Professor Dan Lerner spoke of the power of positive psychology and its ability to help us achieve excellence.
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Success and happiness very rarely go together at all.
“Often people who are incredibly successful, and have worked extremely hard at their chosen profession or sport, are not happy,” stated Dan Lerner, Co-Professor of The Science of Happiness Course at New York University at the 2017 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Chicago. So Lerner sought to find people who were both successful and happy to understand how you can balance the two. He posed the audience a question: “Some of the most successful people in sport and business have proven you don’t need to be happy to be excellent, but there are some who are able to balance success and happiness and so shouldn’t we aim for this?” He gave examples of people who have proven that you can be both successful and happy, such as Richard Branson and Maya Angelou. Lerner quoted Richard Branson: ‘Most people would assume my business success and the wealth that comes with it have brought me happiness, but they haven’t. In fact it’s the reverse, I am successful, wealthy, and connected because I am happy.’
Do you have an advantage as a positive coach?
“We have lived in this world where success comes before happiness,” said Lerner, “but we have started to see exemplars creep into our culture that show us that’s not necessarily the case. There are tremendous advantages when we put happiness before success.” Lerner went on to describe many studies that proved if people were positively stimulated before an event they produced better performance. One study which Lerner explained, was undertaken on doctors, where they were split into three groups; one not primed at all, one group positively primed and the final group negatively primed. They were then given 50 symptoms to diagnose. “Those that were primed positively, diagnosed with 20% more accuracy than those that were primed negatively. Something happens to us when we are primed with positive emotions which enables us to operate differently” he added. Another study which directly relates to athletes, was an eye tracking study. When athletes were negatively primed before taking the eye tracking test, they were found to have a much more narrowed vision and focus, compared to the athletes who were given positive emotions before the test, who showed their vision remained far broader and they were able to take in information from their peripheral vision. “Do you want your quarter back to hone in on one person or them seeing the entire field?” Lerner asked. “Positive emotion is not only allowing us to operate differently, it’s allowing us to see the world differently and operate at a higher level.”
How do we cultivate positive emotions?
“When we have more positive interactions than negative interactions is when we take advantage of that positive emotion,” said Lerner. “Every time you criticise someone, you have to have at least two or three positive interactions to get the best from that person”. However there is a limit to this. Lerner also went on to highlight that if you give too much positive emotion, it becomes unreal, and it feels fake. “If there is no criticism they aren’t hearing ways to get better.” What can you do to cultivate these positive emotions? Lerner explains that it is essential to provide interventions for your athletes or staff that take no more than five minutes per day. Below are four examples Lerner provides to help increase positive emotions.
MedStar Health, the team’s medical provider have partnered with the Orioles to deliver a fully in-house initiative.
Housed on MedStar’s campus in Bel Air, Maryland — around the corner from the franchise’s High A minor league affiliate in Aberdeen, only 30 miles northeast of Camden Yards and about an hour’s drive from the Double A team in Bowie — the tech-laden lab will help the club assess and monitor their pitchers for delivery efficiency and injury prevention using 10 Qualisys markerless motion-capture cameras, TrackMan’s optically enhanced radar and three force plates embedded in the mound.
The Orioles’ pitching lab uses 10 high-speed cameras, force plates in the mound and advanced ball tracking technology.
“It’s something that any modern, cutting-edge player development system needs. It’s sort of a baseline requirement at this point,” says Orioles Director of Player Development Matt Blood. He adds, “The competitive advantage lies in how you actually use the information that the labs produce because I think just about every team is acquiring this information, but then it’s what do you do with it from there to help the players get better?”
Since the new executive team took over in November 2018, led by GM Mike Elias and AGM Sig Mejdal, the Orioles have built out a robust group of coaches and analysts to modernize the franchise’s then-lagging baseball operations. Now, they’ve assembled a management team can interpret and apply such data sources, rather than contracting out some of that work to biomechanics consultancies such as provided by Reboot Motion or Driveline Baseball.
“Fully in-house. We’ve hired the people that we feel are necessary to process the data at every step of the way,” Blood says. “And then we’ve got coaches who are hungry for that information and will put that into play on both the pitching coach side and the strength and conditioning side.”
