The question is on the mind of Jeremy Bettle, the Performance Director at New York City FC, who won the MLS Cup in December last year, when the Leaders Performance Institute and Dave Slemen and Anna Edwards of Elite Performance Partners [EPP] sat down with him to discuss the steps performance directors can take to become better leaders.
Joining Bettle in conversation are Darren Burgess, the High Performance Manager of the Adelaide Crows who also leads EPP’s search offering in Australia, and James Thomas, the Performance Director at British Gymnastics. The trio work in three different sports and geographies, with systems and structures that vary in their approach, but each brings a sense of vulnerability, self-awareness, and an understanding of the importance of the culture and context they are working within. Their leadership capabilities bind together a great strategy and strong culture, which is essential if teams and organisations are to retain their shape when pressure is applied. Of the expectations and pressure now thrust upon NYCFC, Bettle says: “It’s certainly going to be something new for our club this year.”
Bettle, Burgess and Thomas all have a deep desire to keep learning, which has driven them to the top of their fields and each played a part in a series of ‘firsts’ in 2021. NYCFC’s MLS Cup triumph was the club’s first, while Burgess was serving as Performance Manager of the Melbourne Demons when they won their first AFL Grand Final in 57 years. Also, under Thomas’ stewardship, Great Britain won their first Olympic medal in the women’s gymnastics team event for 93 years.
Thomas tackles the question of pressure from the athletes’ perspective. “It’s been the biggest risk or success factor of the last four years,” he says. “When we look at our gymnasts, they’re phenomenal athletes. They have the ability to execute phenomenal technical skills and they can do it day-in and day-out in the training environment. Where I see the athletes either struggle or excel is that ability to step into a competition environment and deliver it there. With every sport, you’ve got great examples of people who can do it either in a one-off or can do it repeatedly, or they can do it in training and they can’t do it in competition.
“We’ve actually put a lot of time and resource into different pressure environments whether it’s changing training set-ups, whether it’s manipulating timings just to put athletes under more pressure, less warm-up, less time between apparatus, we’ve brought in surprise friends and family to come on the balcony and watch and cheer. We try to exhaust almost all of our coaches and psychologists’ views of manipulating the training environment.” Nevertheless, as Thomas admits, “you can never quite replicate the actual competition environment.”
Burgess, who last year won the AFL Grand Final with Melbourne and previously worked in the English Premier League with Liverpool and Arsenal, finds the same applies to professional team sports. “It’s very hard to simulate pressure, especially with games happening every three or four days in the Premier League, particularly when you’re also competing in European competitions.”
His mind goes back to the two-week period in September before Melbourne took on the Western Bulldogs in the AFL Grand Final. The consensus amongst the fans and media was that Melbourne had the better team but were undermined by the fact that their route through the playoffs meant that they had played one game in 28 days.
“We decided to take the high risk of playing a match simulation,” says Burgess. “It probably cost us a couple of players who were on the fringe of being selected, but in the end, that was how we decided to simulate that pressure as much as we could. We had umpires in, full mouth guards, so it was part of our thought process to try and simulate that as much as we could. We even built up a bit of a rivalry between the ‘possibles’ and ‘probables’ and tried to manufacture that so that the ‘possibles’ put up a good fight.”
Bettle approves of such approaches. “I’m a big believer in exposing people to pressure versus shielding them from it,” he says. “I think there can be a balance there but you’ve got to get used to pressure and have strategies to deal with it. I’m a big believer in process and having done it before; and trying to make these environments a lot more automatic.”
He recalls his time working at the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets between 2011 and 2015 when there were few opportunities to generate pressure because the games came thick and fast. He was struck by the veteran players. “They show very little emotion win, lose or draw. I think because it’s so automatic to them, it really helps them to perform on a nightly basis.” By contrast, however, New York City practised penalties as they progressed through the MLS Playoffs. “Having the guys line up on halfway and having them walk out on their own; and because they’ve gone through it over and over and over again, when we actually get into the scenario, which we did twice in the playoffs, it just felt more normal to us. The guys executed it excellently when it came to it and maybe it helped, maybe it didn’t, but it made me feel better about it anyway!”
The approach is far from universal in soccer, as Slemen points out. Penalties are one of the few closed skills in football that can be practised but the prevailing culture has often been reluctant.
Bettle and New York City Head Coach Ronny Deila also tried to factor an element of fun into the team’s progression through the season and post-season. Though he has often been sceptical of organised fun in a team context, he explains that Deila’s decision to organise team dinners reaped dividends.
