By John Portch

• The characteristics highlighted in recent studies aren’t unique to Generation Z (broadly 11 to 24-year-olds in 2023) but they are emphasised in this group.

• Yes, Gen Z must be willing to adapt to other generations, just as everyone else must adapt to them.

• What applies to students in a scholastic setting may or may not apply to young athletes.

Allow them to show their individuality and competitiveness

“They’re the first generation of digital natives,” said Jonnie Noakes when speaking of Gen Z, the group most often defined as having been born between 1997 and 2012. “They’re used to what is sometimes called ‘hyper-customisation’.” As such they value expressing their individuality. Noakes is the Director of Teaching & Learning at the world-renowned Eton College and, in 2020, he spoke at Virtual Leaders Meet: Coach Development about the traits of Generation Z as defined in a series of recent studies.

He ended his presentation with some steps coaches can take to effectively engage Gen Zs in learning and development. “This is a generation at ease with fluidity. That doesn’t just apply to their idea of their careers it actually applies in a way that is interesting and quite complex to their identity, their sexuality, to who they see themselves as being.”

Coaches should also allow them to be independent and competitive, which is one of the strengths of those who grew up post-9/11 and post-the 2008 financial crisis. “These are not dreamers, they know that life will not always be easy, they know they’re likely to experience significant failures before achieving success, but they’re willing to fail forward and try again. They’re very focused on skills and building their skills for future flourishing; and they are self-starters.”

Communicate with them face to face

The research recommends face to face communication. “They prefer this,” said Noakes. “They prefer to receive their feedback individually and in person.” Remember: “These are a group of people used to choosing exactly what they want, exactly how they want it, and this has a relevance too to the way we might reach them educationally.”

Show them how to collaborate

The research suggests that while Gen Z enjoy stories about their peers, they are less-collaborative than Millennials. “They have to be taught how to collaborate in a way that Millennials perhaps didn’t,” said Noakes. “They must also adjust to us just as every generation must adjust to others who don’t think in quite the same way as they do,” he added. “They’re not natural collaborators but we know the value of collaboration. Therefore, we can insist having shown them how to do it.”

On that note, Noakes referred to a study conducted at Eton around holistic education where the premise was that teaching students a traditional, narrow band of cognitive tasks was not equipping them for life. Growth mindset was a major consideration. “We were very interested in whether if we taught 17-year-olds growth mindset, that is an understanding that their abilities are not fixed, but that they improve with practice, and that crucially also applies to intelligence, which is not a fixed thing, would they become more pro-social?”

Experiential learning

“Generation Zs learn by doing – they like experiential learning,” says Noakes. “That’s not to say they’re not capable of learning by listening, of course they are; learning by reading, yes, that works too, but when you can give them an opportunity to learn by doing – give it to them.”

Gen Z are also responsive to “blended learning”. “That’s a combination of online and experiential learning, partially because it allows them to personalise the online element. Involve them in the planning and iteration stages of whatever you’re doing with them. They want to have a say in what’s happening to them. Don’t forget: they’re used to hyper-customisation.”

Focus on the future

“Gen Z like to know they’re going somewhere,” said Noakes. “Give them interaction with those in the years [cohorts] ahead, give them clear goals, help them to focus on their career development stages.” He also stresses that they’re pragmatic and tenacious. “They respond to the idea of ‘work hard and see the rewards’.”

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By Joe Lemire

There’s an old adage in tennis that the player who runs less, wins more, but like any saying aged enough to be an adage, it was born before the advent of sport science and advanced tracking technologies to scrutinize its veracity.

This particular maxim may indeed be true more often than not, but two of the world’s top players — reigning US Open champ Carlos Alcaraz and his finals opponent, Casper Ruud — are actually covering a lot more distance, according to data analysis from USTA’s player development team.

“They’re running significantly more because they’re covering more ground to hit the forehand and be more aggressive,” said Geoff Russell, USTA’s Senior Manager for Professional Players. “So maybe, them covering more distance is, relative to the tactical game style that they’re trying to play, that might not be a bad thing. That might be an efficient thing.”

The running habits of the Nos. 1 and 3 ranked players are but one insight gleaned from the Hawk-Eye player and shot tracking data available at every Grand Slam event, including the Australian Open, which took place in January. What the USTA has prioritized in recent years is in-depth assessment of match data in order to inform training. Practice sessions and workouts are tracked by wearable technologies to ensure that players are preparing appropriately to compete and contend at major tournaments.

