisconsin were the inaugural college teams to begin wearing the NFL’s impact-monitoring mouthguards last fall, meaning the league is now doubling its research efforts to eight universities and more than 250 college players. NFL sponsor Align Technology, the maker of Invisalign clear aligners, conducts dental scans of all participating college players. Those digital models are then sent to Virginia-based Biocore to build the personalized sensor-embedded mouthguards for each player.

An engineer demonstrates on a player’s mouth mold where the sensor will fit once installed into the mouthguard.

The NFL’s mouthguards calculate the force and location of each impact through measuring linear and angular acceleration. Mechanisms for how football players typically get concussed can vary by their position. For example, quarterbacks tend to sustain hits to the back of the head on plays where they brace themselves against incoming defenders, according to the NFL’s SVP of Health and Safety Innovation Jennifer Langton.

“The mouthguard will tell you the frequency and the severity of impact for each player. If you have enough data in aggregate, you can have it by position,” Langton says. “We have the insights to provide to helmet manufacturers so that they can start to design helmets to mitigate that impact that we are seeing from the data for that position. We want to really stimulate the helmet marketplace.”

Studies of data from the NFL’s mouthguard program is led by Biocore CEO Jeff Crandall and Dr. Kristy Arbogast of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, both of whom serve on the NFL Engineering Committee. Players on at least four NFL teams have worn the league’s smart mouthguards since the 2019 season, after the devices were developed as part of the league’s $60 million commitment to its Engineering Roadmap. Each participating NCAA program receives statistical analysis of player mouthguard impacts specific to their team, but the identity of the players is protected.

There are control and charging cases for the mouthguards instrumented with sensors.

“Data collected across the mouthguard sensor program is anonymized and analyzed by NFL and NFLPA’s independent engineers,” Langton says. “Only our engineers have access to that data, it does not come to the league office. So when they do the analytics, they provide it so that we can put injury reduction strategies together. But it’s only the independent engineers that have access to any of the mouthguard sensor data, whether NFL or university.”

The 2021 season saw players on 10 NFL teams wear mouthguard sensors, but the league decided to scale back the program to four NFL teams this season. In September, the NFL said it’s recorded a 25% reduction in concussions in each of the last four seasons. Other recent health and safety efforts from the league include the Guardian Cap worn by players during training camp, medical marijuana studies, pre-season load management wearables, and the Digital Athlete system created with AWS that uses computer vision to detect player head impacts during games through video analysis.

The NFL is not the only professional league implementing smart mouthguards. World Rugby outfits players with impact-monitoring mouthguards from Prevent Biometrics, while soccer’s English Premier League does the same through its collaboration with Wales-based Sports & Wellbeing Analytics. Medical leaders from the NFL and English Premier League met in London last month to share their latest findings around soft tissue injury reduction, mental wellness, concussions, and head impacts.

“The mouthguards is a program that we could roll out to the EPL,” Langton says. “And then in addition, with our digital Athlete Program, we are able to identify and track players and their impacts on field, so there is an open opportunity for them to collaborate to use some of those technologies as well,” she says, adding, “there is a huge opportunity to collaborate with other sports so we can share with them what we have built as far as technologies, how we’ve collected the data, and how we’re measuring head impacts in our game so that they can do the same for their sport.”

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.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By Luke Whithworth and Sarah Evans

Recommended reading

Psychology and Purpose: Creating a Thriving Team Environment

How Do you Get that Little Bit Extra Out of a Person’s Performance?

Framing the topic

The practice of psychology or mental skills is always a field of interest across the Leaders Performance Institute – there is always a curiosity to learn about how others are integrating and influencing the practice across different environments. Therefore, within this topic-led roundtable discussion we wanted to delve into our members’ current thinking around what is making the most impact and what some of the associated barriers are to embedding effective psychological practice.

Due to the popularity of the topic, we split the group into two to cover more of the detail.

Group 1:

