Recent data demonstrate that an incremental increase in practice length can help curtail soft-tissue injuries.
According to the NFLPA’s General Counsel and Head of Medical Innovation Sean Sansiveri, all 32 NFL teams—besides being required for the first time to place GPS trackers on every player—had to adhere to the new health and safety protocol at training camp.
“We’ve now mandated a gradual ramp for the first time this season,” said Sansiveri, referring to the revision that was approved at this spring’s annual league meeting. “We had an acclimatization and contact integration period the last two years because of Covid, but this will be a whole different approach to that, and we anticipate seeing a reduction in the lower extremity injuries because of it.”
Sansiveri said that by monitoring players the last two “Covid” seasons through wearables designed primarily by Zebra and Catapult, the league determined that a spike in soft-tissue injuries came from “overbearing load” during early-season workouts.
“One of the things, very interestingly, that we learned from the GPS trackers was the teams that had a gradual duration ramp up,” Sansiveri told SportTechie. “Meaning start one practice at 90 minutes, the next one at an hour and five minutes, then an hour and 20 minutes—the teams that didn’t do that had almost a 25 percent higher risk of lower extremity injuries.
“But we wouldn’t be here if not for the use of the X,Y data and being able to monitor load [with wearables]. The information has turned out to be tremendously valuable for injury mitigation. And [this season] we want to look at intensity, we want to look at conditioning tests, we want to look at the number of padded practices. The CBA limits it to 16 during the training camp period, but not all clubs use all 16. And so looking at from the pure injury side, plus the load and the movement standpoint, we’re able to piece together with the help of our engineers a pretty clear picture of what’s contributing to the injuries.”
The NFLPA has to sign off on any wearables deployed by the NFL on its players and has formed a “joint sensor committee” with the league to ensure that the devices are “validated for its intended use and what the potential arms or downsides are.” Sansiveri, for instance, says some devices (such as sweat patches) are “bleeding over into bio-specimen” collection, and those need to be consented to by the NFLPA, as well.
Last season, Sansiveri said approximately 25 teams used various GPS devices during practice—either from Zebra, Catapult, STATSports or Kinexon. But by having all 32 teams gradually ramp up practice length during this year’s training camps, the data should be more definitive going forward. Last season’s Super Bowl Champion Los Angeles Rams were particularly lauded for their load management tracking during every preseason and regular season practice, which led to a reduction in injuries while winning nine of their final ten games.
“You can definitely bucket the teams in terms of the ones who are more effective than others,” Sansiveri said. “Depends on how you look at it. Whether you look at total number of injuries, which may not necessarily be indicative. Because you can have more contact injuries, for instance, versus non-contact and load-based. So if you break it down in terms of the duration ramp-up thing that I mentioned, there is a clear difference in the number of lower extremity injuries based on that. And that’s one of the reason we’re pursuing this the way we are.”
“As I said, the duration ramp-up question was primarily based on the two Covid seasons worth of data. But you can bolster that by looking at the piecemeal data sets on this issue we had previously. So I would say the study really solidified two years ago, and it’s sort of been in the works much longer than that.”
Troy Vincent, the NFL’s executive vice president of football operations, used the Rams’ game-wrecker Aaron Donald as a prime load management example in a conversation last February with SportTechie.
“Aaron Donald,” says Vincent, pronouncing the name with emphasis. “Nobody gets more double and triple-teamed in the National Football League over the last 7, 8 years than this man. In the trenches. That’s monitoring, that’s [load] managing. They have a lot of players in that situation where they don’t miss a lot of game time. But that is being properly managed through the head coach [Sean McVay] and the head trainer, Reggie [Scott]. So that’s everyone being on the same page. You can’t do it and be effective if it’s not a team. You can’t have one side of the house saying, ‘Data is it,’ and the other side of the house saying, ‘Nope, it doesn’t work.’ You can’t have sports science over here and someone says, ‘I don’t believe in sports science.’”
“[The Rams are] so cutting edge. When you look at their injury prevention, their injury reduction platform, it’s data science. They are no question light years ahead.”
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The Seattle-based startup discuss the technologies that can help basketball players improve the mental side of their performance.
World’s shortest elevator pitch: “We focus on training the mental side of basketball. It’s a part of basketball we think is undertrained.”
Company: VReps. “The goal of the company is to give virtual repetitions of your sport, primarily basketball right now. That’s the impetus behind it.”
Location: Seattle, Washington
Year founded: 2015
Website/App: https://vreps.us/; Google Play app; Apple Store app
Funding round to date: “We are Pre-Series A. It’s all Seed funding.”
Who are your investors? “We are all angel funding and have raised roughly $2.5 million.”
Are you looking for more investment? “If the right investors came, yes.”
