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.

By John Portch

Effective performance pathways will create space for outliers, according to Ken Lynch, the National Performance Pathways Manager at Australian Sailing.

“Not everybody will fit into ‘the box’ and there are many out there that comment negatively on sport ‘pathways’,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“While the term ‘pathways’ can be off-putting, looking beyond the concept and understanding that many sports are producing pathways that represent the many but are tolerant of the few is important. Getting clear on what ‘good’ looks like enables you to achieve this flexibility and offer time and resource to those with potential who may not quite fit the mould.”

Lynch argues that rigid, linear pathways are unlikely to be fit for purpose as a guide or for use as a selection tool. “Most performance pathways I have worked with are considerate of non-linear progression,” he adds. “They give athletes room to fail and learn and work with other athletes over extended periods to better understand athlete potential and how they respond to the various stimuli provided within the parameters of any well designed and applied framework.”

Can a performance model sustain both linear and non-linear progression? “I think that it has to if sustainable, repeatable success is the goal,” says Lynch, who explains that efficiencies come from an accurate understanding of the numerous factors behind what it takes to win.

“There are plenty of elements that contribute to sustainability that require attention and minimal resource to have impact in the first instance. For example, how are you succession planning your coach pool? How are you testing who has potential while adding capacity to your coach workforce?

“Many of these things can be achieved utilising existing platforms and, with the addition of a small level of investment, can become a significant contributor to your program. Even something as simple as how you treat your people can significantly increase the value proposition of being involved with your sport for no additional investment.”

This is the second of two instalments in which Lynch, a former teacher who has worked at sports organisations including the Irish Institute of Sport and High Performance Sport New Zealand [HPSNZ], discusses the space given to talent pathways in sport.

The first half of our interview explored long and short-term planning, as well as the need to be evidence-based in your practice and, in this second half, Lynch reflects on the need for patience and the need to ensure staff and athletes have ready support.

How important is patience in high performance and how can a performance manager buy themselves more time?

KL: Patience is extremely important in high-performance. When we think about how long it takes an athlete to achieve the required level to deliver an Olympic medal-winning performance or how long it took their coach to learn their trade, we start to understand the importance of patience and sustained, consistent support to be able to deliver these types of moments. The ‘flow’ of a system (insert link to part one) should see the right number of athletes and coaches on the right trajectory at the various phases of the High Performance [HP] pathway. Gaps in that athlete or coach population risk the ability to deliver the required consistency and performances over more than one athlete generation. This type of view and thinking should enable a system to identify and fill these gaps early and minimise the associated risks. Milestone targets and markers can support informing stakeholders and giving confidence that interventions are having an impact and that the progress towards pinnacle goals is on track.

How can you ensure that everyone is onboard when it comes to supporting your pathway?

KL: Building capability and effective system leadership takes time. When I arrived at HPSNZ there were three leaders in sports tasked with managing HP Pathways. Minimal direct investment into that area of the system required us to generate understanding in the value of the space to sustainability. Post generating understanding, we needed to build capacity and then develop capability. The system supported this movement by including HP Athlete Development as part of the annual review process, emphasising that demonstrating future potential was an important part of the investment process. Having people in various sports waking up in their sport every day thinking about development was a huge advantage – much better than an external probe or support dropping in periodically. These types of pathway roles are quite new to Olympic and Paralympic sport so the learning curve for many was quite steep. Very soon people shifted from managing the space to leading and driving it. This was a real turning point for many sports but it took six to eight years of consistent attention to achieve that. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but a lot of it still remains – not a bad effort!

What did you learn from that experience in New Zealand, where you worked for eight years?

KL: The learnings suggest that patience is required, as I believe it is, but there were many times in that six to eight years where we tried to move things a little too quickly or moved too far away from the capability build to be useful. Having built honest working relationships with those leaders their feedback helped us realign and move at a pace that was more appropriate. Bringing them with us was what enabled its success and was a good reminder to me around understanding tolerable pace and the intensity of leadership and support.

Surely tensions can emerge when the message is to be patient?