“I think the coach did a great job this year of recognising that our team didn’t do well when they didn’t have an opportunity to relax,” says Bettle. “So we started doing team dinners when we go on the road, on match day minus two. They’d have a glass of wine, and we’d have just a really fun night out that felt authentic and not forced. Giving the players an opportunity to enjoy it and not be so disciplined was a bit of a departure from my mindset, but I’ve come to recognise it’s been one of the most valuable things that we did last year, to put a focus on joy and fun and enjoying the experience. I think building that environment, recognising who your players are and how they’re going to respond versus having some really rigid thoughts around ‘this isn’t high performance, we can’t drink wine two days before a game’ it actually helped us.”
Much like in soccer or basketball, Thomas explains that in gymnastics the success of any rituals largely depends on the skill of the coach. He says: “Where I probably see the magic happen it’s been where coaches have managed to really understand the team and the group of athletes they’ve got, where they’re positioned.
“For the men’s gymnastics team, it was very clear in the build-up to Tokyo, they were probably fourth or fifth in the world, and it was very cleverly done by our coach to position them as the underdogs that were going to create the big upset rather than ‘we can’t achieve that’ or ‘we’re world No 1’. It was ‘let’s go on the hunt’. They really put this mindset into the gymnasts that this final 12-week prep was really just about closing the gap. You could see every day that the gymnasts came in with the bit between their teeth about closing the gap. It wasn’t necessarily about winning the medal, it was about ‘how do we get as close as we possibly can?’
“There was a sense of realism, a sense of togetherness towards something and it really pulled them together. It did feel like a team and the feedback that we had from some of the gymnasts who had been to multiple games, said it was the best team environment because they had a really clear purpose and it was really cleverly orchestrated by the coach. That’s where I’ve seen it work its best, through the coach, with a little bit of a framework of what they’re working towards and that purpose.”
Thomas has witnessed scenarios where the use of rituals does not work and puts it down to authenticity, which chimes with Burgess’ views on the matter. “It’s a really risky practice if there’s not authenticity about the ritual, the practice or the theme,” he says. “If there’s not complete buy-in, then you really are in trouble. Let’s say, for example, that your ritual, your belief is ‘selflessness’ and you want everybody to act selflessly throughout everything, the minute that your star No 10 player decides to miss a training session or turn up late or act selfishly in some way, are you going to drop that player? You have to stick to it and then it becomes part of your team’s identity and everybody respects that. Yes, it can work, but it has to work in the right environment and I’ve seen both.”
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“I experienced it first-hand as a practitioner,” Rich Buchanan tells the Leaders Performance Institute, having previously worked behind the scenes at Swansea City FC, the Wales FA, and other organizations. “The people tasked with making sense out of assorted data are under immense pressure to interpret information every single day for every single player throughout an entire season. The weight of delivering ROI lies in their hands.”
Buchanan, who has also worked for organizations in the US and continental Europe, is now the Performance Director at Zone7. The company’s artificial intelligence [AI] system is being used by a growing number of top-tier sports outfits as they look to convert data collection into actionable insights for higher levels of athlete performance and availability.
“If you have one person undertaking manual analysis and interpretation, it is difficult, if not impossible, to do that consistently well over the course of a campaign,” he continues. “Just as we’ve seen in other industries, I believe AI will play an increasingly important role in helping professionals identify complex risk patterns from an athlete’s data that would otherwise be invisible to the human eye.”
How does data fatigue manifest? “Typically, sports scientists or fitness coaches are the ones tasked with monitoring players using data-generating tools, like GPS or biometric wearables,” says Buchanan. “Many of these professionals, however, are not data specialists by trade. They are generally sports practitioners whose expertise is better served in athlete-facing environments – on a pitch, in a gym, etc. – where they work directly with athletes in a practical manner.”
“Right now, the conventional norm for making sense of athlete performance data in sport requires significant time commitment to examine large datasets. It is a laborious manual analysis and interpretation process, one which often runs counter to why these professionals embarked on a career in sport in the first place. As a result, disenchantment becomes quickly apparent and you see signs of data fatigue setting in as they’re pressured to deliver meaningful insights that can then be practically applied.
“Even now, as many organizations employ data science personnel, it’s not humanly possible to do this kind of manual analysis and interpretation effectively and consistently for multiple athletes over the course of a season. Combined with the frequency and complexity of new datasets becoming available, the manual approach often results in flawed insights that reduce the value that organizations receive from investments in data collection tools.”
Buchanan works closely with Tal Brown, CEO and Co-Founder of Zone7, whose extensive background in creating and deploying AI technology with the likes of Salesforce and Oracle has allowed him to witness data fatigue first-hand.
“The need to find accurate solutions for harmonizing, analyzing, and interpreting such large volumes of data has never been clearer,” says Brown. “I’ve spent much of my career creating intelligent tools that minimize data fatigue while creating more efficient data analysis processes. This is now becoming a significant challenge for decision makers in sport, especially as they’re tasked with validating and correctly interpreting data from a growing array of different sources. It’s not just game and competition data, we’re also seeing increased amounts of medical, strength & conditioning, sleep and general wellbeing data generated by wearable technologies.”