The cameras and TrackMan are portable, enabling most of this set up to be moved around, including to the Orioles’ player development complex at their spring training facility in Sarasota. Only the force plates are fixed in place, but Blood says a second sensor-laden mound is slated for construction there. One force plate is placed at the rubber to capture a pitcher pushing off to start his delivery, and then two more are installed side by side down the mound to evaluate the landing force of righty and lefty pitchers.
The idea, he says, is for pitchers to get a spring training baseline and then receive follow-up assessments every four-to-eight weeks. In a video interview shared by the team, Orioles starter Jordan Lyles discussed throwing one of his between-start bullpens at the lab, which opened to the team in July, while seeking better efficiency with this throwing motion.
The pitching lab will serve as an evaluation destination for Orioles pitchers at every level.
“We feel like we have gone about this in a responsible and organic way,” Blood says. “Instead of just rushing to acquire the data, we rushed to acquire the people who could help us and build out the proper system and process and technologies that were most practical and productive to use.”
Previously, the Orioles sent players to the Wake Forest Pitching Lab, owing to a good working relationship they have with both lab director Kristen Nicholson and baseball coach Tom Walter. The Wake lab is identical to what the Orioles built — 10 Qualisys markerless motion capture cameras, TrackMan, three force plates — and is open to the university’s baseball programs as well as the public.
“I have a particular interest in creating 3D simulations to enhance performance in both sports and medical rehabilitation and then also to figure out and define pitching efficiency,” Nicholson said. “We want to limit throwing arm stress and avoid injury without sacrificing velocity, and that becomes the real core of our lab and what’s driving our research in player development.”
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.
In our latest Member Case Study Virtual Roundtable, James Morton of Science in Sport reviews his time spent helping to develop a winning strategy with Team Sky.
A Leaders Performance Institute article brought to you by our Partners
Recommended reading
The Secrets of an Agile Team: when McLaren Racing Began to Make Ventilators
Framing the topic
Our final Member Case Study of the year was led by James Morton, Professor of Exercise Metabolism at Liverpool John Moores University, and focused specifically on executing performance in one of the most challenging performance environments in sport – the Tour de France. James shared with us his experiences from the Team Sky, now Ineos Grenadiers, environment around how they approach the race and maximising the impact on rider performance.
“Lack of knowledge is not always the problem… it’s the ability to take this knowledge and develop and deliver practical and simple solutions that counts… it’s the detail and final step of delivery that makes the difference in sport” – Sir Dave Brailsford, Team Sky / Ineos
Performance Knowledge & Delivery
This is the concept of it is what you do that really matters not always what you know. How are you taking the knowledge and applying it – execution.
There are four pillars of consideration to this model (Close, Kasper & Morton, 2019):
High-performing teams strive for Transformational Improvements – practitioners who engage in research and practice, constantly auditing and wanting to improve.
The Knowledge Delivery Framework
Developing the programme and athlete performance plan through the performance checklist:
Where can you lose or win this race? What can stop us winning?
Identify the factors that can stop you winning (cycling example):
What can you do from a delivery perspective to optimise performance?
Discussion points
Biggest challenges
The neurotechnology company’s Pro-Sync software contains a series of video-based eye movement tracking tests accessed through wearing a virtual reality headset
NeuroSync (formerly SyncThink) is calling its new software product Pro-Sync and it contains a series of video-based eye movement tracking tests accessed through wearing a virtual reality headset. The setup is similar to Eye-Sync, the company’s signature eye tracking product released in 2016 that’s used by college football and NBA teams to test athletes for concussions.
“We’re using a different measurement tool that essentially takes you through a battery of eye movement tests, some are similar to what we have in Eye-Sync and some are different and new,” says Scott Anderson, NeuroSync’s chief clinical officer. “We look at different aspects of how well you focus, how well you can sustain your attention, or how well you can maintain your working memory or your inhibitory control.”