Tell us about yourself, CEO and founder Shawn Cooper: “I was studying computer science at the University of Michigan and was a scout player for the women’s basketball team. I’m 6-foot, I was 190 pounds and athletic, so as a scout player I could play any of the five positions. For an upcoming opponent, we would be given the scout team playbook and we’d have four or five plays we’re supposed to simulate during practice. That means during a span of 48 hours I was supposed to memorize 20-25 plays because I’m learning all five positions and it’s just a paper playbook, that was the best way to learn. The idea behind the company was initially making NBA 2K for playbooks, that’s really where we started–a video game version of playbooks. We’ve since broadly expanded to preparing the mental side of basketball, so how do you play basketball? What’s the chess match that happens? When you go through a ball screen, what are the reads? Why are there different ways you defend a ball screen? That’s the idea that came out of it. My senior year, I dropped out for a year and a half and started the company. I did graduate, went back, but that was the start of it.”
Who are your co-founders/partners? “I don’t have co-founders but have some really important leadership to the company in Mike Greenman and Matt Stewart-Ronnisch. They are both supremely talented in the worlds they occupy. Matt, our CTO, is a very talented engineer. Met him in college and he joined pretty quickly after we started, probably a year after we started. Mike Greeman is our Director of Basketball and joined us two years ago after it became clear we had potential to impact the NBA. I have no connection to the NBA, I don’t know enough about basketball to chase that market. We hired him and he has the connections and the expertise. He is a very talented basketball mind. He’s the one that trained Chet Holmgren before the draft and Jalen Williams. We had three first-round picks (Holmgren, Williams and Christian Braun), three second-round picks (E.J. Liddell, Kendall Brown and Jabari Walker) and one player picked up on a Summer League contract (Jermaine Samuels). Chet was our highest draft pick at No. 2.”
The 2022 No. 2 overall draft pick Chet Holmgren had signed an NIL deal with VReps while playing for Gonzaga.
How does your product/service work? “The product is technology at the NBA level. We recreate NBA games as they happen, any NBA game from the past five years, and we’re able to put players in virtual reality in the shoes of any player during that scenario. That’s the product and that’s available for any NBA team to purchase, and we’re working with a handful of NBA teams. The service is the player development training that Mike does utilizing that product. He actually trains players and trains them on how to prepare for the NBA using previous NBA scenarios as examples. So, before Chet got drafted we put him into the shoes of any player in the league. After he got drafted, we put him into Oklahoma City’s offense to prepare to play with the team. So before he ever steps on the court with Oklahoma City, he’ll have been in their offense for almost an hour in virtual reality.”
What problem is your company solving? “Basketball training is very focused on individual skills–shooting, ball handling, weight lifting, vertical, speed. There is an entire segment that is mostly ignored, which is the development of your mental understanding of how basketball works and why those things are that way and the strategy behind it. We’re filling the gap between how a player gets from a really good college player to an exceptional NBA talent. A lot of that growth is on the mental side and we are accelerating that mental growth, which is traditionally learned almost exclusively through game time.”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “Our product costs $10,000 to NBA teams as an initial offering. There are more expensive layers. The service to the NBA players, there are two tiers. One is $20,000 per year and the other is $60,000 per year. For the product, our target customers are the NBA teams. For the service, it’s NBA players or players that are preparing to be in the NBA. It’s not just NBA players.”
How are you marketing your product? “It’s entirely word of mouth right now and direct connections with those teams or players.”
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “The technology we built has meaningful potential at nearly every level of basketball. It’s training the mental side of your brain in terms of the strategy aspect. Our growth will come, depending on what markets we want to grow into. Our growth from here, after we successfully enter the NBA market a little more, will be high-level international basketball and probably going into the college level in the U.S. We may also pursue other sports like the NFL. This technology has the same value in the NFL. We can do virtual reality training for NFL players. That’s another way we can grow. Depends on how much cash we get and from whom.”
Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “Our nearest competitor would probably be Strivr. There’s also a company that does hockey simulations. Nobody, as far as we know, recreates historical games to relive that from the perspective.”
What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “Our unfair advantage is our technology expertise. We have 10 engineers working at the company. Very few companies our size are that heavily invested in their technology. We also have a few proprietary partnerships that give us access to the data streams we rely on. The recreation of the NBA games, for example, is through our partner, Sportradar. As of now, we are the only company that has access to those data feeds for player development purposes.”
What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “We just trained the second overall draft pick. That was a huge accomplishment. We also trained a player that wasn’t on most draft boards through the draft process and ended up being drafted 12th.”
In what ways have you adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic? “NBA teams are very focused on in-person relationships, as are NBA players. Trying to create a business where we could work with NBA teams and NBA players remotely has been a challenge. I don’t think we’ve done it super successfully but we’ve managed to get through it and now we are growing on the other side of the pandemic, now that it’s mostly gone back to normal in how the NBA operates. We’re growing into the normal sales processes.”
Beyond the pandemic, what obstacles has your company had to overcome? “It’s a very slow market to adapt. For example, the idea of relying on analytics took almost a decade to catch on. Now, every team is heavily relying on analytics. The NBA moves very slowly and negotiating that very slow-moving market has been incredibly challenging. I’m not saying we haven’t been successful in it yet, because the company is still growing and trying to enter this market, but it’s an extremely challenging thing to overcome. ”
How has your company been affected by the current economic situation, and how are you dealing with it? “The current economy isn’t positive for startups and inflation has also made it more challenging, but I don’t think we’re doing anything special or noteworthy to mitigate those problems other than trying to reduce our spending as much as possible.”