A key figure in this initiative is Paul Robbins, Kinexon’s EVP of Sports Performance and a member of the USTA Sport Science Committee. Robbins pioneered this type of physical performance monitoring for NBA players as the Director of Elite Performance at STATS, which owned the first tracking system implemented in basketball, SportVU. He continues to consult extensively within the NBA.

Robbins jokes about how impressive the USTA Sports Science Committee is, noting that he’s just about the only one without an MD or PhD. (“I always say I’m the dumbest guy in the room,” he quipped with a laugh.)  Now, in conjunction with Russell, Performance Manager David Ramos, medical advisory group member Mark Kovacs and others, Robbins is helping spearhead innovative analysis and training programs in tennis.

“How do these guys actually play? How do we actually then train somebody to play at this level? Their accelerations or decelerations, the loads, the work capacity you need over a two-week period of time in the tournament — things like that,” Robbins said. “It’s basically bringing everything I’ve done for the NBA for 12 years, now, we’re actually at that level for the USTA to be able to do that in our development of our US players.”

During the US Open, the USTA player and coach development staffs introduced the Physicality Index and published a series of web stories using this new metric to describe the intensity and toll of matches. One such piece, discussing the play of the men’s semifinalists, shared the aforementioned insight about Alcarez and Ruud, whose respective 6.9 and 6.6 Physicality Index scores dwarfed Karen Khachanov (5.2) and American Frances Tiafoe (4.8), as did their high-speed distance covered and number of explosive movements.

That public-facing metric was designed to engage and interest fans and, at times, included some sample workouts that competitive players could undertake to prepare for such demands. But the player development work runs much deeper.

Russell and Robbins drove from the greater Phoenix area out to Indian Wells for the BNP Paribas Open in October 2021, and over the course of the roughly eight-hour roundtrip drive, they designed most of the new tech-infused, player development program.

The first order of business was to assess the current practice routines among highly rated junior players at the USTA campus in Lake Nona. Performance Analytics Coordinator Katherine Gonzalez tagged every drill in the data management platform to help develop these baselines.

Early questions raised by Robbins, whose specialty is in metabolics, were about training the necessary energy systems: “Do we need a 15-minute drill? if you’re trying to mimic what’s happening in a match, that’s two minutes. You want to go at a much higher intensity to do that.”

One revelation of this work: several coaches were using mini-tennis — a rally-driven exercise using only the service boxes — early in training session to get their players loose.

“They were calling it their warmup,” Robbins said, “and that turned out to be the highest intensity drill. It’s like, ‘I don’t know if we want to start with the highest-intensity drill.’”

Providing education to the coaches is the important first step, and they’ve been largely receptive to the explanations they’re hearing.

“Coaches have the right intention,” Russell said. “They’re trying to do the right things, but they just need to understand the why — the effects of what they’re doing.”

USTA leadership has been supportive, he added, because every stakeholder in development stands to gain from the infusion of data and video to track not only physical load but stroke volume and heart rate, too. RPEs, the common shorthand for rate of perceived exertion scores, are also valuable data points from the athletes themselves even if they are inherently more subjective.

These sources appeal to tennis coaches, strength coaches, athletes, the medical team and also the mental skills coaches, with Russell noting the applicability of heart rate data as a proxy for pressure management. After all, physical, technical and tactical performance are inherently intertwined. The USTA performance team’s preview of the women’s semifinal, for example, used the data to show how Ons Jabeur and Caroline Garcia minimized their exertion by controlling court position, rarely standing far behind the baseline, by using their strength to return shots from closer in and rallying with powerful forehands.

Every player has his or her own style of play and requisite physical thresholds, but as the data gets collected and analyzed, the USTA can create clusters, or buckets, of player profiles who would all benefit from similar training. That serves as a base for further personalization.

“Going back to Alcaraz, I mean, those accelerations and decelerations that he had — and not only just one or two, he just kept doing it — you’ve got to train for that,” Robbins said. “And that’s what we’re trying to do is understand what the matches are. And then how do we how do we adjust our drills to do that?”

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.

As Lorena Torres Ronda explains, there is a big difference between say the NBA and international tournament play in basketball.

She has experienced both, including a spell as Performance Director at the Philadelphia 76ers and, most recently, as Performance Coordinator at the Spanish Basketball Federation, a role she has held for two years.