• Do you have a clear definition of what mental performance is and isn’t? Is everyone aligned on that definition?
• With this generation of athlete we are seeing a real desire to have their sport be a part of who they are, thus wanting more from their club or organisation around not only inner development but professional development as well.
• There is more of a focus on developing the holistic individual – a lot of what is being done on the front end with younger talent is basic life skills and fundamental qualities. Historically, mental skills and performance was centred around performing at the sharp end without developing the foundational qualities first.
• In the space of mental performance and sports psychology, a couple of teams on the call cited that they are doing a lot of work around education and awareness of what it is and what it isn’t – having a distinction between the mental performance and mental health space.
• Approach your mental performance work with an athlete-like athletic development – it is a muscle that can be developed so you are ready when it matters most.
• In the sport of baseball, you are afforded a short pause between pitches. In terms of some of the work, one environment on the call has honed in on is the challenge over thread mentality and being focused on the right thing at the right time.
• One of the questions a team from the NBA has been thinking about is the balance between individualised learning and holistic team culture learning that sits alongside it. There have also been further considerations on how best to package and meet the athletes where they are at in the different points of their athletic and their human journey.
• In agreement on the point above, a baseball environment uses group contexts for priming and generating conversation and interest in a topic, but then sitting down with the players on an individual basis to personalise it. One of the most important components of unlocking this has been the integration with coaches, getting their buy-in and speaking the same language; working with them to set up training environments that can reinforce the concept of external vs. internal.
• We are seeing the most impact with people who are most bought into the process. Naturally, we will see those that do buy into it and those that don’t. Once we have got athletes into the process, it falls into two camps: do you want to engage in opportunities to drive performance? Or, do you want to just have conversations that make you feel better about playing poorly? It can sound harsh, but often that is the reality we see in different environments.
• Put things in very concrete terms for athletes, using language from their sport for things that they can actually transfer over and apply in their practices – a great place to practise things is in practice. So being able to give them things to actually tangibly work on and experiment. From here, when they come back to have that follow up conversation, you get the opportunity to find that process. What worked? What didn’t? What did you like? It’s important to show how these ideas related to their experiences as a performer.
• NCRW: Naturally Curious Resourceful & Whole. This framework is to support your understanding of where the athlete is. Another good analogy to consider is soil – is it ready for the seeds of mental performance to be planted? It might take those relaxed conversations and meeting the athlete where they are at before planting the seeds.
• Education within your group is important. You will have players that have been at the top level for a number of years that don’t want this specific support, but others in the environment will. It’s important to make it clear to those who are sceptical to not be a detractor to those that are proactively asking for the support.
• Consider the World Café concept: athletes are often wired to do what they are told to do, but best practices like the World Café give off a vibration of something different – create opportunities to get people into small groups and ask powerful questions, from there getting feedback from the leadership group.

Group 2:

• One of our members from North America highlighted the importance in creating relationships in the coaching and application of mental skills, between both the players and coaches; and this takes time to build. Having mental performance coaches as full-time practitioners is key for this, giving them the time and resources so that they can embed this work into everyday performance.
• It is worth noting that the importance of psychologists has become much more accepted within high performance environments. Covid helped to open many people’s eyes to the importance of mental health and mental performance coaching.
• However, it is important to remember that there is a difference between mental health and mental performance and to understand where those lines are and how to best support the athletes with what they need.
• Another key way of seeing the greatest impact within teams is having this practice integrated into the day to day of performance and not having it as an additional session at the end of the day.
• One US baseball team explained the use of short and sweet ‘drive-bys’ where the mental performance coaching is drip-fed into every day, in short bursts rather than 30-minute sessions as add-ons. They also explained how they work with and through the coaches, so the messages aren’t solely from the psychologist, but are delivered by the coaches too.
• Having the psychologist integrated into the session designs and strategy for the week is another great example of where a football team in the UK has seen success. They take a skill to focus on for the week, for example ‘confidence’ and plan how they can design the sessions to help best bring out this skill.
• Coaching the coaches – how can the psychologist help strengthen the coaching team? If they are truly integrated into the coaching staff then they can provide very specific feedback and offer a different perspective.
• Process-focused rather than outcome-focused. It is important to remove the outcome focus both with staff and players.
• Creating identity cards, is another practice one team found had a positive impact. The coaches develop these with the players individually and they put them up on the walls. This helps close the gap in self-awareness so that the players and staff are more on the same page.
• One way to help team cohesion and confidence was through creating a Google form where every player and staff member writes a couple of positive things about each player. It is anonymous, and each player receives the comments from the group.
• One barrier to implementing some of the mental performance work is when the coaches see the ‘casual collisions’ as overstepping. You have to build trust with the coaches which again, takes time.
• This leads onto the notion that the ‘coach is king’ model, which is a major barrier to some of this work. This notion of giving power away to someone else from a mental performance side can be difficult, and to overcome this it is again about building trust, and understanding what small wins you can take. Being able to allow them to see that the work is relevant, and why it is a tool rather than a threat.

An article brought to you by our Partners

By John Portch

When discussing athlete recovery, it is natural enough for one’s attention to turn to modalities such as cryotherapy or compression boots. Perhaps athletes may use the latter upon their return to the team hotel but, for the most part, recovery tools require an active participant who is onsite at a practice facility.

KYMIRA, on the other hand, would like to turn such thinking on its head, as its Founder and CEO, Tim Brownstone, tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“We’re creating products that can be taken anywhere,” he says while pointing to a selection of KYMIRA’s products on a rail over our shoulders. We are onsite at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Twickenham Stadium in London where KYMIRA are exhibiting.