What are the values that are core to your brand? “The values are engineering excellence and content excellence. We have a very talented basketball expert and a very talented engineering team and having a high-quality product that is impactful, it’s not just something to talk about, it actually does make players better. The impact we have is really a core tenant of the company itself.”
What does success ultimately look like for your company? “Success on a small scale is players that want to get better come to us as a way to mentally prepare and mentally enhance in any sport. Success at a big level is changing the culture around the importance placed on the mental side of basketball. If more people started to focus on the strategy behind their sport, that would be–on a broader scale–a lot more success from our perspective as a culture shift from just individual skill training to the broader picture of the strategy behind sports.”
What should investors or customers know about you—the person, your life experiences—that shows they can believe in you? “What gives me the best shot of making an impact in this market is my ability to build a very talented team. The team we have is exceptionally talented from an engineering and basketball perspective. I feel confident I can grow the engineering team as we need to, and also grow into deeper levels of basketball or build into new sports and build a team necessary to enter those markets.”
VReps allows players to create and watch plays through their app in 3D.
What made you start with basketball for VReps? “My true sports are lacrosse and ultimately frisbee. I was a very talented lacrosse player in high school but didn’t play in college because it’s really hard to do computer science and play a varsity level sport, so I decided to pursue a career. Now, I play at the highest level of ultimate frisbee. I play on a world-level team. Basketball is one of the easier sports to monetize and has one of the bigger markets and is a sport that has a very clear strategy to teach. Soccer is a little more fluid in the way strategy works. Basketball is a pretty ‘rock, paper, scissors’ type game where if they do this, you do this and they are going to do this and you do this. It’s not scripted in a football sense but more of a read-and-react sense, and it’s teaching that read-and-react decision making that is core to our business and what we can do. Basketball is the perfect petri dish for us to really prove our technology can grow in these sports.”
Do you have a favorite quote about leadership? “‘Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant’ from Charlie Munger. The best leaders are those that build world-class teams around them. As an entrepreneur, you usually have very limited resources, so you need to be able to identify your biggest weaknesses and hire talented people to fill those gaps first.”
Question? Comment? Story idea? Let us know at [email protected]
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Whether it is mere scouting reports or an analytical deep dive, the startup’s platform, which pulls in data from various sources, offers something to all coaches.
“I was jaded on some things, felt like they could be done a lot better,” he says.
Those pain points led to the founding of 6-4-3 Charts, a leading college baseball and softball data analysis and visualization tool. Five years later, 6-4-3 Charts works with 550 college programs, provided statistical support for ESPN’s broadcasts of the men’s and women’s College World Series and recently partnered with Sportradar-owned Synergy Sports on integrating its cloud-based video platform. Synergy already counts 96% of Division I baseball schools as clients, as well as growing numbers of softball programs and smaller school baseball teams. It also supports all 30 MLB organizations.
The 6-4-3 report generating process is on-demand and customizable. Coaches choose the template, stat year, spray chart design and players to include.
“What’s really cool is we’re sharing data between both of our APIs, so we’re not just leveraging Synergy data and video, but they’re also leveraging our data to improve some quality assurance processes and to look at potential ways to make their vlogging process even more efficient,” Weldon says. “And then, on our side, obviously, accessing all their video and data gives us a really unique opportunity to connect data from multiple sources.”
The origins of 6-4-3 Charts were humble, starting with a $12,000 investment and no full-time employees for its first two years. On the long bus ride to Tennessee Tech’s appearance in the ’17 NCAA regional in Tallahassee, Weldon called one of his former players from his time leading the Timberline High program in Lacey, Washington.
Rick Ahlf, who played shortstop for Weldon, was a high school valedictorian and Arizona State engineering graduate who had accepted a job at Boeing in low-speed aerodynamics product development. Ahlf laughs when recalling the experience of playing for Weldon at Timberline—“That was my first 50-hour-a-week job,” he jokes—but was interested in sports analytics and agreed that there was an opportunity to make a better product. (The third co-founder is Tim Kuhn, a CPA by trade who serves as COO at 6-4-3.)
Working out of his parents’ basement in the summer before the Boeing gig started, Ahlf coded the first iteration of the 6-4-3 Charts product. By scraping box scores and play-by-play data, the tool produced in-depth statistics and visualizations. In recent years, they’ve added a feature to sync TrackMan ball flight data as well as several other partnerships, including with SEQNZR and Playsight.
6-4-3 syncs with TrackMan to share ball tracking data visually with coaches and players.
“We started with PDF reports and Dropbox links, and we’ve evolved,” Weldon says. “Five years later, it’s a fully dynamic interface with on-demand reporting, customization, upload visualizations, video tagging, analysis, ball tracking.”
Coaches are the primary users, with some simply downloading basic scouting reports and spray charts and others delving deep into situational data.