The scenario of data fatigue described by Buchanan is not uncommon and Zone7 is aware of the vital need to adopt a ‘practitioner’s lens,’ continues Brown. “Tech innovation and evolution is driven by the need to answer harder questions in more efficient and reliable ways. You need to collaborate with practitioners and ultimately provide the insights that add value in their specific environments.”
One such practitioner is Javier Vidal, a Performance Coach with Spanish La Liga club Valencia CF. Vidal has used Zone7 in a number of different team environments. “Zone7 is a tool I’ve used for several years,” said Vidal. “Its AI has allowed me to adapt my day-to-day routine and get more value of out new data generating technologies that are arising all the time.
Zone7 has been deployed and operated real time by Vidal at Valencia CF since the start of the 21/22 season and the number of confirmed injuries has dropped by 52% compared to the previous season. This closely resembles results during his tenure in Getafe another La Liga team, where Vidal saw a drop of 70%, with a 65% reduction in days that first-team players were lost due to injury. “It would be the work of many people analyzing data all day to gain such useful information, but with Zone7 I get accurate, usable information within minutes that I can immediately put into practice.”
Buchanan adds that, in the case of forecasting injury risk, AI can also take a complex, multifaceted problem and present it in an easy-to-understand way. “At the top line, Zone7 presents ‘athletes at high, medium, or low risk. On top of that, it presents potential actionable solutions, such as, ‘do more or less in this specific area than you originally intended.”
Multifaceted problems also create greater risk of blind spots emerging in athlete monitoring. In this case, the relationship between classic sports performance data streams such as external workload, strength and internal workload, and ‘next gen’ of data points such as heartrate variability [HRV] and biomarkers monitoring stress, sleep or diet presents a margin for error. “We can create visibility into how those nodes interact in the day-to-day environment,” says Brown. “More data allows us to calibrate tools that can understand those relationships. Traditional spreadsheet-like tools just don’t offer that functionality.”
One of the missions driving Zone7 is to give practitioners a sense of security at moments when they are under significant pressure to deliver. “One of the hardest parts of a coach, analyst, or performance specialist’s job is giving definitive advice on decisions made around athletes,” says Buchanan. “The number of times these professionals are tasked with doing this under pressure from all directions, with only their own subjective opinion to draw upon, is concerning. Equipping medical, fitness or coaching professionals with the objectivity that AI provides, driven by complex computations, creates more certainty and a stronger case for the advice they provide in that scenario.”
“Humans, by nature, already have in-built biases,” Buchanan continues. “We already have opinions about certain athletes; who’s robust and who’s not robust, who’s likely to report muscle tightness, etc. Now, if Zone7 corroborates those opinions, it assures the user. If what Zone7 suggests turns out to be true, then the trust builds. When we suggest something that’s counterintuitive, people may find that uncomfortable because it’s challenging preconceived beliefs. But I would say, in a way, that’s the true value-add that Zone7 brings, highlighting those blind spots. We’re there to make sure those players, and the opportunities to pre-emptively intervene, don’t slip through the net.”
Brown and Buchanan are excited about the opportunities that lie ahead for data science in professional sports, whether that be 360-degree support for any interaction a player has related to performance, the possibility for longitudinal injury risk profiling, or the ability to support practitioner across a variety of different sports, each with their own cadences. The latter is already underway, with Zone7 being actively applied across American football, basketball, baseball, and rugby, in addition to extensive work in soccer.
Zone7 will also continue to challenge accepted wisdoms. “Regardless of the value individual practitioners and sports organizations place on data to manage athletes/players, the industry has been heavily reliant on simplistic data analysis and interpretation for a number of years and, quite simply, there’s now a more refined way of doing it,” says Buchanan. “Using AI to simulate different training load scenarios with the aim of physically peaking on certain days on the training cycle is just around the corner. “This is where people can get very precise on how they prepare their players or athletes for future events, rather than best guess periodization models.”
“Ultimately, future sporting success belongs to those who leverage their data in the most efficient, effective and accurate manner. We’re here, primed and ready to help practitioners in sport do just that.”
To connect with Zone7 directly, please email [email protected]
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The insight is provided by Steve Gera, a former US Marine, NFL coach and Co-Founder of Gains Group, in his role as moderator of this Keiser Webinar titled Data Decision Making in a High Performance Environment. He continues: “[Kelly said:] ‘That information is completely true but I cannot do anything with it.’”
While coaching reactions such as Kelly’s are common across sport, they are not inevitable. Joining Gera to explore the question of data’s role in the decision-making process were Kate Weiss, the Director of Sports Science at the Seattle Mariners of MLB, and Jordan Ott, Assistant Coach with the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets.
