SwingVision’s app is ideal for tennis players who all rely on speed, being able to manage costs, and often operate with limited connectivity on the courts of the world.
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This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
Artistic Director Alexander Campbell explains his academy’s approach with reference to his own experience as a professional ballet dancer.
“The reality is that not any one teacher is going to know, if you’ve got ten people in front of them, what’s best for each individual person in that class,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey last year.
“It’s about having that humility or that understanding that it’s OK not to know that definitively, for it to be a work in progress.”
Campbell, who spent 19 years at the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet companies, retired in 2024 to take up his current role, which gives him responsibility for the academy’s teaching across more than 80 countries.
It’s a position that grants him insights into the expectations, motivations and development needs of the next generation of dancers; and, as a self-proclaimed “sports tragic”, he was delighted to address an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members at the Royal College of Music in London.
The Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall at the Royal College of Music in London where we hosted Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey in April 2025.
Below, we explore, through the lens of Campbell’s own ballet career, his approach to meeting that challenge head-on with the RAD.
Meet students halfway
Campbell’s teaching mindset has been influenced by his underwhelming student experience at the Royal Ballet School, which he attended on a scholarship between 2003 and 2005.
The main problems were the teachers and the environment. “I struggled so much that I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to continue pursuing a career in ballet,” he said.
He had arrived from his native Sydney mid-term, which didn’t help him to settle, but it was also down to the type of prescriptive teaching that routinely irks younger generations today.
“We weren’t really encouraged to step out of our lane. It was like, ‘you know the steps, you focus on this, and we’ll worry about everything else,’” he added.
As Campbell explained in a 2017 interview with the Daily Telegraph, “we weren’t encouraged to ask too many questions. I think it took me too long to learn that, because I was naturally inquisitive, and wanted to know why we were doing certain things.”
When reflecting on that time for Leaders members, he said it was “such a missed opportunity.”
His turn-of-the-century experience as a ballet student shows that the need for teachers to meet their students halfway is not new. Two decades later, talent environments in performing arts, and in sport, must be designed to engage a cohort that wants to know ‘why?’
Promote early sampling
Campbell followed in the footsteps of his maternal grandparents, Valma Briggs and Mario Desva, who had both danced with Ballet Rambert in London.
By the early 1990s, Briggs was teaching at Academy Ballet in Sydney; Campbell’s mother worked in the same school as a manager. He began dancing at the school at the age of five.
He played grade cricket too. If his dancing talent was no surprise then nor was his cricketing ability as his father Alan was a professional player.
Campbell might have gone down that path himself had circumstances been different, but there was no pressure from his parents to choose one over the other; his teachers at Academy Ballet were similarly minded.
Of his cricket and school studies (he was homeschooled from the age of eight), Campbell said, “my parents were keen for me to remain interested in other things so that I was ‘Alexander, a person with various interests’ rather than just ‘Alexander, the ballet dancer’.”
Much like the world of sport, the performing arts has increasingly moved away from the idea of early specialisation. On Campbell’s watch, the RAD promotes the type of holistic development he enjoyed; and he is not alone. “Thinking about and knowing certain conservatoires, thinking about their talent pathways and their talent identification, how they train people is being reconsidered.”
The shift towards co-creation
As Campbell explained, RAD teachers must be able to adapt to a generation of students that desire agency in their own development.
“As educators and teachers, it’s really easy to go, ‘OK, I have to have this knowledge and I have to demonstrate to them that I know how best to get from A to B’,” he said.
That isn’t true, of course, but it requires humility on the part of the educators; and much of Campbell’s focus is on equipping dance RAD teachers with the “understanding that it’s OK not to know things definitively, for it to be a work in progress, and that it is going to be different, not just for each individual, but for each year [grade] at the school.”
Campbell’s decision to persist with ballet beyond his experience at the Royal Ballet School was influenced by his “opportunities to work with other coaches and have different experiences” at the Birmingham Royal Ballet. When he joined the company in 2005, it enabled him to see “a different environment and different way of operating that felt much more aligned to the sort of experience that I’d hoped for and wanted to have.”
Campbell demonstrates a plié for an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members, who imitate his movements with varying success despite his words of encouragement.
Care is a baseline expectation
We know that wellbeing is a performance enabler; younger generations sense it too.
Campbell wants RAD staff to be role models of wellbeing. He said: “Educating our teachers on that and the importance of looking after themselves could have the most impact in a fairly short period of time.” It must start with him as Artistic Director; a fact of which he is “acutely aware”.
The RAD has also made efforts to improve safeguarding in its schools and increase the accessibility of its courses, particularly for students and participants with additional support needs. “We’ve got teachers who have parents saying ‘my child has additional needs but they love dance, they really want to be part of it; is that something you can do?’ And a lot of our teachers will find a way or have found a way, but a number of them feel nervous about the responsibility that entails. They don’t want to get it wrong.”