“Coaches of all levels will now have the ability to enhance their game prep and film review,” Matt Lawrence, Synergy Sports’ senior director of baseball and softball, writes in an email. He adds, “And, importantly, their program is in-depth and easy to use. As a former D3 coach, I know this partnership is something that would have enhanced my video scouting and game preparation experience.”
Weldon says they are considering development of their own player portal; one of 6-4-3’s other partners, Driveline Baseball, already does with its TRAQ system. One of the 6-4-3 features is customization of a pocket card with info, for players to wear in a wristband during games or coaches to keep in their pockets. (NCAA rules prohibit in-game access to technology.)
In addition to serving its coaching clients, 6-4-3 has begun sharing some of its data in the media, both with ESPN and D1Baseball.com and D1Softball.com.
“We have all this data,” Weldon says, “and it’s like, ‘Well, other people besides coaches would probably be interested in this data. How can we tailor something for media, for example?’”
For the softball College World Series, Weldon was in the ESPN booth alongside the lead stats researcher and with two 6-4-3 team members in the graphics truck. Having seen how the process works, he is now brainstorming a specific TV production app to help broadcasters provide additional context and storylines.
6-4-3 started gaining significant market share by early 2019, when Ahlf left Boeing and dedicated himself full-time with the startup.
“Honestly, I like having control of my own future,” he says. “I’d rather bet on myself and the people that I trust to work with than being part of a large company where things just honestly move slowly. I like having that level of ownership and accountability that, ‘Hey, if I don’t perform properly, then this thing doesn’t go anywhere.’”
Weldon, incidentally, does still coach back in the high school ranks. His Olympia (Washington) High team won the Class 4A state championship last month. And he’s still in charge of the grounds. “Oh, absolutely,” he says, before correcting himself. He recently handed over mowing duty to a volunteer whose son is on the team.
So some things change, even if the spirit remains.
“All I ever say,” says Weldon, “is, ‘Just keep moving. We’re not going to be still. Let’s just keep going.’”
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The former wide receiver discusses the use of data in the NFL and his work with Breakaway Data, the holistic data platform.
The Bills drafted him in the third round of the 2012 NFL Draft. Graham played two seasons in Buffalo, catching 54 passes for 683 yards and three TDs. He went on to play regular season games with the Jets and Saints while also logging time in training camp with the Titans, Eagles and Panthers and spending parts of three seasons with the CFL’s Montreal Alouettes.
Graham, now 32, completed his playing career in 2019 and turned his attention to coaching and data. He’s mentored numerous elite athletes in the Raleigh-Durham area while becoming a data advocate. For a spell, he also worked in Sportlogiq’s business development office on American football projects.
Graham has spent the past two years at Breakaway Data, a holistic data platform co-founded by the leaders of the Gains Group sports consultancy to monitor and improve their own fitness and performance. He is currently its head of performance and on-field application, but also just started a two-month stint with the Green Bay Packers as part of the NFL’s Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship.
On when he realized the importance of data . . .
It started a little bit around the time I interacted with Philadelphia Eagles—that was in 2016—but the best and realest time I had a connection with data and analytics in football was definitely with the Panthers. And I’ll give you the story: we had always worn GPS devices, but we didn’t really get that stuff given back to us. It was just measured, tracked, probably used more against us than for us—but also to tailor our workouts to fit us, personalized.
Other than that, it wasn’t to the degree of… I call it ‘athletic expansion.’ Just for me in my athletic knowledge and IQ, there are things that I need to know, and I need real-time feedback to adjust. I wasn’t getting that until I was with the Panthers.
One day at practice, one of the strength coaches came by and said, ‘Dude, you ran 23 miles-an-hour on the GPS.’ I’m like, ‘What does that mean?’ He was like, ‘That’s the fastest we’ve ever seen recorded on the GPS units.’ I’m like, ‘OK, I really don’t know what that means.’ I mean, I’m a track guy. So I understand that we’re moving, but in my mind, I’m like, ‘When did I do it in practice? What did I do in preparation for that practice or even that data point to hit 23 miles-an-hour? What did I do to lead up to that? And then how do I replicate that? Or was it so high and so fast that I need time to recover?’
On the evolution of data in the sport . . .
It definitely has improved as coaches have gotten younger and the more that the data providers have created education around the space. It started with some [analysts] calculating some and then being like, ‘Hey, this is beneficial.’ And then a coach saying, ‘I don’t know what the heck this is,’ then a coach saying, ‘I kind of know what this is.’ I started between the two of them. Football has always been statistical and analytical. We do down and distance. We do stats. So we know stuff. We want to keep track of stuff.
I have a heavy track background. My dad was an Olympic track coach. I was around Olympians forever. And I’m at practice listening to splits, listening to times for reps, I’m listening to technical feedback for mechanics. And then, after a while during the summer, I’m seeing them run 9.7, and you’re like, ‘That makes sense now.’ If you don’t hit these different points within your 10-meter splits, 20-meter splits, 30-meters splits, you’re not going to achieve the end goal time. So within practice, within a rep, with your warmup, you have to start tailoring yourself and have an understanding what specifically you need to do to obtain a 9.7 because you’re measuring against the clock, right?