The rail contains a range of KYMIRA’s sweatshirts, leggings and tracksuits. All are designed with the company’s infrared-emitting fibre technology which is designed to enhance performance, accelerate recovery and reduce injury risk. It is a small selection of KYMIRA’s apparel, which is medically certified – an important detail given that those certifications prevent potential conflicts with a team’s contracted kit supplier – to assist athletes with recovery and rehab.

“Because it’s clothing; whether the athlete is sleeping, on a flight or a bus, they can gain the physiological benefits. They can also be used in the practice facility too,” Brownstone continues. “Our core ethos is making the interaction with bio-responsive technologies as simple as possible.”

KYMIRA’s sweatshirts, leggings and tracksuits are designed with the company’s infrared-emitting fibre technology which is designed to enhance performance, accelerate recovery and reduce injury risk.

KYMIRA’s sporting clients include numerous teams from across both NFL and NCAA colleges covering 15+ sports and counting in North America as well as elite soccer and multiple international rugby union teams in Europe. All these teams are tapping into a well of expertise born of ongoing medical research and certifications.

Just days earlier, KYMIRA completed a fitting with an English Premier League team, which turned into an education session for the players. “The club identified the products that they want to make available to their athletes, we visited their training centre, and set up a pop-up KYMIRA area. We also had a microscope so we could demonstrate some of the biological effects to help the athletes visualise what is going to happen and we were there to answer questions such as ‘what does it do for me? Does it fit? What colours do you have?’ Some had already been using our products, been on the website, and come with some scientific questions. But the important thing for us is getting that face time with the athletes, so that they can ask their questions, they can be curious.”

Brownstone is a biochemist who specialises in photobiological wound healing. He is also a former competitive rower and is well-placed to explain to athletes how KYMIRA’s clinical research translates for their benefit.

“It’s reducing injury probability, it’s making sure that you’re more available to be in more games and help your team win,” he continues. “It’s extending your career; we have a big population of aged athletes and I think we’ve given the biggest an extra five seasons. Their agents like that, their families like that, and they’ve been able to keep doing the sport they love for longer.”

Such visits as the one described above are a valuable opportunity to build rapport with athletes and practitioners. One individual, an NCAA performance director, reached out with a series of questions. It is also not uncommon for athletes to post online about their use of KYMIRA products. “They’ll post something on Instagram, we’ll share it saying ‘thank you’ and then we use that chance to engage. Then when athletes are buying directly through our website, we’ll typically follow up and say ‘we’re pleased to see that you like the product. We’d like to know more’. Building that rapport enables us to collect honest feedback.”

Brownstone again points to the rail of KYMIRA clothes. “Each of those has been developed because teams and athletes have said ‘hey, I sleep in my recovery tights but I’d rather be in pyjamas – can you do pyjamas?’ or ‘I don’t really want pyjamas – can you do bedsheets?’ or ‘can you do tracksuits, or tights, or loose-fitting garments?’ We’ve evolved that range with demand and that close back-and-forth during the developmental period to make sure that fit and style is on point.”

KYMIRA has developed a range of sleepwear that can improve sleep quality by 15.8%.

Functional and applied benefits

Brownstone divides the benefits of using KYMIRA into the functional and the applied, with data drawn from case studies with the company’s clients.

“From a functional standpoint, they will stimulate nitric oxide production, which will increase circulation,” he says.

“There’s a pain relief response, which is actually the same pathway as taking an opiate. Not as potent as morphine, for example, but it can help with chronic pain relief, which is where we get that 25% reduction in pain scores coming from. There’s an improvement in sleep quality of 15.8% based on research that’s been conducted on the products. Cells respire more efficiently so they’re consuming less oxygen to achieve the same work output; that, plus the circulation, you’ve basically got an increased supply and a reduced demand, which yields a 20% increase in tissue oxygen levels, which means there’s more oxygen there for the cells to use from a recovery and performance standpoint.

“From an applied benefit, we have an ecosystem. So preparation, performance, recovery, including travel and sleep, and rehabilitation. The ring around all of that is injury mitigation. So from a preparatory standpoint, wearing the products before a game setting, for example, allows you to accrue some benefits. So if you wore a KYMIRA product for 60 minutes, for 90 minutes afterwards you’re still going to have accelerated nitric oxide production, which is boosting circulation, helping the muscles to become more supple and less prone to injury.”

KYMIRA has evolved its range with close back-and-forth during the developmental period to make sure that fit and style is on point for athletes.

The benefits sound remarkable, with one user – a British SAS operator – wryly enquiring if KYMIRA deal in ‘black magic’. Sceptics naturally abound and Brownstone welcomes their questions.

“Sceptics are really important because everyone should be sceptical of confident claims like ours because they’re quite bold. They’re substantiated but they’re bold because they’re substantiated. I don’t think anyone should look at the list of benefits that are on the wall over there and just go ‘that’s fantastic’. They should ask ‘how do you do that? Why do you do that?’