Weiss, who joined Seattle from the LA Dodgers last year, explained that datasets are increasingly prominent in the performance questions the club is seeking to answer. Ott, who has been in New York for six seasons, is part of a team that uses data to inform its decision-making as the franchise continues to evolve.
Here are the ten key considerations to emerge from the discussion.
1. Data can inform your athlete development plans
Weiss explains that Mariners draftees are provided with a personalised, holistic player development plan that is shaped by each practitioner and hones in on specific aspects of their development and how progress will be tracked. “That’s why that initial planning phase, that goal-setting phase, is really critical for us because that’s what sets up the tracking plan. ‘OK, if these are our goals, we’re going to measure this, this and this,” says Weiss. “Knowing what we’re trying to develop makes it a lot simpler to come up with a plan for what to measure and the frequency of the testing.”
2. Relationships are a source of ‘soft’ data
“That’s where it starts and ends,” says Ott of those conversations he and his colleagues have with Brooklyn’s players. “The coaching side to it is that you do have to develop a relationship with the player.” It resembles a partnership and, as Gera points out, it is important to find out information that the numbers cannot tell you or to ask athletes what they feel are their strengths and weaknesses. Ott adds: “We’re trying to maximise each player’s strength so it’s less about what we want as a coaching staff, it’s more about maximising the strengths of the personnel that we have and it’s about us being flexible.”
3. Disseminating data insights
In addition to clubhouse meetings, the Mariners, as Weiss explains, ensure that their data insights are delivered in both written and visual form. “We actually have a team of people to help develop the reports in-house,” she says. “Ahead of new report development, we’re all meeting together as staff to discuss the pieces of information that are most helpful in that day to day decision making, as well as on longer time horizons. We do a very good job of tailoring it to the key stakeholders, including players, making sure the information is clear, straightforward and easy to understand and addressing questions it leads us as a group to come up with.”
4. Using data to inform testing protocols
Gera says that the ‘Holy Grail’ is taking data and linking it to specific tests that track athletic development. Weiss walks through a hypothetical process with a Mariners pitcher. “When they come in, we’re going to test range of motion, we’re going to test movement capacity; how are they going to move in a general sense and a baseball-specific sense,” she says. “We’re going to look at the different components of strength, speed, power, we’re going to look at body composition. All these different things that we know contribute to and help support what they do on the field. Then what we’re going to do is look at the on-field data and link that back and go ‘OK, maybe there’s issues with their shoulder separation on the mound.’ We’re going to look through everything and go ‘OK, is it coming from a range of motion issue? Is it coming from just a movement capacity issue?’ Or if it’s not those things maybe it’s just a coaching issue that we have to work on and come up with specific drills.”
5. Balancing long-term and short-term goals through data
There is a need in sport to balance game to game player development with the need to develop a player to a certain point in the future. The balance between tactics and strategy, as Gera puts it. Ott says that while it is hard to measure development game to game, long-term athletic development can have a knock-on effect on skill development. “I have one guy who’s a really good shooter, so obviously the shooting piece is important, but what he really improved was his ability to get directly to the basket. He’s not just a shooter, he’s a driver and a shooter and it’s opened up the avenue to him having a longer career, in my opinion.”
6. Data-informed markers for scouts
The Mariners are better-placed than ever to provide detailed briefs to scouts. “With HP data, we can provide more colour and that helps you to discern between two players that may play very similarly on field. With this data, you can make a more informed decision about who is the better option,” says Weiss. “For us, understanding what types of players we’re looking for, the specific qualities we’re looking for on the field, and then providing education from that general athleticism standpoint or an injury standpoint.” The benefit is clear: “You can start to put together recommendations that help the scouting process from the other side as well.”
7. Using data to assess risk factors
Whether it is a draft pick or a free agent, data can inform the levels of risk a team is willing to take when building their roster. “In the first three or four years we were taking young guys that maybe physically had to grow,” says Ott, referring to the Nets’ initial rebuild under General Manager Sean Marks. “We’d take a younger guy that physically wasn’t ready but had good character and knew that would work. We’d bet on that person.” Having signed a series of high calibre free agents, there has been a shift in the team’s thinking. “A big key to where we’re willing to bet now are guys that have defined skillsets that would fit with our superstars and how to make our elite players more elite, and how we fit those guys in that can help those three guys is the challenge we took on last summer.”
8. Data as a driving force of research & development
“In game,” says Weiss, “we know that if we adjust launch angle that can improve the hitter’s ability to hit it out of the park. We can think that if we want to focus on launch angle and we’ve seen these trends, how are we optimising drill selection? What are we doing from a strength & conditioning standpoint? Are there ties to other components as well? And by exploring those things it helps us to come up with a new way of training and developing and creating drill sets for players. Or maybe it’s the implement itself. Going through, looking at what’s changing and how that’s making a big difference and what’s tied to that is how we’re thinking long term.”