That same thing can be applied to football with analytics. Coaches have used GPS load to justify if a player is exhausted or done too much and how they go into recovery and how they plan their scripts and their practice plan. That’s high level. That’s way more objective than a subjective view of basically, ‘We ran around today and did this.’ Now we’re having hard data to justify that this guy, compared to this guy, is gassed. So we have tailored practice for this guy specifically but not the whole team—compared to not resting this guy and pushing the whole team and now we hurt this guy. And we really need him. So analytics and data has definitely helped out.
On how he coaches with data . . .
I coach as a performance coach but also as a receivers coach with analytics. Specifically, I’ve worked with a lot of the NC State football players in the area and some pro guys, definitely some other colleges and the HBCUs and some high-level high school recruits in the area. I put GPS units on my guys when we run. We start with running technique. It’s important to be efficient within route running so that you can hit every point on the field efficiently, right? No part of the grass is off-limits because you know how to move your body in the most efficient way to that point on the field.
[I look] at the technicalities of biomechanics. Now I’ll put that in front of video, and then we break it down there. But then we take that and put it on the field. We go from the track or another surface to the field. Now once it’s on the field, it needs to be applied within sport. And I use GPS units to [monitor] change direction, acceleration, deceleration acceleration, average speed, top speed, of course, and just [overall] load. So the quicker that our younger generation can understand it and take the ownership of it off the coaches, the higher level football will be in quicker. Breakaway is doing that right now.
On whether he would have used data had it been available earlier in his career . . .
As a young player, I would have had to be receptive to this information, and I might have just been ignorant to the fact that it was even around, or it was just so early on that it wasn’t around. But I think it would have definitely added a year or two onto my career, just knowing how to be more strategic in my preparation.
Right now, we’re in the NFL offseason. So prior to showing up for OTAs, I was very calculated as an athlete. It was a chance to really hone in on or own the thing that you really good at, really work on that craft. So, for me, I always had to work on my top-end speed. I could not show up to an NFL camp and be anything less than that. And that was important to me. So in order to either maintain or to increase my top end speed, we have to measure, we have to run, we have to be consistent, we have to, like, run to the point of exhaustion. Understand that that point and that wall is going to be pushed further the next time. But we have to know where that wall is to even push it further.
On the infusion of sensors in the sport . . .
Sports and football are getting there. We have sensors in our helmets. There are sensors in the ball. There are sensors in our shoulder pads. There are sensors now in our tights, our girdles, to see what strains or what muscles are activated in our legs and seeing how they are strained or stressed. Next up will be shoes, right? That would measure stride length, frequency, force—almost like a force plate in your foot. Next will be your hands and gloves. You have your visor being able to do some digital overlay. There’s a way to make this whole thing work.
On joining Breakaway Data . . .
When I first heard about the idea around Breakaway, I was sold immediately because I was like, ‘Excuse me. where the [heck] was this my whole career?’ I’ve been waiting to aggregate all my stuff in one place. It’s just been me by myself, and I cannot do it, and I need something to help me make it all sticky.
The part about it that is really cool is that it incorporates your recovery outside of football, your lifestyle outside of football, with your lifestyle within football. If I can figure out if I walked too much in the mall and figure out how much energy I would have for practice, it would definitely on the next day be like, ‘Don’t go walk around the mall that much.’ Without that, guys were doing this pregame ritual when you go to a new city—for instance, we would stay at the Galleria in Houston, and it was right across the street from a nice big designer mall. All I saw was just steps and steps that I need to recover from prior to tomorrow. They’re going to ask a lot of me, and I’m going to run a lot tomorrow. So let me not use that energy over there at the mall.
One of my guys [that I coach] is coming back from an injury. We’re not doing as many reps with him, but his GPS load and output and overall energy exertion was just as high as one of other guys. I’m like, ‘So what were you doing if you weren’t in the workout?’ Then you start looking back at the video, and he’s having fun behind the line. He’s moving over here. He’s dancing. He’s doing this, he’s doing that. And all that plays into it. I’m measuring it, and I’m getting it. I’m like, ‘Well, you need to just sit down somewhere. You need to be a little more detailed and fine- tuned.’
On empowering athletes through their data . . .
Breakaway is knocking on the door of owning that data. Own your data. The team’s tracking it for their own good, but it’s going to be on your own personal self to go take advantage of that and read it and understand it and ingest it and figure out how to become a better player yourself to even help your team. A football roster is 60, 70-plus in the NFL. Colleges are 100 deep. That’s a lot of bodies to assess. I have 12 players, and it takes me three hours to go through some lines of code and lines of data and statistics.
I cannot imagine doing a full team on the daily, but an individual player can go in read his line off in maybe 20 minutes—see what they did, how they did—and now they can justify their day after that. For linear speed, I like to see average sprint speed and average time spent sprinting. Now if you have a long time sprinting, now you’ve got to understand the mechanics of sprinting. You put a lot of high stress on those body parts. It’s like you’re a driver, and you need to go check the tread on your tires.