“The sceptic often becomes the biggest advocate because they’ve made us work harder for the reward, in essence. In dealing with sceptics, we just let the data speak for itself. We’ve got tens of case studies, tens of clinical trials, there is a mountain of evidence.”

As we head into 2023, Brownstone and KYMIRA are optimistic given their own plans for the new year as well as the increasing levels of education around all aspects of recovery in sports. Some teams are even using their athletes’ experience with KYMIRA to underline their fundamentals around sleep, nutrition and recovery.

“That’s quite cool and we hope that trend continues.”

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

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.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

• Help athletes to better understand and use their support networks independently.

• Calibrate wellness education to your athletes or playing group.

• Identify the low-hanging fruit in your organisation.

Help athletes to take care of themselves

Nyaka NiiLampti, the VP of Wellness & Clinical Services at the NFL, spoke of the mental wellness work she does with the leagues rookies at the 2019 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Atlanta. “My first question is asking ‘how many of you have heard that this will be the longest year of your life?’. They all raise their hands,” she said. “Then I ask ‘how many of you actually feel like this has already been the longest year of your life?’ and most of them will raise their hands as well”. A significant part of the NFL’s Total Wellness project, which NiiLampti oversees, focuses on helping young athletes to be intentional in pursuing their wellness. “[We tell them] all of the new experiences that you’re going to have over the next eight to ten months, you need to know exactly who’s your support, how do you take care of yourself, what does that support look like?” added NiiLampti. “Know it now because that’s where we see the mistakes happen, that’s where we see the impulsive behaviours, that’s where we see decision making that could really propel the end of your already really short careers… any mistakes that you make in this space are going to be really costly”.

Set up athletes for their post-playing transition

NiiLampti pointed out that the average NFL career is short even by elite sport’s standards. It is essential for her to understand the culture of the league and its impact on young players. “Anything they see as a potential for someone to see them as not performing up to par in any area is a risk of unemployment,” she said. Make sure you are aware of what those unique cultural factors are but then also know the specific factors about your sport. For example, with the NFL, we know that the average career is 3.5 years. That means you’re going to get guys coming in who are super young who are not going to stick around very long; so how can you make sure you’re providing as much education as you possibly can on the front end?”. This is essential because NiiLampti has found that players “Scotch tape and bubble gum themselves together” due to college and professional football tending to be crisis-focused. She added: “You come into the league thinking ‘yeah, there’s some things I could probably work on but I’ll worry about it after I make my money and transition out’.” Organisations must change this outlook and provide support for their athletes. “We’re going to give you additional skills that might actually help you prolong your career. But [teams should] make what happens in that transition out get a little bit easier. We know the transition out is going to be difficult anyway but what are the sort of things we can do to minimise the difficulty?”

Seek out the low-hanging fruit

There are always quick wins to be found. “One of the things that we talk about is we know that every team is going to have a population of players who struggle with injury,” said NiiLampti, who put the injury rate in the NFL at 100%. “So how do you put things into place that’s low-hanging fruit? How do you put things into place for that population? It’s being aware of who’s your population as well as what are the unique cultural pieces of the environment that you work in? Start small… then that word of mouth grows… if it’s high quality and done well that word of mouth travels”.

Promote sport as a platform for increasing self-awareness

The idea of athletes as role models is as true as some of the best clichés. “We know sports also has an incredible platform and if we can educate and we can use this to further the conversations, particularly around mental health or aspects of wellness; there’s a trickle-down effect,” said NiiLampti. “To what degree, if we are using that platform to further educate the rest of the world, particularly young men and particularly young men of colour, then I think the healthier that men in the NFL get the healthier that young boys get in this country, the healthier families get, and so the healthier we are collectively”.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Former University of Texas football coach Tom Herman gained some notoriety when he posted the Longhorn Football Hydration Chart in his locker room five years ago. What drew most of the infamy was the qualification of the three lightest urine colors as “Championship Hydration Levels” followed by increasingly more severe rebukes: “Selfish Teammate,” “Blatant Disregard for Your Teammates” and “You Are a Bad Guy!!!”

Forget the subjective messaging and, well, more than a few teams still use that urine color chart as a hydration monitoring tool. In 2022. While there have been advances in the space, many are either still low-tech — weighing a player in and out of a session to track sweat loss — or are hard to scale beyond a single moment in time, such as the use of a pen refractometer in a urine sample.

In the coming weeks, however, a continuous hydration monitor will be commercially available as Nix Biosensors launches its first product. The sensor-laden patch — which has already received in excess of a half-million dollars in pre-orders — will calculate sweat rate and composition, providing users data-driven feedback of how much fluid and electrolytes they need to replenish.