Lorena is also a Performance Advisor for the Leaders Performance Institute and, as such, we were delighted to welcome her to deliver an instalment in our Performance Perspectives series, where she reflected on her contribution to Spain’s success at the 2022 men’s FIBA EuroBasket Championships; their fourth triumph.

Hers was a dual role during those three weeks in September that combined S&C work with player load monitoring. It was vital that she prioritise, as she tells the podcast.

“Of course, you see things and my mind is like, ‘we could do this or that’ and ‘it would be good to improve speed or agility’ – that’s my emotional side,” she says. “My rational side knows that in three weeks you’re not going to improve tremendously in certain qualities because physiologically you don’t have time.”

Elsewhere in this episode, she discusses:

• The development of Spain’s feedback system [6:30];
• Harnessing the legacy of the nation’s basketball history [13:00];
• Preparing for the worst during a tournament [20:50];
• How the performance staff connected to the team’s vision [28:00].

Lorena Torres Ronda Twitter | LinkedIn

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

By John Portch

Carl Gombrich argues that you are an expert because of your interdisciplinarity, not in spite of it.

It was with this idea in mind – plus what he perceives as the British school and university system’s inability to cater for more than narrow academic subjects – that he founded the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) alongside Chris Persson and Ed Fidoe in 2017.

Gombrich, who serves as the school’s Academic Lead and Head of Teaching and Learning, is a living embodiment of interdisciplinarity. He is a professor with degrees in mathematics, physics and philosophy. On top of that, he used to be a professional opera singer. Before co-founding the LIS, in 2010, he set up the UK’s first Bachelor of Arts and Science degree at University College London (UCL).

He broached the topic of interdisciplinary learning and knowledge at the 2022 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London but, before taking to the stage, he sat down with the Leaders Performance Institute to give us a flavour of what to expect.

“Interdisciplinary learning is learning in which you combine the skills, knowledge and methods from more than one discipline,” he says. He then cites the hypothetical example of a coder with an intimate understanding of graphics and art being good at data visualisation. “Those two things don’t generally go together but you can combine them comfortably these days and be a very go-to person. There are so many combinations. I had one student on a programme I set up studying genetics and law because she’s very interested in going into the legal aspect of genetic engineering.”

Essentially, interdisciplinarity combines knowledge in new and useful ways, which is a handy skill to have in sport, as Gombrich would point out onstage. Sport, he accepted, is highly specialised, but environments do change and people must draw on new knowledge to be able to adapt and grow. An interdisciplinary approach also leads to an increased menu of options and, therefore, more creative approaches to problem-solving.

However, while there are tangible benefits to interdisciplinary learning and knowledge, Gombrich feels that systemic problems in the British education system, to name but one example, present an obstacle to realising society’s collective potential. “Our school system and university system are not set up for this at all,” he continues. He believes they are beset by what he calls “legacy thinking”. “So my life for the last 12 years is opening the door for students who want interdisciplinary learning and knowledge; and the great joy has been seeing how successful they’ve been as a result.”

Addressing real world problems

Is interdisciplinarity as simple as trying to analyse and understand gaps in skillsets and complementing those with expertise from elsewhere or is it something more holistic?

“I think it’s been a spectrum. It’s not black and white. But what I’ve been amazed about in my career in the last ten years is how students find the gaps,” says Gombrich.

This is where he believes legacy thinking presents an obstacle. “There are so many new areas which are more complex and require more combinations than old academic subjects will really allow for,” he adds.

“I think the reason the thing I did at UCL was a success is because I had a boss and a boss’ boss who allowed me the space, within an established institution, to do that. [For] most institutions – not just universities, anywhere – you’ve got to look at the incentives of people. What are people incentivised to do? Academics in their academic subjects are incentivised to be brilliant at that one very narrow academic subject. Because of the way the degrees are structured, they’re incentivised to get students who are only really very good or interested in that subject.”

Schools, he argues, are no different given the distinctions they emphasise between science and humanities. “You need a sympathetic manager who’s honestly going to knock a few heads together sometimes and say, ‘we totally respect what you do in your area, but there’s more to life than just your area and can we help students learn enough of your area to do well, but also combine it with other things?’.”

He returns to the story of the law student who studied genetics. “The pushback might be straightaway from the lawyers like, ‘Oh, well that person’s only half a lawyer’ or ‘that person’s only half a genetics engineer’, but you say they’re more than double – the unique lawyer who knows about genetics.