Sure, your tires are worn. You’ve got to go refresh your tires. The same thing happens to your body. You have to know what you’re doing—not just go and feel it, but you’ve got to know exactly what you’re doing and have a plan in place. And once you start justifying creating a schedule a routine that you know, satisfies your output, now you’re going to be a consistent Tom Brady type player, right, like longevity type stuff. We can’t just grind it out like we used to in old-school football. And that’s where the younger class has to get on board and be able to read what is being measured, but also understand who to go to and where to go to manipulate the outcome or output on the other side. So, that’s Breakaway.
On getting players to lean into data . . .
Building trust with data is tough, right? It’s almost like building trust with the court system. It’s got to be fair. No bogusness, no BS. It is for you, and it can be used against you. It’s a weapon and a shield. Some teams do a good job of taking care of their athletes, but the uniqueness of it is that it can be used as a shield to keep away the BS. A team is going to try to justify your reps, your pay, your position, your whatever, by whatever they collect. But you need to know, as if you were in courtroom, what they have on their side, to even combat it. And it has to be an open forum. And you can’t be intimidated by knowing that they know.
It’s just an understanding that it’s something that’s going to happen, like our iPhones are tracked but that doesn’t stop you from using your phone, right? We’re ahead of the game, in the sense of we are so early that every time we meet a person, we have to explain its usefulness or benefit. But you still need a place to put [the data]—so insert Breakaway and its app. It’s definitely why I’m here and why I’ve been so passionate in the space because as much as it’s annoying to try to get data released to us, it’s necessary. The sooner that all the data could be sent and delivered back to an athlete, the better, and it’ll lessen that feeling of being scared about the new technology.
It starts with owning your own shit. That was one of my slogans I pitched to Breakaway— own your shit. You have to own your stuff, like listening to the Panthers tell me it was I was running at 23 miles an hour. That was just the tip of it. That was just throwing a pebble in my pond, and the ripples started going. They’re cutting and signing people based off of expenditure of GPS loads and movements and all sorts of craziness. You need to know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and what they’re tracking and why they’re tracking it, to even fight against that.
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Dr Kate Hays, now of the Football Association, discusses the psychology around skill execution and why confidence must be viewed holistically.
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Develop a confidence bank
Confidence is multifaceted and people can be confident about different things, which is why, according to psychologist Dr Kate Hays, it is important for athletes to develop what she calls a “a robust confidence bank” ahead of any setbacks or moments of self-doubt. “What we try to do is ensure they’re pulling their confidence in from lots of different places,” Hays told an online audience at Virtual Leaders Meet: Evolution of Leadership in June 2021 when she was still serving as Head of Psychology at the English Institute of Sport. “We know that athletes gain a huge amount of confidence from performance accomplishments whether that’s in training or in competitive settings. We know that they derive a huge amount of confidence from coaching, social support and holistic preparation, whether that’s physical or mental. The more proactive people can be in terms of self-reflection and developing confidence from a multiple of sources, the more likely it is to be robust when they have those peaks and troughs.”
Normalise a bad day at the office
Hays, who is currently the Head of Women’s Psychology at the Football Association, tried to dispel the myth that you are either confident or you are not. “That’s just not true,” she said, explaining that no one is immune to self-doubt or negative thinking. We can all have a bad day at the office, as Dr Wendy Borlabi, the Director of Performance & Mental Health at the Chicago Bulls, has said. Hays added: “I think it’s a myth that we see the professional athletes and these Olympic athletes line up and they look so well-rehearsed – and they are – but it’s not true to think that some of them are not standing on that start line wishing they were not anywhere else in the world.” Athletes need to accept the inevitable and not fall prey to the myth. “It’s so important then that you’re able to go back to your evidence base and the preparation and your process to be able to cope with that in the moment and to enable you to still perform when the pressure is on. Confidence is not about positive thinking, confidence is about a set of evidence-based beliefs developed from really good preparation.”
The value in constraints-based coaching
What is happening when athletes are unable to execute under pressure? “If the skill is not transferring, there is a difference in the pattern, behaviour, the emotions or the cognitive thought processes that are taking place,” said Hays. She believes the path to the solution lies in constraints-based coaching. “It’s creating as many different environments and as many different circumstances and helping people understand their processes. But it doesn’t matter what you’re faced with, if you’ve got a consistent process that works for you, you can transfer it into any environment and you start to build confidence in your skill execution. I’m a massive believer in constraints-based coaching and how you develop psychological principles through technical and tactical coaching. Just having sessions day to day about learning; ‘so you’re going to make some mistakes and that’s OK.’”