Campbell and the RAD are working to provide those teachers with the right tools. “We give them the support so they can say ‘this is how you go about it or if you want to find out more this is where you would go’. I think this is giving us the best opportunity to broaden our participation in ballet and dance.”
A broader definition of success
Campbell admitted that all his “Plan As” came off in his professional life. He is a prime example of talent meeting opportunity.
However, as he said, “my self-worth and my personality were not determined by whether I was successful in that pursuit.”
He makes sure this is reflected across the RAD’s curricula. “I don’t want to just provide for those people who want to get to the top level and be the very best.” Rather, he also wants to support the career aspirations of students who say, “I enjoy this, I’m quite good at it, but actually I don’t have that real drive to pursue this one very narrow thing.”
Their love of the art form might lead to a career in dance teaching or one of the industry’s that surround the performing arts such as lighting, set design or even physiotherapy with a specialism in dance. The RAD will support those aspirations. “It’s understanding that there are more opportunities than just being the dancer on the stage.”
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In a significant development for women’s basketball, the new league’s player-first, development-minded vision has led to significant investment in its sports science personnel and resources.
Main Image: Getty Images
Susan King Borchardt, who has been a fitness consultant to Sue Bird, Kelsey Plum and Breanna Stewart, joined Unrivaled as its Director of Performance and Recovery. Borchardt’s first call was to Lindsey Elizondo, an athletic trainer and physical therapist with the Magic, who joined as Director of Medical.
“We crafted this idea — her coming from the NBA, me working with some of the higher-level individuals privately in the WNBA — and just saying, ‘This should be the standard,’” Borchardt said courtside before the semifinals in Brooklyn. Phantom went on to defeat Mist for the championship 84-70 in Florida on March 4.
Their department has a headcount of about 25 and is supported by an extensive array of technologies, such as Plantiga insole sensors, Kinexon wearables, Springbok Analytics MRI scans and VALD devices for the weight room. Katie Buria, Head Athletic Trainer at the Dream, is Unrivaled’s Director of Sports Science managing the relationships with the tech providers.
“What we’ve seen is that will raise the bar everywhere else that we go,” Elizondo said. “So if we set that bar here, that’s going to feed upward into the W, it’s going to feed into the NWSL, it’s going to feed into all of these other sports and force the hand of this is what it takes to perform at this level.”
The athletes have full ownership of their data and can choose whether to share it with their WNBA teams and personal coaches. Unrivaled didn’t have exact figures available but indicated that the majority of players opted into using the tech, with Borchardt calling it “part of our culture.”
“This is a very player-driven league, and they care about player safety and wellness. The treatment has been top of the line,” said Breeze G Paige Bueckers, praising both the staff and the tech, such as “the data and what we look like on the court with our Plantigas or our [Kinexons] or our chips that measure our asymmetries — little stuff like that goes a long way in basketball.”
Plantiga has made women’s sports a priority, with its CEO Quin Sandler saying of the work with Unrivaled, “Together, we’re not just collecting movement — we’re helping build the future of applied sports science for women.”
Her teammate Cameron Brink, who suffered an ACL tear in June 2024, had her first Springbok scan — which uses AI to turn an MRI into 3D muscle data — while rehabbing with Unrivaled last year and then again before this season.
“Once you have a big injury, you want to learn how to optimize everything, so all these tools really help,” Brink said. “It is really reassuring to get MRIs done like that and just a full body scan. From here you can see how you’ve grown and improved and what areas you still need to work on.”
Elizondo noted the unprecedented position Unrivaled is in by collecting all of this data since the league’s inception. By having access to data for every player, the performance group can identify trends and understand the demands of the elite 3-on-3 game, which are different than 5-on-5. That helps them train the players with more specificity and develop more targeted treatment and recovery protocols.
Tracking longitudinal data enables Unrivaled to share baseline metrics for each player, and for rehabbing players, it helps reinforce the value of the hard work. Borchardt saw it firsthand with one athlete recently.
“For that athlete to have those two visual pictures to be like, ‘Wow, this is actually really working’ — that was so motivating,” she said.
Unrivaled CEO Alex Bazzell emphasized the league’s player-first, development-minded vision as a reason why it has invested so deeply in the personnel and products to make the performance team what it is.
“These players are thinking long term, and the expectation is not just your compensation but resources of off the court,” Bazzell said. “Our staff and who we hire, those are the ones that the players need to trust. You have to build trust in a 10-week period, too. That’s not easy.”
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
AS Béziers Hérault Head Coach Rory Teague ponders the question of skill acquisition and delivers his six considerations.
These are the words of Rory Teague, who notably spent a year and a half between 2016 and 2017 working as a skills coach under then England men’s rugby union Head Coach Eddie Jones.