The biosensing wearable analyzes sweat and prescribes a personal hydration strategy in real time.

“Hydration for us is just the first of many applications that I think fall into that category of health and wellness data that consumers might like to have without having to go to the doctor and that they can act on — on their own — with that personalized data,” Nix founder and CEO Meridith Cass says.

Over the past few years, Nix has been conducting pilot programs with MLB, NBA and NFL teams as well as athletes in motorsports and tennis. It was a finalist in the 2021 NFL 1st and Future Competition and, in August, for instance, 14 IndyCar drivers wore the biosensors in practice sessions prior to the Bommarito Automotive Group 500 in St. Louis, with the research done in conjunction with PitFit, a motorsport performance group. Nix partnered with fitness industry creative agency SweatWorks on help with the hardware and UX development.

Nix Biosensors has also assembled a formidable team of advisors. The scientific counsel includes Bob Murray, the founder of the Gatorade Sports Science Institute; Brad Wilkins, the former director of the Nike+ Performance Lab and lead physio on the Breaking 2:00 project starring Eliud Kipchoge; and Doug Casa, the CEO of the Korey Stringer Institute. Sports advisors include Olympic and Paralympic marathoner Shalane Flanagan and Tatyana McFadden as well as ultramarathoner Dean Karnazes.

What a Bluetooth-enabled patch can do is individualize hydration monitoring, which is challenging to do with endurance athletes traversing large distances or in large team settings because of the numbers. Nix added Pratik Patel as its director of human performance this year. Patel most recently was director of performance nutrition and an assistant strength coach with the New York Giants and previously worked for several major college programs.

“[The goal] is to empower the practitioners and the athletes to understand what their information is, and drive that behavior change,” Patel says. “I think that’s one of the biggest things that we’re trying to do as a company, instead of playing this guessing game where we have blanket recommendations for everybody.

“I’ve been in that space, I know how difficult it is trying to wrangle 90 to 110 athletes at one time, and you want to do right by them because all of them have very varying levels of educational knowledge and background with sports, nutrition and hydration,” he adds.

Football training camps are typically held in the summer, with players wearing heavy pads in high heat and humidity for two sessions a day. Add in the size of the linemen, and Patel says some could lose 15 to 18 pounds of fluid in a practice despite regular drink breaks. Cass told a SportTechie Pro Day audience that athletes are 29% slower when in just a mild state of dehydration, among other impairments. Nix cites studies indicating that 87% of endurance athletes are afflicted with some degree of dehydration, with a 2% loss of body weight a threshold for significant performance depletion.

The Bluetooth-enabled patch allows endurance athletes to individualize hydration monitoring.

“When it gets past 2%, you start seeing decrements in speed, power, accuracy, cognitive function,” Patel says.

The founding story of Nix stems largely from Cass’s own experiences. She played basketball at Bryn Mawr College and took up marathon running in her 30s, where she struggled with her own hydration. At the time, the Harvard Business School graduate returned to campus as an entrepreneur in residence. Her charge there was to build something with broad health care implications.

“For me, that was what has now developed into what we define as biosensing,” says Cass, who had been the principal of the Children’s Hospital Boston technology development fund. “That word didn’t really exist as much at that time, but it was this concept of, ‘Let’s borrow what we can from the healthcare industry of real, true, validated electrochemical biomarker data and marry that with what we think wearables have done right and leave behind what they have done wrong.’”

The experienced led to Nix Biosensors, whose wearable weighs less than a half-ounce. There are integrations with Apple Watch and Garmin, as well as some bike computers. It can be set to send customizable push notifications. The user can ask the app to say how much fluid he or she should consume every 10 minutes or to receive a prompt to drink another predetermined volume — say, four ounces — whenever the body needs it, no matter if it’s been five minutes or fifteen.

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.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

High performers in both sport and business tend to overcomplicate things, on the other hand, they cannot just assume they can go it alone.

Dan Lawrence, the Head of Performance at Matchroom Boxing, watched his former boxer, the now-retired George Groves, learn this in real time.

“Yes, he had a team. He had myself, a conditioning coach, we had his head coach at the time,” Lawrence tells the Leaders Performance Podcast. “He was steering the ship at that time, whereas I don’t think that was the right way to go.”

In fact, “you have to have a cohesive team working with one sole goal”.

Here, Lawrence discusses his work in combat sports while also touching upon:

• The reasons why people over-complicate human performance [6:00];
• The differences in working with boxers and footballers [10:00];
• Working smarter, not harder [13:00];
• How the role of the S&C is evolving [23:00].

Dan Lawrence Twitter | LinkedIn

John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn

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

By Sarah Evans and Luke Whitworth

Recommended reading

How Do you Ensure you Are Giving Talent the Time to Hit your Performance Metrics?