“Confidence is an essential part of the make-up of the very best performers; of course, the key question is how can belief be developed so that it remains robust under pressure? As Dr Hays says, one of the best ways of doing this is to help performers draw their confidence from various foundations, with their previous accomplishments being at the core of this. The notion of a ‘confidence bank’ is one that many top performers use because, just like our personal income and finances, we can generate confidence from multiple sources, we can invest and expand our belief portfolio over time, and we can make withdrawals when we need them most. But, similar to financial management, performers require support from coaches, family, experts and others, on how to best manage their own experiences and environment in such a way to strengthen their confidence. Certainly, focusing on personal mastery experiences, particularly success in difficult tasks that have occurred recently, is critically important for performing at our best.
“Just because the best performers can develop their confidence to high levels, this does not make them immune from intense anxieties. In other words, performers can simultaneously have strong belief in their ability (i.e., high levels of self-confidence) whilst being uncertain, or even doubting, if they will achieve some of their goal(s) (i.e., high levels of competitive anxiety). This is the performance equivalent of what the novelist, George Orwell, termed ‘doublethink’: the acceptance of contrary opinions or beliefs at the same time. It is not uncommon, for example, for performers to believe that they are capable of a great performance but be uncertain of whether it will be enough to win – hence being self-confident and anxious at the same time. The good news though is that some doubts can serve to keep high levels of confidence in check and prevent arrogance and/or complacency. It is, in part, for these reasons that performers should use some constraints-based coaching and pressure training to help them learn how to draw on and maintain their self-belief when they are under pressure and some doubts will likely creep in.”
The asymmetrical training bar has helped PGA Tour players including Scheffler, Jordan Spieth, Zach Johnson and Ryan Palmer with their stability and mobility patterns.
A trained chiropractor with a focus on sports biomechanics, Van Biezen does some treatment on the training table before Scheffler begins his warm-ups. For the vast majority of that time—85%, Van Biezen estimates—the recent Masters champion is clutching GolfForever’s new SwingTrainer, a 44.5-inch, asymmetrically-weighted training bar with attachments that either replicate the feel of a driver or a club head that’s 2.5 times heavier for training. There is also a detachable resistance band for a wide variety of exercises.
“When we’re on the road, SwingTrainer is an integral part of our warm-ups and our training throughout the week,” says Van Biezen, who has worked on the PGA Tour for 20 years with Jordan Spieth, Zach Johnson, Ryan Palmer and others. “What I try to do in a gym, which is under a controlled environment, is just mimic the movement patterns that we want to have Scottie integrate into his golf swing. The SwingTrainer has been a very versatile, durable tool that we can apply those movement patterns under a light load but generating that neural pathway pattern to get that brain working on certain movements we want to get him into.”
GolfForever is the spinoff of chiropractor Jeremy James’ BackForever program, and the SwingTrainer launched in November as a training tool to complement the library of video content in the program. Scheffler, who has been training with Van Biezen for a decade in the Dallas area, recently joined Justin Leonard as a GolfForever ambassador, calling the SwingTrainer “critical” to his Tour preparation.
James, whose practice is based in Aspen, Colorado, welcomed patients suffering from chronic back pain for weeks or even months at his facility. Recognizing the challenge and expense of his location, he sought to distribute his message further, first by writing a book and then by recording streamed video content. Many of his most active users were golfers, which spurred the development of the GolfForever package that launched in 2019.
“Golf does a very predictable set of things to your body,” James says. “From a biomechanical perspective, it’s a repetitive, asymmetrical motion, and if you’re not in great shape or if you’ve had injuries in the past, it’s going to wear your body down.”
For the first couple of years, GolfForever relied primarily on resistance bands, but James sought to more precisely target the core muscles that generate and resist the rotational forces created during a golf swing. “We didn’t invent the idea of asymmetrical bar training—that had been in the fitness world for a while—but we took that concept and we made it specific for a golfer,” James says.
The SwingTrainer helps golfers open up the joints in all three planes of the swing, Van Biezen says, referring to the sagittal (left/right), frontal (front/back) and transverse (top/bottom) planes. He’ll have Scheffler do a side lunge with a rotation, a Bulgarian squat while doing a unilateral push or a single-leg overhead press, all while incorporating the SwingTrainer.
“With Scottie, he’s very, very strong,” Van Biezen says. “It’s just now, with the GolfForever, what I really like about is it just helps a lot with the stability and mobility patterns. It’s just a really high-beneficial, low-risk training tool. I think golf fitness has probably gone down one extreme where you get the Olympic lifting and all that kind of stuff and guys really getting hurt. I’ve always said the game of golf is a marathon, not a sprint. And so these guys can play for a long period of time and perform at a high level if they just keep themselves healthy.”
Van Biezen says he believes strongly in rigorous baseline testing to track movement patterns and detect asymmetries. He uses 3D motion capture regularly and employs massage therapists and strength coaches at his facility. There is also a golf shop and hitting bay with club fitting and repair, making it a one-stop destination. Scheffler first visited around the age of 14 or 15 and has kept coming back, much like Spieth, the 28-year-old who ascended to a world No 1 ranking in 2015.
“What’s going on with Scottie right now, it’s kind of like Groundhog Day for me with what happened with Jordan around the same time,” Scheffler says. “They both had a little bit of low back issues, and that’s why they first came in. Then they both just realized, for injury prevention, they have to start doing stuff off the golf course.”