A decade on, Teague serves as the Head Coach of French Pro D2 club AS Béziers Hérault and, as he tells the Leaders Performance Institute, would not copy Jones’ appointment in southern France.
“I wouldn’t myself employ a skills coach,” he says. “I think every coach who coaches an area of the game should be able to coach the skill of their area. ‘Skills coach’ as a term has become archaic as coaching has moved along.”
He feels that assigning skills coaches to coaching units risks diluting accountability. “When something breaks down, you’re not going to just look to the skills coach who’s sat in the room waiting for the moment to say ‘oh, that’s me’,” he continues.
“If the lineout doesn’t go well because of the throw, who’s responsible for that? Is it the lineout coach or the throwing coach that comes in once a week? I would prefer that my forward coach has understanding of the skill of throwing and takes responsibility for it.”
AS Béziers Hérault Head Coach Rory Teague. (Image: Rory Teague / LinkedIn)
Over the course of half an hour, Teague ponders the topic of skill acquisition from a coaching career spent as a skills coach, unit coach, and now a head coach.
Here are his six of his main considerations.
1. The difference between ‘skill’ and ‘technique’
“Ultimately, skill is technique performed under pressure,” says Teague, who has been influenced in his thinking by coaches including Rick Shuttleworth (a consultant at organisations including the Rugby Football Union and UK Sports Institute), Scott Wisemantel (Attack Coach at the NRL’s Paramatta Eels) and, of course, Jones (who is now in his second spell as Head Coach of the Japan men’s team).
“They were three incredible coaches who helped me along the way,” he adds. “They pushed me to go and find out what is ‘skill’; what is the difference between ‘technique’ and ‘skill’? Because there’s a big difference.” Skill, he suggests, is the ability to select, adapt and execute actions in a pressured context. There is little value in a player passing the ball ten metres to their teammate repeatedly at the end a training session. “They’re only working on their technique, because there’s no external cue for when they’re passing.”
It follows that skills in rugby develop as a consequence of an interaction between mechanics, cognition and match context. “If I stand in front of the player and they run towards me and I run towards them, they’re interacting with the environment i.e. me, them, and the distance – and then they’re performing the technique.”
There is also a psychological and emotional dynamic that goes beyond cognition and technical execution. All these elements can affect skill expression in a match situation.
“There’s no substitute for being in the saddle,” adds Teague. “Hot feedback in the moment can be so powerful because you’re living that moment with the player.” He will use the moment to talk them through a situation.
He will readily halt training sessions to allow kickers to practise too. “Get them to kick when their heartrate is up and their emotional state is variable rather than just doing 50 kicks at the end of the session – because that’s just technique.”
2. Implicit and explicit learning both matter
At the heart of discussions about skill acquisition is the dichotomy between information-processing approaches (skill acquisition as learning to plan and execute correct movements by processing information internally) and ecological approaches (skill acquisition as learning to perceive and act in context by interacting with the environment).
Teague is not a dogmatist, even if he leans towards the latter. “I like implicit coaching where the exercise and your questions give the player the feedback,” he says. “What exercises can you design whereby you don’t have to say anything, the player performs the act, and the exercise gives the player the feedback? If you look at, say, goal kicking or throwing, you want the player to self-regulate when they’re in the moment and feel the pressure.” He will look to ask a series of questions that “get the player to think about where they want the ball to end up, where they want the ball to go versus breaking it down too technically”. He will also be mindful of the timing too, both pre and post-match.
However, when it comes to explicit approaches, “it’s not that those guys you’re very direct with are not taking control of their own journey and development, they just need to be told.”
It comes down to knowing the individual athlete. “I’ve worked with some players where I’ve fluffed it up too much and asked too many questions and they just want you to go ‘tell me exactly what you want me to be doing, tell me exactly what I’m doing wrong, tell me exactly how I can get it better’. Whereas with others, you can ask ‘what do you think?’”
Skill acquisition requires the coach to understand what the best approach is and why. Additionally, while it may be ideal for the session design to act as the teacher, there will be times when the coach needs to check for understanding.
3. Ask yourself: what will help the player?
While it is important for players to be drawn towards training sessions, whether by coaches placing balls in their line of sight or by making sessions enjoyable, the guiding principle should be whatever will help the players in that moment.
“Do you want your players to think your coaching drills are really good or do you want players to think ‘you’ve taught me how to pass better’?” As ever, the answer “depends on where you are” with the players in question.
In any case, “sometimes you have to get through the reps and you can’t deviate away from repetition”. Teague says: “I’ve seen coaches try to do these fast exercises to appease players and sometimes they can be so complicated that the players don’t buy into it because of how complex it is.”