KL: It requires constant attention. Consider the markers that you lay down around the progression of something for the future. It’s important to be able to show progression. When you write a strategy across three cycles, the first four years of the cycle should see you working on all three strands:

• Current cycle (the next Games);
• Next cycle (the Games in eight years’ time) and;
• The eight-year plus plan (identifying and confirming the right type of athletes and coaches to deliver longer term).

All three areas of work should carry milestone markers and enabling the reporting of progress across each of them. Each will have projected targets to project against to understand how athletes and coaches are tracking against future performance targets rather than what it will take to deliver a performance in this cycle only. Previously, and perhaps currently in some systems or sports, perhaps those with less resource, only focus or can only focus on the current cycle and don’t turn their attention to the next one until they get to it.

How and in what ways can a performance manager support their staff?

KL: Another part of that constant, which I probably didn’t do in New Zealand well enough, is to continue to reiterate people’s understanding or support people’s understanding of the value and importance of what next cycle thinking is. Highlighting the progression so that people can see we’re having an impact and retain the interest and motivation to continue to support sustainability and the value of those with roles in this space. Most people are attracted up. Coaches are thinking: ‘how can I coach at the Olympics?’ Service providers may be thinking: ‘how can I work with the best athletes?’ There’s not many people in the world that place themselves in the high performance development space going ‘this is me. I don’t actually want to go up there. This is where my expertise is, this is where I can really deliver, this is where I can make a difference.’ Some that have lived in the ‘current cycle’ space have arrived at: ‘I’m better suited here, at this level.’ I think it requires a bit of system experience and guidance from people who lead in shepherding those with a real ability at this level to see their value to the system, the future and the repeatability of success. Quality professional development opportunities, effective planning and honest conversations are key ingredients to supporting coaches to realise their potential regardless of the level. The next step is ensuring we value and promote the work they do to highlight the important role they play in the system. These roles are critical to sustainability and have often been the forgotten ones in the past. Let’s value these people and these roles as they become a more prominent and important part of their sports.

By John Portch

• Data interpretation and delivery can be a competitive advantage.

• Relate an athlete’s data back to their life.

• Is there a solution that goes beyond high performance?

Human-focused data – your advantage

“The winning and losing is not going to change,” Robby Sikka, the former VP of Basketball Performance and Technology at the Minnesota Timberwolves, told the 2019 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. “And there’s going to be more and more information. We’re going to have to give that information back to human beings. You’re going to have to deal with more data, you’re going to have to communicate it back, and you’ve got to do it more efficiently than others – and that’s your advantage.”

Using data to question norms and be more thoughtful

Sikka turned the discourse towards anterior cruciate ligament [ACL] injuries, where a change in behaviour, informed by data, my prevent a secondary surgery. “You might not be able to prevent the ACL, but if you can prevent the secondary surgery, you’ve probably done your athlete a service,” he said. “Those are the things I want our athletes and our medical staff to think about; ‘hey, we’re here, focus on the present: this guy’s got an ACL tear and we’ve got to deal with it. What are we going to do to prevent that secondary operation? What are we going to do now to counsel the athlete?’

In keeping with their principles, data is used positively and communicated clearly at the Timberwolves. “It’s about the ‘sandwich technique’,” he added. “We’re going to give the data back to them with two positives and one negative, but communicating it in a way that’s tied to the important parts of their life.

“If you’ve got a player who cares more about being a dad than anything else, I’m going to give him data that reflects what’s happening to him about being a family man. If he wants to be able to spend more time with his kid, how do I show him that information because that matters to him?”

How do you like your eggs?

Away from spreadsheets and digital interfaces, the Timberwolves apply the same principles to a problem in the canteen. Sikka told the story of a player who could not stand the eggs in the Timberwolves’ cafeteria. “It turns out he eats his mum’s eggs just fine,” he recalled. “We flew his mum out to meet with our chef to find out what’s she’s doing for the eggs. She then made eggs for the whole team.

“We embrace that; we wanted to understand: what does he eat? How does he respond to it? How does his body respond to load?

“That’s the kind of story we want to tell and that’s what we’re able to do with our group because we’re aligned. We care about each other.”