9. Innovation can emerge from a single dataset
As Joe Shulberg, a coach at English Premier League club Norwich City points out in a question submitted to Weiss and Ott, we may think that innovation comes out of the blue, but it’s often a datapoint that influenced an idea. Ott concurs, adding: “The thing about basketball is that it’s so interconnected, so what we’re doing offensively affects us defensively. Maybe something we’re doing offensively is hurting us defensively and if the net benefit is not good enough then we have to learn to adjust how we’re coaching the team.” Ott highlights the reluctance of officials to give free throws in the current NBA and Gera ponders a hypothetical future where the GMs of the league request bigger, stronger and faster players as a consequence.
10. Data has its limits
Ott and Weiss touch upon the general limitations in data collection in the major leagues, but current datasets have very little to tell us about mindset, game intelligence, self-sufficiency, motivation or leadership potential. “There’s no magical test out there, no magical number, no psycho-graphic test,” says Gera. “The teams and organisations I’ve seen do it the absolute best typically mimic what the FBI, Special Operations and those folks do. They have intelligence units that go out and gather massive amounts of soft data and information and process that into a decision-making matrix that helps them find if that person is a red-line risk or whether or not a person has some of the soft traits you can actually mould.”
Kate Weiss of the Seattle Mariners and Jordan Ott of the Brooklyn Nets discuss their teams’ complex relationships with datasets and how they inform their work on a collective and individual level.
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The insight is provided by Steve Gera, a former US Marine, NFL coach and Co-Founder of Gains Group, in his role as moderator of this Keiser Webinar. “[Kelly said:] ‘That information is completely true but I cannot do anything with it.’”
While coaching reactions such as Kelly’s are common across sport, they are not inevitable. Joining Gera to explore the question of data’s role in the decision-making process were Kate Weiss, the Director of Sports Science at the Seattle Mariners of MLB, and Jordan Ott, Assistant Coach with the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets.
Weiss, who joined Seattle from the LA Dodgers last year, explains that datasets are increasingly prominent in the performance questions the club is seeking to answer. Ott, who has been in New York for six seasons, is part of a team that uses data to inform its decision-making as the franchise continues to evolve.
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Notwithstanding my bias, it is important to remember that it is in fact nutrition that provides the basis of all human performance. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that in my conversations with leading performance directors from around the world, I often comment that nutrition should be one of the first and most important hires for anyone leading a new performance programme.
I am going to explain why.
Why nutrient intake impacts performance
Where once our focus was solely on ensuring sufficient muscle fuel stores, it is now accepted that what we eat before, during and after every single training session has the capacity to drastically alter our whole-body physiology, affecting tissues and organs over and above that of skeletal muscle. For example, the timing, type and quantity of both macronutrients (i.e. carbohydrate, fats and proteins) and micronutrients (i.e. vitamins and minerals), alongside total body water content (i.e. hydration status), can all affect the daily function of our brains, gut, kidney, liver, immune system, bones, tendons, ligaments and so on. When considered this way, the importance of nutrition extends far beyond that of body composition or fuelling for game day. Rather, our daily nutrient intake affects our ability to make decisions, execute physical actions and technical skills, withstand mechanical load, fight infection, maintain training volume, promote sleep, reduce injury risk and so on.
From a human performance perspective, a poorly fuelled athlete is therefore likely to suffer from poor sleep quality, exhibit increased incidence of injury and illness and display impaired growth, maturation and recovery, all of which can manifest in your star player apparently suffering from a lack of responsiveness to training and a loss of form. It is through this lens that it is no exaggeration to say that I have witnessed transformations in athletes’ careers and longevity within their sport once they have embraced the principles of a performance approach to nutrition. From the performance director’s perspective, the hiring of a highly skilled performance nutritionist could thus be viewed as one of the shrewdest returns of investment across the organisation. For without one, the other key members of the ‘orchestra’ are unlikely to get the best from their athlete.
The limitations of the ‘consultant’ model
The practical delivery of performance nutrition has evolved considerably throughout the last decade. In the historical service model, sports typically employed an expert ‘consultant’, usually based on their academic and/or practical experiences. Despite the expert knowledge that a carefully chosen consultant can bring to the performance programme, the consultancy model has obvious limitations in that ‘face time’ is typically restricted to one or two days per week. In such instances, the consultant often spends their time in setting up generic team-wide systems and protocols (e.g. fuelling, recovery, body composition protocols etc), upskilling the knowledge base of existing staff to support practical day-to-day delivery, as well as managing specific athlete case histories. However, in considering my reflections from this model, I am not convinced that this type of approach yields the cultural change or attention to detail that is required to truly support the delivery of a high-performance service. Indeed, in many situations, the consultant may be responsible for the remit of improving performance in excess of 100 athletes, a task that clearly conflicts with the concept of creating and delivering highly individualised and multidisciplinary athlete performance plans.