“Actually a student of mine has a great way of saying this. He’s working in AI and law, another fantastic combination where there’s such a need for people that can speak to both audiences, and he says it’s pretty hard to be the top 1% of anything – it’s really, really hard. But it’s not that difficult to be the top 10% of two or three things, and if you see that as a multiplier you become the top .1%, or 1 in 1000, in that new unique area.

“There are these areas open to you if you just keep your eyes and ears open.”

Strikingly, the LIS teaches no subjects. This is because the school does not believe in traditional categories of education that it feels no longer reflect the world today. “We just teach through real world problems, so students will study something like sustainability in equality and we’ll teach them methods – so basically research methods. It could be quantitative methods around statistics, it could be graphical methods, it could be social science methods. How to design a survey, how to conduct an interview. And we don’t say, ‘oh this is economics’ or ‘this is sociology’ or ‘this is physics’ – we just teach them tools to go out and to tackle that problem. So this is the big step that we’ve made – it’s very radical. I think it’s very hard for people to shift their mindset.”

It sounds like they are teaching students an entirely new way to learn. “Absolutely, 100%, that a big meta of all this. One of the quotes I say from a student of mine is about how being on our programme she was almost forced, as she puts it in a beautiful way, to: ‘foster a burning curiosity about things’. And that’s kind of a teacher’s holy grail, because if you can take someone from thinking that learning is just kind of receiving knowledge passively, perhaps regurgitating it through an exam, and then have them thinking, ‘I’m just curious, I want to know, I want to learn!’ then they’re kind of made for life, really. They can, in this modern world retool, retrain, have three or four careers and that’s really nice to hear.”

How does the LIS track progress without exams? “One of the defining features of interdisciplinarity is trying to reflect the real world more. In the real world there are no exams. There’s things you do, there’s feedback and, if you’re a good learner and you’re lucky to get feedback, you should learn from that experience. That’s what learning is: trial, error and feedback, and iteration and improvement.”

The LIS prefers real life projects. “For example, in the first year, our students worked with 13 separate individual external organisations on a sustainability consultancy report. These were only first years and it was quite scary for them coming from school and all the traditions of school, but the [clients] were genuine external clients, people interested in doing a startup around waste management or in education, looking at schools, school architecture, all sorts of different things. And our students were asked to use the knowledge they got from our programme to write this report for them. So there is a real emphasis to try and make the assessments as real as possible.

“The other answer to that is a bit more theoretical, but I think it’s worth trying to answer it – how do you assess interdisciplinarity? How can you say you’ve done a good job combining genetics and law? That is much harder to do because you’re coming from a space where we know what law looks like, we know what genetics looks like [but] we don’t really know what someone who’s really good at that combination looks like. But that’s the sort of challenge we should like as educationalists and we are working on that. We’ve got various ways of looking at how students have synthesised knowledge together, how they’ve integrated it. We’ve looked at quite a few meta things like how they’ve framed the problem, how they’ve been critical of the various different perspectives. We talk a lot about taking perspectives on a problem, having evidence that you’ve taken more than one perspective. So there are quite a lot of these meta tools, but it’s interesting actually, in setting up a new uni, a lot of the kind of standard regulatory phraseology just doesn’t work because it says, ‘demonstrate that you’re better at this discipline in this way’, but we don’t want one discipline, we want them to take different perspectives and synthesise them in new ways.”

The balance between ‘synthesis’ and ‘analysis’ lies at the heart of the discussion between traditional methods of education and interdisciplinary learning. “In education, we’re very good at analysis because we know what it looks like to break something down into bitesize pieces and then be critical about it. Or if you get something right and we can give that a mark, we’ve got a checklist about that.

“We don’t really know what good synthesis looks like, because almost by definition synthesis gives you novelty, it gives you newness – someone’s done something cool and combined these two things that you’ve never seen before. How are you supposed to go to your mark sheet, to the regulator, or even to the student sometimes, and say ‘this is really good’?

“I said to my students at UCL that I’m going to reserve the top marks for those of you who surprise me in a good way. And what’s the students’ first question? ‘How can I surprise you, Carl?’ And it’s like ‘just stop and think about it for a moment.’ And that’s the twist you need. Of course certainly some students are scared of it, some even resent it because they think, ‘no, if I do everything correctly I should be able to get the top grade.’ And you want to say ‘no, you do everything correctly – that’s cool, you’re a B.’