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Alexi Pappas is a multi-hyphenate: Greek-American Olympic runner, writer, filmmaker and actor. She is the Greek national record holder in the 10,000 meters (31:36), which she set while competing at the 2016 Rio Games.

Before that, Pappas was an All-American runner at Dartmouth, from which she graduated magna cum laude, and then completing her NCAA eligibility at Oregon while pursuing a graduate degree, helping the Ducks win indoor and outdoor track national titles.

Now with her eyes set on the marathon — she recently ran Boston and London as a guide for visually impaired runner Lisa Thompson — Pappas aspires to set the Greek national record. Her personal best is a 2:34:26, which set in 2020 at the Houston Marathon, less than a minute from Maria Polyzou’s national mark of 2:33:40.

Alexi Pappas is a multi-hyphenate: Greek-American Olympic runner, writer, filmmaker and actor. She is the Greek national record holder in the 10,000 meters (31:36), which she set while competing at the 2016 Rio Games. Before that, Pappas was an All-American runner at Dartmouth, from which she graduated magna cum laude, and then completing her NCAA eligibility at Oregon while pursuing a graduate degree, helping the Ducks win indoor and outdoor track national titles.

Now with her eyes set on the marathon — she recently ran Boston and London as a guide for visually impaired runner Lisa Thompson — Pappas aspires to set the Greek national record. Her personal best is a 2:34:26, which set in 2020 at the Houston Marathon, less than a minute from Maria Polyzou’s national mark of 2:33:40.

On her introduction to Oura . . .

I used to train in Oregon with a very closed professional group where everything was pretty micromanaged by a coach. There was a lot of guidance and hand holding, as I think a lot of athletes require, especially early on in their career.

I was exposed to Oura once I moved to Los Angeles and started training in different environments and not in the context of like one of those Olympic training groups. Because in these groups [like Oregon], you have a coach that has eyes on you, and they can see sometimes what you can’t about yourself, especially because my coach was an Olympian himself. He could see fatigue, where I couldn’t.

But once I moved to LA, there wasn’t always consistent eyes on me. So I needed to keep better eyes out for myself. And I learned about Oura from a friend of mine named Blue. He was wearing it, and I met him at the Chicago Marathon. And so I just started to learn about this and how it was different than the watch I was wearing, which wasn’t as accurate for the data about recovery.

On the metrics she finds most meaningful . . .

The readiness and sleep scores are more useful to me than anything else, as well as obviously the period tracker. To be perfectly honest, the sleep score has helped me figure out what of my habits will lead to the most restful sleep. I think the sleep score is something that I’m more dynamically interacting with—if I have had, you know, red meat for dinner, or if I’ve eaten at this time, or if I’ve eaten out versus cooking at home, or if I’ve gone to bed at this time, or different habits—so the sleep score is helping me get better sleep because that data is pretty consistent and my life is changing, if that makes sense. Then the readiness score is something that I use to adjust my actual training and activity for that day.

On how Oura data helps her make decisions . . .

It has really helped me because I live a very multifaceted life that I’m excited about. I’ve tried to see everything in my life as a choice rather than a sacrifice. For example, if I make a choice to drink, I now just have a better understanding of what it’s going to do to me, and therefore I’m making more informed choices.

And I’m someone who really values my time. So if I’m going to do something, whether it’s training or socially, I want to understand why and what I’m doing. I have adjusted specifics in my routine and been very amused and interested in how it affects my sleep. And it’s not always in the way articles that I read reflect because everybody’s so different. What affects my sleep might be different than what affects somebody else’s sleep. But it has allowed me to make adjustments in my life and be better educated.

The whole thing is that it’s information. What you choose to do with it is up to you, but to not know it at all is really disempowering. I’m a creative person—I make films and I write—and I sometimes like to think about criticism or feedback with my creative work as data that you can either choose to pay attention to or not. Just because I don’t ask for feedback on my book from my editors doesn’t mean my book is good or communicating, it just means I refuse to look or ask them the questions. And I think it’s like that with bloodwork or with Oura data where, just because you don’t want to know, it doesn’t mean it’s not true. So I’ve just found the information to be empowering, and I keep it in balance with, also, how do I really feel? It’s not the only information I use, but it’s an additional piece of information that I didn’t have prior.