Cameras in the VR headset follow the user’s eyes while NeuroSync’s algorithm quantifies how long their eyes are moving to the appropriate location. NeuroSync then provides an instant score from 0 to 100 (100 being best) to rank their results though a machine learning model that compares their performance based on NeuroSync’s cognitive assessments data of more than 20,000 patients. Some of those patients are NBA players from NeuroSync’s work with teams such as the Warriors, Wizards and Hawks, who all originally leveraged the company’s Eye-Sync concussion product as a makeshift solution to monitor fatigue amid the rigors of an 82-game schedule.
“Teams are making are making arbitrary decisions on load management, based on what’s happening physically, but what people don’t realize is that the brain’s central nervous system controls your entire body. We just look at all the physiological parameters that help us understand what the status of the athlete is,” Anderson says. “I think there’s a better way. If you start at the source, you’ll understand why physiological changes happen and cardiovascular changes happen — it’s because it’s all being run by the central processing computer in your body.”
The brain has long been neglected by sports scientists and team physicians working with athletes, according to Anderson, who notably also serves as a medical observer consultant for the NFL. He often sits in the replay booth during games and shares specific video angles with on-field team doctors to help identify and diagnose player injuries after plays.
Earlier this spring, the NFL mandated players’ use of wearables to track load management during all preseason practices. While football has been a main target of Eye-Sync, Anderson expects Pro-Sync’s fatigue evaluation to be most applicable in continuous-play sports such as basketball, soccer and rugby.
“People spend a lot of time talking about reaction time, but actually visual processing happens before reaction time. And so you have to move your eyes to the right place, so that your brain can interpret what it is that is in front of you, so that you can formulate a reaction,” Anderson says.
Anderson says NeuroSync has conducted “unofficial studies” over a couple NBA seasons with the Atlanta Hawks that affirmed a relationship between slower eye movements and sustained physical injuries. “They had several players who as soon as these markers showed up, soon after that they got injured. And so we want to be able to predict when somebody is at risk for decreased performance or potential injury,” he says.
The Hawks and Wizards have also worked with NeuroSync to deploy eye-tracking tests on college prospects before the NBA Draft, to assess their cognitive abilities. The process served a similar role to the Wonderlic Test used for scouting evaluation in the NFL.
“We screened 60-plus [NBA] draft prospects and then ranked them according to risk,” Anderson told SportTechie. “We identified the high performers and those we thought were risky investments.”
Devices from Kinexon and Catapult are among the most used wearables in NBA and college basketball for load management, and the NBA is also testing Nextiles’ sensors in apparel. Pro-Sync’s cognitive function assessments would provide a complementary perspective for evaluating athletes whose schedules include cross country flights and games in different time zones.
“We have data from NBA players before they went on a five day road trip, in the middle of that road trip, and when they get home from that road trip,” Anderson says. “And the difference in their cognitive abilities at those three time points is remarkable. They’re trashed when they get home, and nobody knows it.”
Pro-Sync’s software roadmap for 2023 includes adding training protocols for athletes to practice improving their cognitive deficits in virtual reality. NeuroSync has more than 20 sports teams in the NBA and college football, including its league-wide deal with the Pac-12, but it’s been a few years since the company announced a new team partner as teams don’t want to publicize a potential competitive advantage.
While NeuroSync’s Eye-Sync concussion product is a registered medical device with FDA approval, Pro-Sync is considered a nonmedical device and thus not seeking those certificates. What began as a “passion project” for Anderson, he now thinks is on the precipice of changing the way sports view fatigue and cognitive function.
“I think it’s the next frontier. I wrote an article about it for Leaders in Performance in 2016, talking about the potential to measure real time brain performance, how it could change sport,” Anderson says. “I’ve been obsessed with it ever since.”
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.
Sports teams and organisations have spent the best part of a decade collecting data on athlete performance, but what does the next decade hold? Zone7 believe that the answer lies in making sense of it all. In fact, they refer to this as sport’s next ‘arm’s race’. This is just one of the themes touched upon in this Special Report, which is brought to you by our Partners at Zone7.
Complete this form to access your free copy of In The Zone, which delves into the growing sophistication behind data interpretation, the importance of openness and collaboration between stakeholders, particularly when addressing any reservations, and how data can transform the way business is done in the front offices of elite sport.