The triangulation of practitioners, academia and the sports industry
Fortunately, with the increased recognition from both head coaches and performance support staff on the role of nutrition in supporting performance, the landscape of nutrition delivery is changing. This is especially prevalent across the UK and Europe and is beginning to be adopted across the big leagues of the US. As an example, most soccer clubs within the English Premier League now employ a full-time professionally accredited nutritionist to operate at first team level as well as an additional full-time head to focus on nutrition to the academy players. Such individuals typically travel home and away to ensure that nutrition delivery occurs at the heart of where and when it matters. In some situations, the nutrition programme is also supported by formal collaborations with academic institutions so that academic experts can also inform the creation of an evidence-based programme, the nature of which may extend to the integration of PhD practitioner-based researchers within the club. Given the requirement to adopt a safe supplement programme, a fully integrated partnership with a sports supplement provider specialising in banned substance testing is also an essential ingredient of an elite performance nutrition programme. Upon reflection, it is this triangulation of practitioners, academia and industry that could now be considered a model of best practice, one that can be dynamic and responsive to change as the performance questions arising on the front line are posed thick and fast.
Integrated performance nutrition
The increased appreciation from head coaches and performance directors on the performance effects of sound nutrition is particularly pleasing to see. In the 2020 Uefa consensus statement on nutrition for football, former Arsenal Manager Arsène Wenger, who currently serves as Fifa’s Chief of Global Football Development, contributed an accompanying editorial where he argued the case for nutrition to be integrated within a performance team’s activities. ‘It should be a fundamental part of the team’s performance and/or medical meetings, where the priorities for each individual player are discussed in detail’, he wrote. ‘When nutrition—like any other element of sports science—exists in a silo, answering only the questions or interests of a single practitioner (i.e. the nutritionist, him or herself), it is detrimental to the team.’
This integrated performance approach that Wenger calls for certainly resonates with how we approached Performance Nutrition during the four seasons I spent as Nutrition and Physical Performance Lead at Team Sky. When Chris Froome pulled back 3 minutes 22 seconds on Stage 19 of the 2018 Giro d’Italia to win his third consecutive Grand Tour, I knew our programme was in a good place. “Today was about fuelling, today was about making sure you can fuel a ride like that all the way to the end,” Sky’s Team Principal Sir Dave Brailsford told the media in the aftermath. “It’s fundamental really, so all staff, myself included, have been out at the side of the road putting together a fuelling plan for him so that he would absolutely not miss a beat, because that’s basically the game changer.” In the years to follow, the team (now known as the Ineos Grenadiers) have since employed three full-time performance nutritionists (two of whom are integrated practitioners from the Science in Sport Performance Solutions team) alongside three full-time performance chefs. There is consistency, clarity and a performance-focused approach across all training camps and races.
Athletes are starting to ‘see’ nutrition
As a result of this increasingly adopted integrated and full-time staffing model, athletes and staff are now ‘seeing nutrition’ on a daily basis. The role of the nutritionist is now considered much more important than the mere organisation of food services at both home and away games. It is no longer a consultant who appears and disappears in the flash of an eye. The nutritionist now sits at the top table, having visible dialogue with the most influential decision makers in the organisation. The culture is changing.
From both a theoretical and practical perspective, perhaps the biggest leap we have made is in the recognition that nutritional needs are not static. In the same manor that physical load and performance objectives are periodised across the micro- and macro-cycles at both team and individual athlete level, nutrition should subsequently follow suit. It should no longer be a one-size-fits-all approach where every day is the same. Rather, the entire performance team and athlete roster should recognise that nutritional needs will change between and within each individual depending on the development and performance goals at any given time. Every meal should be carefully considered because it can impact the work of the whole performance team.
In this regard, the remit of the nutritionist has developed to be the:
“Strategic periodisation of energy, macro- and micronutrient availability (alongside targeted use of supplements and ergogenic aids) to improve body composition, training adaptations, performance, recovery and athlete health.”
The outcomes of such an approach will produce an athlete who is ready to win consistently.
This article first appeared in our latest Performance Special Report – Winning With Nutrition
Long relegated to the side lines, nutrition is finally getting the attention it deserves when it comes to helping athletes achieve peak performance. Download Winning With Nutrition, produced in partnership with Science in Sport and featuring NBA champions the Milwaukee Bucks, the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and English Premier League club Aston Aston Villa.
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Though it might seem like an obvious question, there is not always a consensus within a team or organisation, and even where there is a consensus, astute organisations will seek to continually iterate definitions that everyone in the building can support.