On her current running career plan and goals . . .

It’s possible that I go to New York [for the marathon], but I think competitive-wise, I’m looking at a race in January. What I’m trying to do in my life is generally move in a direction of everything supporting everything else.

I would like to break the Greek record in the marathon as an overall goal. I think it’s like ‘should be broken, can be broken.’ It’s in the low 2:30s. And I have not had the opportunity to run a fully healthy marathon yet because I had this post-Olympic depression and did not realize what toll that took on my body.

For me, I don’t have anything to prove to myself or anyone else. I’m very happy with my career, but I have curiosity and fascination with the marathon that I think hasn’t been fully expressed yet as it was in the 10K. So, yeah, I think a winter marathon would be fun. I’m thinking about Houston, which is a really nice race, but we’ll see.

On balancing running with life . . .

I think this sport is evolving. If I’m being really honest with you where, before Covid, I think the world wanted this sharp, hard motivation of get out and grind, the world just got a little bit worn down by Covid. Generally in sport, but in running in particular, the energy has moved towards just be enjoying your sport and doing your sport. And I think that’s something that I see myself increasingly filling the role of in other people’s eyes and giving them permission to actually enjoy and lean into whatever form the sport takes for them.

Girls quit sports at twice the rate of boys by the age of 14. I’m very aware that that number, I think, is because, when they see female adult athletes, I don’t think they see themselves in it as much as it’s more common to see men playing sports in adulthood and pick up tennis, basketball. I think part of my privilege in this world is to be someone who shows that you can have a full life and still play your sport as a woman. It’s not why I do it, but I’m seeing that it is affecting people in that way. I think that number could shift if girls see more women in sport living a full life and still playing sports.

It’s not that I need these things for myself. It’s just that I love running, and I want to keep doing it. And it might take different forms—guiding, flying through like a fairy, racing, occasionally trying trails—but mostly I just really like the sport. In my creative career, a lot of the projects I’m doing are actually athletic in nature. I’m really embracing my identity as like an athlete in Hollywood, and I’m realizing that I actually don’t have to hang up my shoes like I thought I would. I can be an athlete and be a creative person. And that’s a strength, it’s not a weakness. I just haven’t fallen out of love with the sport, and I don’t think I ever will.

On the potential for wellness data to benefit young women . . .

Men and women obviously have different development timelines. And I think what has been really difficult is, when a young girl is going through puberty, for example, isn’t able to see the word ‘development’ as a really positive step in a really healthy life. I think the word ‘development’ is something that we generally don’t embrace. During those years, for example, to have a different vantage point about your health besides what a coach might say and also what social media might tell you is probably wise.

That’s because, as athletes, we’re really hard on ourselves and, to have some permission to be as kind to ourselves as we are hard on ourselves, is what we need. It can come from a coach and it can come from a book, but if it comes from data that’s specific to our bodies, I think we’re more likely to allow ourselves the chance to recover and therefore develop during those developmental years.

For me, personally, I didn’t run during those puberty years. It was because I had a coach in high school who wanted us to specialize in just running. And I was playing soccer and doing theater and student government. And this was before social media. So I wasn’t able to be like, ’Is this messed up?’ I just thought I was de facto not allowed to run unless I only ran. And I didn’t run because I wanted to have a well-rounded life. What the result was, I went through puberty very normally during the years when some people overtrain.

For someone who doesn’t happen to be kicked off their running team, and therefore develop normally, they should still be given data that shows that they’re healthy during a time when they might be self-conscious about an evolving body. So this Oura data can give you confidence. And it can give you ease where that time in life is so uneasy.

On why she likes Oura’s customizable dashboard . . .

There’s a new feature that you can remove the caloric [expenditure]. Here’s a more metaphorical way of putting this: Everybody receives information and inspiration differently. You might tell a kid ‘enjoy the journey,’ and it might not resonate with them. But maybe if they hear it from the right person or they hear it said in a different way, it resonates. And I think the fact that you can toggle and change the way the data speaks to you also acknowledges that people receive information differently. What’s useful to everyone is unique, and so I was always taught to focus on what’s useful. And something that might be useful for me might not be useful to you.

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