Why Are The Red Bull Soccer Teams So Good at Talent Identification?

The Importance of Diversity in the Decision-Making Processes Around Talent ID and Development

Framing the topic

Understanding what talent is now versus future potential is a constant question within much of our membership here within the Leaders Performance Institute. Therefore, within this topic-led roundtable discussion we wanted to delve into our members’ current thinking around player evaluation and talent identification, as well as how they are looking to develop this further in practice.

Due to the popularity of the topic, we split the group into two to cover more of the detail.

Group 1:

• From one of the cricket environments on the call, one of the best predictors of players that progress is aggregated scouting views and insight. Utilising that expertise in a structured way.
• We can be our own worst enemy in sport in that we sometimes don’t give expertise the credibility it deserves. What we should do is regard expert opinion as evidence, but sometimes we can counter it by saying it’s not objective.
• When considering player profiling and the notion of starting by looking at the end in mind and working back, we can still see a challenge in taking people on the journey around doing that, especially with having a number of different opinions and bringing them in, making the decision and deciding what goes into that profile.
• Ideally, we want to give individuals autonomy to reflect their own thinking but you have to have enough uniformity to have contrasting validity. Where we have seen this work well is when you have a solid structure, but a small bit of flexibility to meet individual needs, whilst at the time making it uniformed enough to scale across the organisation. It’s about finding a balance in that tension.
• Another challenge around player profiling is that the coaches who provide information to others feel like it’s valued. Consider the reference points of athletes who have come through the pathway because their opportunities and experiences to get to the top will be different. It begs a wider question around how we continue to provide opportunity more often for our players and predict that better.
• In terms of profiling, what emphasis are we putting on age within an academy environment? You can work towards a profile but we can’t mix technical, tactical, physical and mental competencies, so how are we diversifying this along the path?
• One of the organisations on the call conducted some research on players who had bridged the gap between the pathway and entering the first team environment – they looked at what attributes they had versus the others, and specifically the breakdown of technical, tactical, physical variables and which of these were set and which naturally developed. This allowed them to profile the players that made it, what differentiated them, what is fixed at the specific age and what can be manipulated in the environment.
• Self-evaluation is important and something that is not always considered. We can evaluate the player but they are able to evaluate themselves. We are on the right track because it is about the athlete. We are not here to guarantee athletes to play in the first team, but we are here to help maximise their potential and to support them to develop a skill in themselves to become more self-aware. This can provide us with a bit of insight into their potential as well – how actively engaged and involved are they in their own career?
• Peer evaluation is also a concept that one of the environments on the call has looked to implement across their programmes. Spend time asking the cohort of players to give you their insights into each other because they tend to know each other well.
• When thinking about the broad theme of evaluation, the group felt there is an opportunity for psychological or mental evaluation. What are the best models out there to benchmark? An important thing to consider is that the environment you are in has a large influence on how you show up. Measuring personality characteristics etc can yield some interesting insights in terms of what we see around behaviours.
• Constantly review capability, motivation and opportunity as these are the areas we will see small shifts in behaviour change.
• Do you understand what makes your athletes tick? It’s a simple question and many of us say we do, but how much time do you spend on it in terms of identifying those insights and then consistently evaluating those through good conversations with the multidisciplinary teams?
• With younger athletes, there has been a shift in the social part of being within an environment – they want to spend time with others and that’s how they like to turn up. Some programmes are concerned that social contexts can be impacted when some athletes don’t make the next step.
• Swimming Australia has done a good job in supporting coach’s decision making through the use of data and analytics – they have done this through corrective adjustment alongside relative age affect. We know about the influence of early maturation and how this biases decisions. The real key for them is how they have been working with the coaches, athletes and parents to explain the insights and decisions they are making.
• We see a big opportunity for artificial intelligence in the prediction of performance, but a challenge that accompanies this cultural adoption. Where insights being offered aren’t comparable to a genuine expert, you need that engagement to be able to advance the technology. How are we shaping an environment where we get that buy-in?
• We are still seeing both opportunities and challenges in how coaches can use data and insights to influence decision making. More often than not we see coaches revert back to their own observation or ‘last experiences’. An opportunity is how we engage them earlier in the process.
• Getting an understanding of what your environment can affect is a key metric that an organisation in the AFL spends time looking at. Do you have an understanding of what your coaching group or programme have been historically good at in developing or supporting change in an athlete? Having an objective view of what you have been good at changing can help to inform what types of athletes you might be interested in bringing in.