The American swimmer is working closely with Orreco and is witnessing first-hand how the company’s performance platform is deepening the understanding of female physiology in athletes and coaches alike.
Born in Pittsburgh and raised outside Detroit, Schmitt later starred on the University of Georgia swimming team where she was a four-time individual champion and leader in helping the Bulldogs win the 2013 NCAA national title.
Schmitt initially retired after the Rio Olympics in 2016, at which point she began pursuing a master’s degree in social work at Arizona State. She reduced to a part-time load when she began swimming again in 2018 and now is on track to graduate in May. Schmitt recently joined the Female Athlete team at Orreco and is an ambassador for its FitrWoman campaign.
On her medical history . . .
I was diagnosed anemic in 2010, and the only really cure for that, I was told, was on an IUD so that I would bleed less. That’s all I knew, and I was on an IUD for eight years. I came off of that into the end of 2018. I just wanted to see how my body reacted. The myth is that the only thing we really know about female health is that our body changes every seven years. So I figured that maybe my hormones have changed, and I wouldn’t bleed as much.
That was my thought process. Coming off of birth control essentially was—I mean, I didn’t know what exactly an IUD was—my only question was, ‘I want kids some day. Is this going to stop me from having kids?’ They were like, ‘No, as soon as you stop, you can have kids.’ I didn’t really realize the severity of the synthetic hormones and what it does to your body. So when I came off it, my body was adjusting to it for quite a few months because of the synthetic progesterone was being produced for those eight years, and now all of a sudden, my body’s trying to produce it.
On using Orreco’s platform. . .
I didn’t really know what was going on with my body, which is when I got connected with the USA Swimming Director of Sports Medicine, Keenan Robinson. He connected me with Dr Georgie [Bruinvels], and I have been working with her ever since. I was very involved. I talked with Georgie almost daily. I would be on mostly weekly calls with the whole team. It was like a team. We would talk just to check in, make sure everything’s going right.
For what was needed, we would have blood work. So going towards Olympic trials, from probably October of 2020 through May of 2021, I was going through a lot of health things, and they helped me through that. And by the end, when I was actually into full training again, I was getting blood tests every Monday to check on my cortisol levels to see how it was in response to training.
On applying her Orreco results to training . . .
We had a plan of nutrition, recovery and training. But on Mondays if that number came back extremely low, I would have to adjust the training for that day or for that week. That was a different type of challenge, I guess for my coach, Bob Bowman, in just adjusting that based on what the scientific numbers are. I love that about Orreco: everything is proven and scientific-based, and it’s not just opinion.
We needed that change because of my performance at a time. I wasn’t able to finish practices. I wasn’t able to do practices at the level that I needed to do them at. The whole Orreco team helped us through that process. And, I mean, it was kind of like hands up in the air. Bob and I don’t know any information on the female health side, so teach us what we can [learn] and what’s going to be beneficial. It ended up working—all of us working together—and results started improving. From where I was in March and April to where I was in Tokyo was a drastic difference, and I don’t think that we could have got there without the help.
On training men versus women . . .
I come from a mostly male training environment, and my mentality, which in that environment has gotten me a lot of success in sport, is, ‘Okay, put your head down, push through, you can get through it.’ But I think just now learning the difference between pushing through something, and getting the right help in this situation, is a big difference, but also the difference between men and women.
Why are we training females like males? And why is all the research on males when females and males are different people? How our bodies are made up is completely different. It’s critical to treat your body how it’s made up, understanding that [females] can use those hormones and the differences to their advantages, and they can be more powerful than what they already are.
On pairing training with monthly cycles . . .
We look at it as four phases in a female athlete, and yes, there’s different modalities that are ideal for them. But, at the end of the day, yes, we have our goals that we want to accomplish and adjusting to your needs and your period is not asking for less work. I’m still putting the same amount of work in, I just need to be more conscious and educated on ways that I can perform better. So whether that be nutrition, whether that be more recovery, whether that be more warm up—whatever that is for that day, I as an athlete have to be educated in that. But also, from a coach standpoint and pushing their athletes, I think there’s a lot of times where athletes are hard enough on their selves as it is. And they’re gonna want to do better week after week.