“You’re never going to be outstanding, you’re never going to change people’s minds really, or create something, unless there’s a whole bit above doing everything correctly which we reserve for that synthesis, that novelty and that productive, creative approach”.

Specialist-generalists

How interdisciplinary learning and knowledge may best apply to sports is in the continuing debate around specialists and generalists in high performance.

Gombrich is a believer in the theory of interactional expertise, which was devised by a professor of social sciences called Harry Collins, who defined the concept as: ‘the ability to converse expertly about a practical skill or expertise, but without being able to practise it, learned through linguistic socialisation among the practitioners.’ The opposite is contributory expertise, which is possessed, quite simply, by experts in their field.

“There’s an entire huge class of people in the knowledge who use their linguistic interactional expertise in really valuable ways,” says Gombrich. “Now the challenge for this is people think this means that if you can bullshit your way you’re good, you’re doing a good job. And Collins said this isn’t about bullshit, it’s about leadership – can you understand someone’s point of view and their objectives without being them? Without being a marketeer or being an accountant, can you really understand what makes them tick, what they care about, what their main concepts are in their discipline? Can you advocate for something without being an expert in that area?”

Interactional experts, as he would tell the audience, have the ability to ask penetrating questions, play devil’s advocate, translate accurately from one expert to another and negotiate in unfamiliar circumstances. This means they are good at taking perspective, translating between sectors and brokering, showing empathy, being creative and demonstrating leadership.

But how should a team be constituted? “There are quite a lot of these meta questions,” says Gombrich. “Can you find the right narrow experts that are willing to open up and listen to other perspectives? Or, and there’s a risk here, do you say you’re not going to have experts like that because they just can’t integrate? So you’re going to have a whole bunch of people who are open-minded, but is there a kind of groupthink in open-mindedness? So there’s a kind of asymmetry with this, you see. The open-minded person has to, in a sense, include the close-minded person in their discussions; and interdisciplinarians are always trying to do that, kind of widening the ambit of inclusivity. A close-minded person just says, ‘oh, I just don’t consider you, you’re out of my spectrum’. But that, in a way, makes their life a bit easier. There’s just one track. But I think in an interdisciplinary team you can’t afford to do that. So you need to include difficult people who might challenge you, and some of the very, very difficult people might not even be willing to be in the conversation with you.

“We have two very high level guiding principles at LIS for our students and I guess they apply everywhere because we’re about tackling complex problems. One is that you need to pursue multiple perspectives and the other is you need to think in terms of networks and relationships. Now how this works for teams in sport I’m not quite sure, there must be a way, but often when solving a problem these days it’s best if you’re humble enough to know that you don’t know the answer but someone in your network does. And if you can pick up the phone to them and get 20 minutes with them they might give you that nugget which you didn’t get before.”

Gombrich concludes with a quote from former US President Harry Truman. “He said: ‘it is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit’.

“Humility is a theme across all this. Humility of knowledge, humility of learning, humility of reaching out to people and admitting you don’t know.”

A Data & Innovation podcast brought to you in collaboration with

“My staff is, by far, way more educated, smarter than me. They all have these niches that they’re really good at,” says Brandon McDaniel.

“When I need to be able to understand something, when I need to be able to communicate something, when I need to be able to have that conversation with our front office or coaching staff, whoever that might be, they’re the ones that I’m going to in order to get that information.”

McDaniel is the Vice President of Player Performance at the LA Dodgers and the first guest on the People Behind the Tech Podcast series, a new collaboration between SBJ Tech and the Leaders Performance Institute.

During the course of the episode, he also talks to SBJ’s Joe Lemire and Leaders’ John Portch about topics, including:

• The tech he uses in his own life [1:00];
• How he seeks to test, trial and implement tech in a team environment [10:00];
• Exploiting ‘windows of opportunity’ in athlete monitoring [16:00];
• How analytics departments can play a role in scouting and development [29:00].

Joe Lemire Twitter | LinkedIn

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 Joe Lemire

After Madan Rajagopal moved from his native India to the Netherlands, his first course of action was to find a local cricket club and register as a player. The club didn’t have a permanent year-round coach for its senior members but, rather, seasonal instructors from the Southern Hemisphere — Australia, New Zealand and South Africa — and inevitably each had a different opinion about how Rajagopal should alter his swing.