Group 2:

• One team in the AFL begin by looking at their current group of senior players, asking the question ‘who’s responded to this environment?’, understanding their characteristics, and then taking a step back to see who they might have missed within this process. By using the word ‘responded’ they mean ‘demonstrated success as a senior player’.
• Within this process, the scouts are part of the coaching conversations. The Head of Recruitment is part of building the mental model that the multidisciplinary team are trying to understand. They then also utilise data from many different disciplines to try and get as holistic approach to this process as possible.
• Another organisation looks to support coaches through a series of Talent ID workshops. They bring the coaches together and ask them to select a group of two men and two women for a fictional team at the Olympics, based on four profiles for each respectively. They select the four athletes solely based on data and factors such as their home life, education, sporting background, psychological and physiological profile. These coaches then made judgements based on the data, and select four, however, what they don’t know is that each of the profiles is of Olympic Champions in different sports. The purpose of the exercise is to challenge their thinking around talent identification and move away from solely looking at data, and understanding what biases they might be bringing into the process. What they have found is that often the most important factors are the things that are harder to quantify, ‘the bit between the ears’, and they are still working at developing this further.
• Often one issue which affects team sports more than individuals is that within teams, comparisons are made against other players too early. It is important to understand their trajectory and where they could go with their potential. However, this is very hard to really ever know. Therefore, one organisation aims to give the athlete as large a variety of different experiences as possible to cope with whatever they might face as they progress through the pathway and they are better equipped to handle these challenges as they encounter them.
• Does the athlete have some key characteristics?
  • Attitude to learning
  • Focus
  • Drive
  • Emotional intelligence
• Understanding different cultures, and who the athletes are as a whole person is a key consideration when trying to develop them. Especially within Australia, understanding the aboriginal culture, and how to best support these athletes as they relocate or change environments. Therefore, the role of mentoring and player welfare is crucial in supporting them.
• ‘Win now’ vs. ‘potential’ mentality. This can depend on the level of performance for each situation, but balancing this and the expectations of the whole team. Having clarity on which of these you are striving for is critical.
• Where are we creating limitations for our athletes? There is the pressure of time in sport, but how can we use this as a de-limitation?
• Utilising AAR – After Action Reviews – to debrief and assess what was done well, what did we miss and how we can improve. Often because of the pace of time this process is either not done or not done with enough intention, and we could be missing a huge opportunity to understand how to develop our athletes and not make the same mistakes moving forwards.
• How can we leverage on our athletes’ strengths? Find something that they are outstanding at and build on that even further.
• Is player evaluation also looking at the composition of the team? Developing thinking around how best to build the most successful team based on different factors.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Tom Friend

Baseball’s grab-and-go technology has flooded the market with enough analytics to make a brainiac’s head spin. Between Pocket Radar, Stalker, TrackMan, Rapsodo, Blast Motion, Diamond Kinetics and Yakkertech, pitchers and hitters have access to more data points than a nuclear physicist.

If only the numbers could all be aggregated onto one simple video.

Then again, that’s the goal of AWRE (pronounced Aware) Sports, a startup that relies on camera vision, cloud technology, skeletal tracking and streaming to create automated film clips that can be overlayed with any baseball player’s wide swath of personal metrics.

The company is currently deploying its hardware and software at the Division I level with the University of Maryland, at the DII level with Erskine College, at the DIII level with Keystone College, at the JuCo level with Eastern Oklahoma State College, at the prep level with IMG Academy and, yes, even at the youth level with Brick Little League in New Jersey.

The result is an application that serves as part recruiting platform, part training platform, part game-stream platform and, down the road in an absolute dream scenario, as perhaps a competitor of the scoring app and automated highlight company GameChanger.

“Obviously, GameChanger’s literally everywhere – that is a monster,” says Ken Spangenberg, AWRE’s chief sales officer and older brother of the St. Louis Cardinals’ Cory Spangenberg. “But I think there are differences that kind of separate us from anyone else. One, the fact we’re trying to capture everything, not just games. Hopefully, people are ultimately going to choose: ‘Do I want to watch on GameChanger or do I want to put it on AWRE?’”

If nothing else, AWRE has a vision…as well as computer vision. It doesn’t intend to be the scoring app that GameChanger is, although it does stream games. Instead, it wants to elevate its streams to another stratosphere with radar and sensor integrations.

The company’s roots are in golf. CEO and co-founder Chris Clark, a former college baseball player at DI Wofford, is married to the former Vanderbilt golf coach Holly Clark and saw his wife struggle trying to organize the team’s data, scorecards and spreadsheets. Circa 2012, he developed software that allowed her players to store all of their vital golf analytics on their iPhones, giving birth to a company he called, “Birdie Fire.’’

But his passion remained baseball, and he went on to develop a predictive spray chart model that appealed to most of the college programs that demoed it. One of those schools, Oregon State, went on to win the 2018 College World Series, claiming Clark’s spray chart predictor helped them position their defense and strategize pitch location during their title run. From there, Clark had no choice but to expand.