On other wellness monitoring . . .
I did use Sleeprate which [paired with] a disc under my bed. And when it first came out, I used Whoop. And then I started using it again at the end of my career. And still today I use those modalities just because it’s interesting to me to see how much our bodies can adjust, and even seeing between the different phases, the quality of sleep I have. It kind of affects my performance, not only in athletics, but in your everyday human interactions.
On now working for Orreco . . .
I’m very passionate about getting that education out just because I feel like I learned so much about it. And if I’m learning this—I’m a 30-year-old female and am just learning about my body—how many other females are going through the exact same thing? If we can get this information out to kids at a younger age, in high school and college, there’s a lot of obstacles that they will be able to avoid throughout their career and hopefully have a more successful career.
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.
The Irish startup PlayerStatData says that their app helps to provide a holistic picture of young player development in soccer.
During the pandemic pause on sports, however, Brett recognized an even greater deficiency in the player development infrastructure, so he pivoted his startup, PlayerStatData, to address the Under-13 through Under-19 population. The target user is currently academy directors and player development coordinators, but Brett says further iterations will likely suit coaches and the athletes themselves.
The PlayerStatData app, which launched in the US and Canada earlier this month, seeks to provide objective performance data culled from video analysis, physical test results, a centralized library of coaching assessments and, crucially, a monitoring system for psychological and socio-economic insights.
“We want to see be a solution for all and to be an all-encompassing solution as well, which means that we want to be accessible, affordable and available to all clubs at all youth levels across the US and Canada,” says Brett, the CEO and co-founder of the Waterford, Ireland-based company. “And we want to give them the full picture of a player’s development.”
Context is critical. Family backgrounds and finances all play a role in player progression, especially in the North American pay-to-play model with costly club and travel teams representing an important pathway. Teenagers’ mental health and perspectives need to be considered, too.
“Coaches have become a lot more open to psychological output because, especially with the age that we’re looking, 13 to 19, there’s a lot going on physically and mentally with them at that age,” Brett says. “There’s a lot of stuff to understand with them too. So that’s where we want to get the best advice, because it’s important to get that right.”
For that, Brett has turned to Laura Finnegan, a lecturer in sport management at South East Technological University in Waterford, as an advisor. Her master’s thesis was in sports psychology, and her Ph.D. dissertation studied the organizational structure of talent development in Irish soccer. Finnegan has done research work on behalf of Uefa and US Soccer as well.
“It’s valuable everywhere to be able to see the player in the round,” she says. That 360-degree view, which PlayerStatData will incorporate piecemeal in future updates, is a novel approach to a market that does have several digital scouting video platforms, GPS wearables and new sensors already. “I really think that’s what’s going to set them apart,” Finnegan adds.
Malcolm Gladwell detailed in his book Outliers that a disproportionate number of NHL players were born in the early months—January, February and March—because the Canadian youth program cutoffs were at the start of the year, thus favoring the slightly older kids. Finnegan has noted similar patterns in academies in the United Kingdom and thus advocates for delayed selection of players because many physical skills don’t manifest until after puberty.
“It’s all stacked with boys that are our early maturers, and in the early years, all born earlier towards the cutoff as well,” she says of the academies. “That was one example of something that we could layer in so that you’re not just necessarily comparing Boy A with Boy B, but actually, you’re comparing boys with someone of the same maturity status as him. You’re trying to be fairer for those kids. For me, it’s just adding an extra lens for coaches.”
PlayerStatData has done some early work with the academy of Waterford FC, which competes in the League of Ireland’s First Division, and has attracted some early clients overseas such as Ottawa University Arizona, a nationally ranked NAIA program. PlayerStatData also sponsored a local Under-14 tournament where it did analysis for the participating teams, which included a team from the Blackburn Rovers, whose first team is one rung below the Premier League. Brett envisions a platform that’s truly customizable so that users can meet their needs no matter the staffing and resources.