When the Carolina Panthers appointed Tish Guerin as the NFL’s first Director of Player Wellness in September 2018, their aim was to ensure that wellness was built into their team environment.
“Are we making sure that we’re building a culture that subscribes to making sure we’re all in good mental health?” asked Guerin when she spoke at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit in Charlotte in February 2020.
Guerin, who has since departed her role, was firmly at the intersection of mental wellbeing, resilience and training. Elite sport continues to promote wellbeing, it remains at the heart of the discourse, but there is a sense amongst Leaders Performance Institute members that teams can be doing more to promote wellbeing at an organisational level.
The Australian Football League [AFL] took a step in the right direction in 2019 with the publication of its first Mental Health Framework, which views mental wellbeing as the cornerstone of general wellness.
The Leaders Performance Institute discussed the topic with Kate Hall, the AFL’s Head of Mental Health, in 2020, when she spoke of the work being done behind the scenes for their women’s league [ALFW].
“We put together a best practice guide for our player development managers,” said Hall. “They’re a designated development role and they’re not for the development of craft or any on-field aspect. It’s all about the growth of the individual athlete.”
The guide has not just been lifted wholesale from the men’s game either. Hall added: “What we didn’t want to do was just repurpose the pillars of player development that are used in the men’s competition because it’s a very different journey as an athlete and the competition’s very different in terms of it being a part-time competition. After extensive research, we worked with the players and the player development managers to develop a best practice guide to outline pillars of how you should lead player development in the women’s competition. Essentially the things you should focus on when you’re growing the whole person, not just an athlete on the field.”
This encompasses the earlier stages of the talent pathway too. “Our designated wellbeing coordinators are working with our under-18s, who are hoping to be drafted this year. They articulate a curriculum for our young players that illustrates the mechanisms, tools and strategies they can use to build their mental fitness. That’s quite explicit, we measure at baseline on these types of qualities and we measure them at the end of their talent year as well.
“Our concept of mental fitness is get in early. The sooner you get in and empower young athletes to really grow in this space, then their demanding this of their coaching staff and leaders within their club.”
‘Getting in early’ characterises the approach of Zach Brandon, the Mental Skills Coordinator at Major League Baseball’s Arizona Diamondbacks. “Building a robust, systematic, and preventative approach to employee wellness requires that leaders address policies, practices, and perspectives in their organizational culture,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in August.
“Perspective begins with organizational values and addressing if, and how, employee wellbeing is prioritized in the culture. This requires that leaders and staff be intentional and progressive with their language surrounding mental health.”
Brandon added that leaders play a pivotal role in showing that self-care is not selfish. On that note, Gareth Southgate, the Head Coach of the England men’s football team, has set that example to his players.
“What I recognise about myself is that if I feel in a good place, that my own wellbeing is in a good place in terms of sleep, exercise, then in actual fact I feel stronger to take those things on and less affected by it,” he told the Leaders Performance Institute in June. “If I’m not sleeping well and I’ve been travelling a lot, if I’m rundown, I’m not physically in as good a place, I find that can affect my mood a little bit more and then I’ve got to be careful with my decision making.
“I’m very aware of my own personal state and [I am] able to control that and react to that a little bit more and put things into perspective better as I get older.”
The hope is that it will rub off on England’s players and support staff. At the Diamondbacks, Brandon advocates a similar approach. He said: “In reality, supporting wellbeing and resilience for your employees is really a competitive advantage, especially with the ever-increasing uncertainty and complexity found in work environments, which often lead to stress. Leaders should aim to install comprehensive prevention strategies within their organizations rather than rely on reactive support as issues arise.”
Both Brandon and Southgate spoke of the notion that wellbeing goes beyond the mental and it was a point picked up by Tom Patrick of the Royal Australian Air Force [RAAF] during a Case Study Members Virtual Roundtable in August.
Patrick, the RAAF’s Performance Optimisation & Wellbeing Lead, stressed the need to educate each squadron with the understanding that there is more to wellbeing than mental health. To assist in that continuous process, the RAAF is training what Patrick called ‘wellbeing advocates’ to support its proactive approach.
He said: “We are identifying people in the unit and squadron that have that real trust relationship with everyone, who might be the first person to reach out and check-in. We’re focused on developing others to get better in this space, before having to think about more medical-based models around wellbeing.”
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Wendy Borlabi, the Director of Performance & Mental Health at the Chicago Bulls, has spied a noticeable shift.
Less than a decade ago, she says, there was a desire for, “having a coach with the credentials to take you from point A to point B. [Athletes] were looking for coaches who could do that; they hired coaches who could get you from A to B, it wasn’t about the relationship.”