“I’ve got this [Oregon State] coach wanting to give me a testimonial,” Clark remembers. “I’m like, ‘Hell, now I’ve got to figure this out. It may never get better than this. How do I leverage turning this into a business in the baseball space?’”

He ended up having a purposeful conversation with his Wofford college roommate, Steve Johnson, who ran a New Jersey baseball training academy named Invictus with business partner Rob Corsi. The discussion turned to the smorgasbord of baseball technology out there: the Pocket Radars, Stalkers, TrackMans, Blasts and so on. Johnson mentioned how his facility’s travel ball players needed those sorts of data points to be recruited but often had no way to afford or gain access to such high-end tech.

Clark then talked about how college programs could afford all those devices but could barely aggregate it. He mentioned how graduate assistants were always tasked with writing down launch angle, exit velocity, spin rate, bat speed — arduous and imperfect tasks.

The outgrowth of those discussions became the genesis of AWRE. Clark and Johnson — with the help of a chief technology officer Dave Johansen, COO Corsi and later Spangenberg — debuted the company in their comfort zone: college baseball. Due to their connections from their days at Wofford, Clark and Johnson made a decision to reach out to universities large and small to trial their hardware and software.

The hardware involved the installation of six cameras at each college’s baseball field: a centerfield camera, a camera above home plate and two more cameras on each dugout so both a hitter and pitcher could be filmed from their open and closed sides. Meanwhile, the software involved camera vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence that enabled each pitch or swing to become an automated video clip.

Next was adding the video overlay. Integrating with Pocket Radar, for instance, started with a pitch speed being uploaded to the Pocket Radar cloud, where it would then be synced with the AWRE cloud. With other apps, such as the Stalker radar gun, the overlay vehicle may be Bluetooth instead of a cloud, according to Johansen. He says for the TrackMan V3 ball flight tracking, there is a listening device that marries the data with the video. With Blast Motion, the data is overlayed through separate downloads and uploads, and the same with Yakkertech.

“We started to sell it to colleges,” Spangenberg says. “The reason for that is it’s the cleanest target. You know what the fields are going to be, you know they’re going to pay their invoices on time, you know they’re going to be receptive to the technology. And we’re full. So at this point, we have a waiting list.”

In other words, anyone streaming a Maryland Terrapins baseball game this season through AWRE will be able to toggle between the six cameras, but also see the metrics of each pitch and swing on company’s game center. But streaming games isn’t the platform’s long term goal: streaming analytics is.

The company will soon trial a platform on smart phones that will enable parents or fans to log in, start streaming any game through the AWRE app and immediately have automated clips of every pitch or swing that can be found on player profiles. If the fan or parent can bring a Pocket Radar or Stalker or Blast with them, or if the venue is equipped with AWRE software, the metrics can be overlayed onto every clip – turning every swing or pitch into a video that can be sent to a college or shared over social media with verified analytics.

GameChanger has begun to do the same during games, but AWRE’s hardware and software can be deployed in batting cages or bullpens for just as valuable training data.

“We’re democratizing recruiting,” says Spangenberg, a former head baseball coach at DIII Arcadia University. “The one-percenters have the high-end platforms like like Yakkertech or Track Man. It’s the Power 5 schools. But I think what we’ve built and why it’s interesting is it can also service an 8U team. So we’re not looking at 1 percent of the market, we’re looking at the entire market.”

AWRE’s longer term goal is to eventually use its skeletal tracking — which is currently part of its machine learning — to measure metrics like pitching velo and exit velo on its own…without integrating all the grab-and-go technology.

“Then our app can give people feedback on their swing mechanics or pitch mechanics in real-time,” Johansen says. “Our product can say ‘Your swing is most like Mike Trout. Or Aaron Judge.’ How cool would that be?”

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.

An Industry Insight Series Podcast brought to you by our Partners

“Innovation isn’t about what we know; and defining it would be challenging everything we know,” says Ben Williams.

“One thing I do believe is: to harvest a culture of innovation we need human engagement and we need collaboration.”

Williams, who serves as the Ineos Grenadiers cycling team’s Integrated Performance Lead and the Ineos Britannia sailing team’s Head of Human Performance, is our very special guest on this Science in Sport Industry Insight Series podcast.

He sat down with SiS Director of Performance Solutions, James Morton, to discuss his varied professional background and the approach to innovation he has cultivated in each of his roles in sport and beyond.

Also on the conversational agenda were:

• The need to normalise ‘silly’ questions inside your organisation [12:30];
• Why the America’s Cup could be sport’s most unique performance challenge [15:00];
• His transition into cycling (combining his work in sailing) [19:00];
• Whether the next gains will be made in ‘training science’ or ‘equipment science’ [23:30].

James Morton LinkedIn | Twitter

Ben Williams: Twitter | LinkedIn

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