“What’s useful is we did some bespoke design,” says Waterford FC academy director Mike Geoghegan. “So Colin sits down and asked me, what information am I looking for? What’s the sort of things that I want to track as a head coach? Because it may not be the same for every head of academy.”
For now, the PlayerStatData staff manually tags video and collects data, but computer vision algorithms developed in conjunction with professors at the local university are being developed. Brett wants that process automated within 18 months so that coaches only need to upload video into the app. “We want to get into a situation where it’s drag, drop, collect, and pick up the reports,” he says.
The Waterford academy, for instance, is staffed by part-time coaches who don’t always have the time to “extract and properly manage the data and draw insights from that data,” Geoghegan adds. “So I’m saying, I’ve got lots of recordings, lots of football, lots of coaches, but I’m not really getting this information in any way because it’s no one’s job.”
Brett sees the US and Canadian soccer systems as needing a tool like his to eliminate subjective coaching bias; the volume of players and vastness of geography make it hard for objective monitoring.
“It’s a bit of a wild west when it comes to pay-to-play and the sheer size of the market,” he says, adding: “There’s an openness to data, there’s an openness to finding that edge, it’s an openness to use a couple of innovations to get ahead, be that as a club or be as a player.”
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.
Players can train technical elements in the comfort of their own homes and receive instant feedback on their execution.
Tennis legend Martina Navratilova has signed on as an advisor to Sense Arena after seeing a demo and calling it “about as realistic as you can get without actually hitting the tennis ball.”
Founded in Prague by Bob Tetiva—whose father, Jaroslav, was a member of the 1952 and 1960 Olympic basketball teams for the former Czechoslovakia—Sense Arena is a partner of 30 pro hockey teams, including the Los Angeles Kings, New Jersey Devils and Vegas Golden Knights among its five NHL clients. It has begun accepting pre-orders for its tennis product, which costs $300 for a yearlong subscription and, for a limited time, includes a free haptic racquet.
“You don’t have time in any sport to think, you just have to react,” says Tetiva, the CEO. “And to learn that, you can either play hundreds and thousands of matches in hockey or tennis, which will be very exhausting for your body or—here comes the beauty of virtual reality—we can throw you in the same environment in the first person to a controlled place where it’s actually only about you.”
The company, which has North American offices near Boston, Toronto and now Tampa, has raised $3 million earlier this year and $5.2 million in total, with participation from the Boston Bruins’ top scorer, David Pastrňák.
Available now on Meta Quest 2 and soon to be expanded to other VR providers, Sense Arena’s tennis software is currently usable as a one-person training tool, with multiplayer capability likely for the future as well as other updates, including the ability to practice serves and a pro-level strategy feature.
Users hold the proprietary racquet—which houses a Quest controller and vibrates when a player makes contact with a virtual tennis ball—and can replicate shots and volleys as well as engage in other cognitive drills.
“Forehand, backhand, it’s all about reaction, and it’s about repetition,” Navratilova says. “And then you get [to see] what the end result is, so you can fix it. The ball tells you what you did wrong. So you get that immediate feedback in the safety of your home.”
Navratilova has suggested some tennis drills to be incorporated and, even after her first product demo, recommended the inclusion of a pause button to help players visualize the angles of shots better. “Immediately she was intuitive giving us feedback on the existing product,” Tetiva says.
Tetiva plans to market the product to both elite teams—colleges, academies and the like—as well as individual players. B2C is likely to be the predominant sector because of its sheer size, he says, “but the credibility is built through the top tier of tennis.”
Yannick Yoshizawa, a former college player at South Florida who worked nearly nine years at the WTA, was hired to lead the tennis business at Sense Arena. The three main pillars of the sport, he says, are physical, technical and mental training. Physical and technical are more easily isolated in practice, but he has bought in to the potential of VR to train the mental component.
That was the early thesis of Tetiva when he began developing a hockey program. He had played some pro basketball in the Czech Republic before entering the IT industry when his son began showing interest in hockey. Sports training has evolved considerably in almost areas, he realized, with a notable exception.
“One piece is kind of neglected, and that’s your brain,” he says, “which actually controls everything.”
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.