Last season, Scheffler had eight top-10 finishes in his 29 starts but no wins. In fact, he had never won a tournament prior to the WM Phoenix Open in February—which began a streak of four wins in six tries, culminating in his Masters victory. Van Biezen pushed him hard in the offseason to strengthen his upper body and core but also build his endurance so that he was as fresh during the back nine on Sunday as he was the front nine on Thursday. By a small margin, his fourth round average a year ago was his worst, and his first round was his best.
“We’re just beginning to see everything come together finally,” Van Biezen says.
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The Formula One team are make better, more data-informed decisions around race strategy.
Suddenly, the graph line began a rapid descent, so unexpectedly that Green, McLaren’s Head of Commercial Technology, quipped, “Oh, this doesn’t look good. We must have broken something.”
A colleague, however, assured him otherwise. The algorithm was predicting rain, which would cool the track. Though Green saw blue skies and sunshine, he shared the intel with folks in the hospitality area, who grabbed precautionary umbrellas.
“Sure enough, 20 minutes later, it started raining, and the clouds rolled in,” Green says. “That just made me smile, thinking that this is quite powerful that the race team that’s down there is using this information.”
This graph was the product of a new artificial intelligence model built and maintained by DataRobot, McLaren’s new partner this season. DataRobot has helped cull data and refine the AI models to make better predictions, even accounting for such details as how the hillier train in Monaco affects cloud movements compared to the flat Miami course. The rain in Miami cooled the track enough that F1 cars could make a few extra laps on their tires.
DataRobot is integrated into the McLaren Racing infrastructure, delivering AI-powered predictions and insights.
“It sounds a little pedantic, but it’s one of the most extremely important aspects that you could do for the race strategy team,” says DataRobot’s AI evangelist, Ari Kaplan. “So that was one of the successes is being able to better predict the actual air temperature, as well as the track temperature, more precisely than they could before.”
An F1 car is outfitted with 300 sensors, many of which sample data at different rates. The fuel flow sensor measures 2,200 times per second. Collectively, they produce tens of thousands of data points per second—and that doesn’t include any of the myriad of external sources—to be reviewed by the on-site team, which is in France this weekend, and the engineers at Mission Control, the nickname for McLaren’s headquarters in Woking, England.
“It’s a very data-rich sport, and we’re collecting and analyzing, truthfully, more data than we know what to do with,” Green says. While emphasizing how smart his team’s engineers are, he notes that a little more scrutiny was needed in their analysis.
“We’ve been running models and using AI for quite some time now, but like many organizations, as working on the IT team, we sort of just let people get on with it,” he adds. “And we didn’t really ask too many questions about which model they were using, how they made that choice where they were deploying it. It was really done without much supervision or much oversight.”
That’s where the DataRobot partnership, which was announced last November and includes McLaren’s F1 and IndyCar racing teams, plays a role. DataRobot maintains an AI cloud that serves a third of Fortune 50 companies.
DataRobot’s Ari Kaplan (left) with Randy Singh, McLaren Racing’s Director of Strategy and Sporting.
“Anytime you have an AI opportunity,” Kaplan says, “you look at all different factors: what data is readily available? What type of insights could be given? What’s the actual value? If we get an insight, is it actionable and practical? Or is it just Trivial Pursuit and you’re getting fun data? Maybe that’s good for fans, but if it’s the race team, [they need] the things that they can take action on.”
Every area of racing strategy can be optimized in support of drivers Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo. McLaren’s pit times have been among the circuit’s fastest this season, with Norris making the fast pit stop in the field at Italy’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, needing just 2.27 seconds to get moving again.
Kaplan, who was a pioneer in baseball analytics, describes AI’s role in helping plan the timing of those stops—based on the car’s wear and tear, fuel management and weather—and also the intricate “ballet sequence” of so many crew members simultaneously tending to the car.
“You can spend hours and weeks in the wind tunnel trying to shave hundredths of seconds off the car—and you could lose that through through a pitstop,” Green says.
The remodeled car being raced this season in F1 are optimized for creating ground effect, an aerodynamic phenomenon that generates downforce. Green describes the change as going from “how much air can we push over the car to how much air can we pull under the car.”
To help with this transition, McLaren has built a digital twin of the car. Every new part begins its life on a designer’s computer where it undergoes rigorous computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling. Once it meets a certain standard, Green says they use a 3D printer to construct a part at 60% scale for wind tunnel testing. Only after those tests are passed is the part physically constructed for an on-car trial. These simulations are an area where AI has helped “massively,” Green says.
But for all the proliferation of data and technology, the AI models remain complementary to the process.
“We have this concept of ‘human in the loop,’” Green says. “So it’s not letting the AI make the decision for us. It’s not letting the machine model dictate your strategy that you’re clicking along with. It’s really about giving the human in the loop the best information, the best insight possible, so they can go and execute that decision with all of the other systems and information that’s coming out from the rest of the team—be that at the track or be that back in Mission Control.”
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