“Now,” she continues, “I see more of the connection with the coach; they want to have that relationship. In my opinion, a lot of it has to do with the age. In the NBA we’re seeing younger players; they’re coming into the NBA at 17 years old. They’re babies, they need that nurturing, they need someone who’s going to take them under their wing that’s going to help them do the everyday pieces, that’s going to look after them, that’s going to ask about them, come and visit them at their house and be there to sit with their parents. They’re looking for that because they’re so young and when that’s there and that trust is there then I think that they’re able to expand on that, that they’re able to ask them to do things outside of their comfort zone and challenge them because now they’ve got a trust and it’s built on more social and emotions than [the question] can the coach move me from Point A to Point B.
“This shift is happening and I know we’ve talked about it that we used to see it a lot with female athletes as opposed to male athletes, but not now I think it’s more age-related as opposed to gender.”
As those coach-athlete relationships shift, so too does the role of the sports psychologist, which was a major theme of Borlabi’s appearance at June’s Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership alongside Kate Hays, the former Head of Performance Psychology at the English Institute of Sport [EIS]. The duo joined moderator Dehra Harris, the Assistant Director of High Performance Operations at the Toronto Blue Jays, to discuss the stability of an athlete’s confidence as well as the athlete’s ability to root confidence in a firm understanding of their strengths.
“For me, there’s been a real shift in sports psychology and how it’s delivered,” says Hays.
“When I think back to when I qualified, the focus was still so much on mental skills training and a lot of work at individual level and there’s certainly been a huge shift now. A lot of the work that the psychologist is doing around the team is facilitating environments that are psychologically informed and working alongside the coaching, sports science and sports medicine team as a collaborative effort; and I think that talks to the culture of people as well.
“It requires an entire sports organisation to be aligned in terms of the mission, behaviours, the philosophy around coaching, whether we take strengths-based approaches etc. when it has worked really well and you have athletes that have given the opportunity to learn, develop and grow, it’s because you’ve got a collaborative group of people that are coming together and working really effectively; and I think these things are difficult to do in isolated pockets.”
Borlabi also elaborated on the ways in which her work has changed. She says: “My role is so different now to when I first started. I need to teach athletes some very basic pieces of socialisation and emotion before we even get to the performance piece, because there’s these things that they don’t even know that.
“Besides working with the Bulls, I have a consulting business on the side and work with [Olympic] athletes as well. I think of so many times I spend the first four sessions just helping them understand that we’re not returning a call or text to their coach.”
Mental skills and learning to problem-solve
Harris asks Borlabi and Hays a question about the mental skills that athletes need to be working on. Both have already discussed emotional intelligence and self-awareness and it is a theme to which they both return.
“In working with younger athletes, it is establishing who they are,” says Borlabi. “One of the things I’ve always wanted them to try to figure out is how they like to be coached. I don’t think that they know that or how can they improve, and when do they listen the most, and what is the aspect they value the most in a coach and teammates.
“You miss that piece when you’re younger, so when they become professionals, I want them to try and think about that. It’s definitely something we learnt with the Olympic [athletes], they’d think about the coach. How are they coached? How will they work with their teammates? And how do they work at their best?
“Another aspect of that is their support system. Wanting them to be able to know who is in their support system and who gives them what kind of support and who do they gravitate towards? Who reinforces what they’re trying to do and who brings them down? I think that’s important because they don’t know that at a young age and it’s helping them to figure that piece out that helps them to grow as athletes.”
Hays shares her own experiences on the matter. “I’ve learnt a lot in diving [she worked with British Diving for more than a decade], which is an early-starter sport,” she says. “You’re quite often working with young athletes, aged 9, 10 etc. Obviously their cognitive ability is not the same as an adult and one of the most important things, very gently and slowly, is getting them to start to self-reflect.
“Quite often, they’ll go in, and the coach will direct them in what they’re doing, they’ll execute the training session, they’ll have a great one, and then they’ll get in the car and tell mum and dad how brilliant it was. But then they’ll go in the next day and the same thing will happen. It’s because they haven’t necessarily taken the time to take a step back.
“It’s a slow process, particularly when you’re dealing with younger athletes, but that process of self-reflection, the earlier that can start, the more robust athletes are in terms of what happened today; ‘why do I think that happened, and what does that tell me about what I need to do tomorrow?’ It encourages that problem-solving, that reflection, and that thought. Essentially, it’s a cyclical process, you get to that point where you’re able to recreate the things that you do well and lose the things that you’re not doing as well.
“With the youngsters, it’s about getting them into the habit of just asking questions around ‘why?’ and then figure out how they’re going to problem-solve and how they’re going to figure out the different things that they could try. So that the failing becomes part of the learning process rather than something to be worried or scared about. It’s that real message around failing smart and learning fast. How you make sense of your experiences and utilise that information. At this stage, it’s not about performance.”
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