“I lost all my fundamental flow and feel for the bat,” Rajagopal recalls. He adds, “Coming from India, cricket is kind of in our blood, in my blood, and I could live without anything but not without cricket. But in 2018, there was a point where I literally thought about stopping cricket because I wasn’t enjoying the game anymore. I wasn’t scoring. I wasn’t playing well. My performance was very bad.”

Around the same time, Rajagopal was helping coach the club’s junior players and was surprised not to find any apps to help track their progress. In his professional life, he is a data scientist and AI engineer, so he set out to build his own solution.

That product is now Ludimos, a smartphone-based cricket tracking and training app that has been used by more than 19,000 players across 15 countries. Among the team clients are nine national cricket associations, including those in Scotland and the Netherlands, as well as Royal Challengers Bangalore of the Indian Premier League (IPL).

Ludimos can analyze video from multiple viewpoints and provide tracking data on ball and bat. An assessment of player biomechanics is in development. And the platform is also a communication tool that enables coaches to assign drills, evaluate them upon completion and return annotated videos with tips.

Ludimos can analyze video from multiple viewpoints, provide tracking data on ball and bat and act as a communication tool where coaches can assign and evaluate drills. (Courtesy of Ludimos)

“Our current core value prop is the ball tracking,” Rajagopal says. “So our ball tracking technology is good enough that it is already adding value to both batters and ballers, and in our roadmap, the next thing we have is to unlock the bat tracking and then the biomechanics. Then at that point, then we can merge everything together and have contextual analysis of the player in full.”

RCB, in fact, revealed this week that one of their newest additions — bowler Avinash Singh — was the direct result of its Hinterland Scouting program, a data-driven talent identification tool powered by Ludimos. Singh has never played professionally and mostly played tennis ball cricket until less than a year ago, yet now he is the first of more than 10,000 registrations to make the RCB roster through this program and has bowled 145 kilometers per hour (90 mph), an elite pace.

In a video interview, RCB head of scouting Malolan Rangarajan described Hinterland Scouting as a “very, very objective way of identifying talent where we don’t use human eyes” while likening the bowling action of Singh to Umran Malik, the IPL’s fastest bowler.

As part of an innovation contest in 2021, Ludimos earned second place in the competition hosted by Cricket Australia and HCL, with distinction for its player development tools. Ludimos is also a graduate of the Stadia Ventures accelerator program and is now raising a €1.5 million seed round, of which €300,000 was slated to come from a crowdfunding campaign on Seedrs. (By mid-January, Ludimos had exceeded that goal and raised €314,511.)

The Ludimos homepage interface includes access to video analysis, drills and more. (Courtesy of Ludimos)

While other sports — most notably baseball — have seen great advances in the understanding of the sport via publicly accessible databases and research, cricket’s advanced data has been more closely held.

“We don’t have any open data set about what’s been collected and how it’s been used, which means that there are only a handful of companies in the world that actually do this,” Rajagopal says. “And we are the only one of them, which does all three, which is bat tracking, ball tracking and biomechanics.”

Video review helped remedy Rajagopal’s own swing woes. He asked friends on the team to record him for three weeks straight and reviewed the clips with a coach.

“Even though the exact same sentence was said to me by several coaches — ‘that your head is moving away, that your weight is actually falling off and not coming towards the ball’ — I could never visualize what that actually meant, how that would look like, until I saw him pointing on the screen where he said, ‘Your head should be here, but it’s few pixels to the right or to the left,’” he says, describing the experience as empowering.

With small changes, Rajagopal dramatically improved his batting results, regaining his confidence and triggering his pursuit of Ludimos to create similar opportunities — with greater tech-driven features — to everyone. (Ludimos is an amalgamation of Latin words that try to capture the process of improvement: self-reflection, practice, habit formation.)

Rajagopal says Ludimos was designed for all age groups of cricket, recognizing that most club coaches might work with 11 year olds on up to 40-somethings. The older bracket will seek more detailed analysis; youth players will seek a different experience. “For 11- to 15-year-olds, it’s more about having fun and feeling for the game,” he says. “It’s more about gamification, so we turn our data and AI into a way that they can use as challenges and leaderboards.”

Ben Ferbrache, the cricket development manager for Guernsey, manages and coaches the junior programs for the small island state situated in the English Channel.

“It’s a really good way of tracking a player’s progress, especially with a lot of our guys that are going from one age group to the next,” he says. Ferbrache notes the ease of use, both for the players and for the coaches to record and assign their own practice drills. “What we find is kids love technology,” he adds. “Everything is on a phone or an iPad these days. So that’s where we were like, ‘Why don’t we just embrace the technology, and the kids will actually start using it?’”

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.

The Konnect insoles have a built-in top grip to prevent athletes’ feet from moving in their shoes. San Francisco Giants outfielder Mike Yastrzemski (pictured) has worn the insoles during games over the past two seasons.

Image courtesy of Blumaka

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Athletes from 25 professional sports organizations — including the San Francisco Giants, Dallas Cowboys, and golfers on the PGA Tour — are seeking an on-field edge through stuffing their shoes with Blumaka’s Konnect insoles. New data from an independent biomechanics analysis lab shows that athletes wearing Blumaka’s insoles recorded faster movement, more force generation, quicker start and stop times, and increased stability.

The study was conducted by a professional baseball organization — Blumaka is not publicizing which one–with movement tests performed on 190 athletes. Data from the biomechanics lab was collected through KinaTrax’s 3D marker-based motion capture system with integrated force plates. Among the findings from the study were 90% of athletes saw an increase in linear body velocity while wearing the insoles compared to not wearing them, 80% increased their lead leg ground-force production, 70% increased their back leg g-force production, and 80% had an increase in front knee stability.

“I can’t think of any sport where slipping helps other than curling,” says Blumaka founder Stuart Jenkins. “Everything in athletics is determined by ground forces. If you want to jump higher, you have to convert horizontal forces to vertical forces as efficiently as possible. We increase ground force.” On the lab testing, Jenkins adds: “They were running and then coming to a complete stop, looking at how fast do you start and how fast do you stop? They were also doing baseball things like a pitcher coming off a mound, what happens to that front leg when it hits the ground? Is that foot sliding down the mound or is it stopping so that you can get velocity on the ball?”

Konnect insoles are made from 85% of recycled foam materials, including a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) surface. Jenkins, 63, has spent over 40 years in the footwear industry including his previous role as VP of Innovation and Product Development at Deckers Outdoor Corporation, which owns brands such as UGG and HOKA. Investors in Blumaka include Donnie Ecker, the current bench coach and offensive coordinator for the Texas Rangers and former hitting coach for the Giants.

“Most insoles have cloth on the top and most socks are made out of fabric. You put two things together, a sock and a fabric that have the same coefficient of friction, they slide,” Jenkins says. “What we did is we picked a material that had a tackiness to it. If you put [Konnect] under a microscope, you would see these micro-grip patterns that we’ve built into the mold so that it would grab this sock more effectively.”

Giants outfielder Mike Yastrzemski has been among the staunchest advocators for Blumaka, wearing the insoles during games over the past two seasons after being connected to Jenkins though a friend of a friend. Several teammates, including Tommy La Stella and Evan Longoria followed Yastrzemski’s lead in purchasing the insoles. Testing on Yastrzemski’s swing showed his rotational acceleration increased by 5-7gs [g-force] wearing the insoles versus without, according to The Athletic.

“[Konnect] lasts something in the neighborhood of 10 to 20 times longer than the insoles they’re putting in these athletic shoes from a cushioning and durability standpoint,” Jenkins says. “Mike Yastrzemski told me he normally goes through three insoles a year in his baseball cleats. He has now played two consecutive seasons in one insole, our insole. Think about that from an environmental standpoint.”

“I’ve tried every kind of insole there is on the market,” Longoria, now a free agent, told The Athletic last summer. “I’ve had custom orthotics made, I’ve tried all the over-the-counter stuff you can buy. This [Blumaka] has by far been the best result that I’ve gotten from an insole.”

Jenkins says that 10-15 PGA Tour golfers wear Blumaka during tournaments. California-based athletic sock company Drymax has a distribution agreement with Blumaka, which has sold its Konnect insole at full price ($59) on its website to all professional athletes wearing the product and does not yet have any paid endorsers.  A report from Fox Sports found that just 11 of 695 MLB hitters did not wear batting gloves in plate appearances during the 2021 season, and Jenkins thinks his insoles could become a just as common piece of equipment.

“The reason everyone wears batting gloves is because it makes you a little bit better, because slipping is not a good thing,” Jenkins says. “It’s gonna be the same way with insoles. Why would you want to slip? We’re not going to make people go from the sandlot to Yankee Stadium and be a star, but we’re gonna make the stars at Yankee Stadium a little bit better.”

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.

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.