There will be times when a coaching intervention can harm a player’s development and Teague will consciously be less prescriptive as a game week develops. “As you get closer towards the game, you’re looking at confidence versus correction” because sometimes less is more.
4. The coach is only part of the player’s journey
Between 2022 and 2023, Teague worked as a forwards and backs coach with Racing 92 where he had the opportunity to coach Finn Russell, who is widely considered one of the best fly-halves in the world.
Teague reflects on that period and what he refers to as the “culture of extras”, which is the work that the world’s best players continue to do on their basic skillsets.
“Finn would ask to do some extras when he thought it was right for him,” says Teague, who explains that Russell’s experience guided their training interactions. “Sometimes he’d do them on his own, sometimes he’d ask a coach to be there to give him some feedback, sometimes he’d want a coach there just to keep him company.”
Teague has also worked at school and underage level where he employed a more directive approach but in an environment like England or Racing, “telling them what to do probably isn’t the most intelligent thing.”
Instead, “I think the more players take control of their own skill development, the more you as a coach just have to be part of that journey, not driving that journey for them.”
5. Be patient, it’s a journey
The Leaders Performance Institute asks Teague what he knows now that he wished he knew whilst working as a skills coach.
“Skill acquisition takes a lot more time than I thought,” he says, adding that it could take a season for a goal kicker to become 10% better. “I don’t know if patience is a skill, but I wish I understood more about the learning journey of the player in terms of skill; that each player can pick things up at different rates.”
It comes back to the player-coach relationship. “Players need to take responsibility around what they want to be working on; and that’s a shared process with the coach. Obviously, if there’s something the player has really not identified that they need to work on, and if the coach has to tell them, then so be it.”
Teague will decide when to intervene, when to step back, and when to change the task.
“If you’re clever in your design, you can keep pushing and changing the design incrementally as you see the player evolving and becoming better. Equally, you can take it backwards if the player isn’t getting it. So it’s that ability to move up and down the bandwidth of the learning journey where, ‘OK, I’ve set the start point here at three, I need to go back to one before I can move to four, five and six’.”
6. Data informs, it does not decide
When it comes to using data in skill development, Teague describes it as a question of “data versus feel”.
He says: “You can look at the number of passes per game, for example, but then I think you have to really sit down, watch the video, watch the technique, watch the context, look at the environment that they’re in at that moment in time in the game, conditions; there’s lots of different things.”
As ever data must inform judgement, not replace it; it must provide a meaningful talking point. “I think data can serve its purpose, but what we don’t want to do is go too much down the data route without looking at the individual data moments in the game.”
As a final question, the Leaders Performance Institute asks Teague what advice he has for coaches working in skill development.
“Go and find the theory behind skill acquisition. I think it will change you. It will change mindsets, definitely.”
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The Nets recently opened the Brooklyn Basketball Training Center where a couple of weeks ago SBJ’s Joe Lemire had been invited to test the Shoot 360 tech its coaches use in training youth players.
Main Image: Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment
Across the street from Barclays Center, the Nets recently opened the Brooklyn Basketball Training Center where a couple of weeks ago I had been invited to test the Shoot 360 tech its coaches use in training youth players.
Standing in front of one of the baskets outfitted with Noah Basketball’s shot-tracking tech and Shoot 360’s graphical user interface, I awaited the pass, dribbled back across a few lines and confirmed with coach Michael Collins that I was now behind the NBA three-point line. I was. And so I took a shot.
The net swished, and the LED screen lit up green — Shoot 360’s Splash Zone confirmed that my shot’s arc, depth and left-right alignment were just about perfect. Bird would have been proud.
Or at least my fellow ginger sharpshooter, Brian Scalabrine, who looks like family and played for the Celtics and Nets. (My two-time fantasy basketball title team was named Big Scal’s Doppelgängers.)
The Nets have long run free youth basketball programs in the borough, reaching 40,000 kids annually through 235 schools as well as Boys & Girls Clubs and other community centers. But this space now gives them a centralized location to run daily programs, largely targeting children ages 6 to 17. The Shoot 360 tech, Collins noted, offers a range of drills and sills — even passing and dribbling — so kids have a balance of autonomy and structure, so they can “use this technology not only to create a workout, but then also have fun.”
Don’t take just my word for it, but my brother and I brought some of our kids — ages 9, 11 and 14 — to test out the tech. They loved it and didn’t want to leave despite working up a light sweat and pushing close to tip-off an NBA game.
Three stations have responsive, large-screen LEDs that show videos demonstrating technique and then offer interactive exercises. The kids were asked to dribble a certain way and then fire passes at numbered targets. At one point, the screen showed a memory game that also required passing accuracy: players bounced the ball off the card to flip it over.
“One of our main lenses is, how do we help players get better faster?” said Shoot 360 founder/CEO Craig Moody, a former college basketball coach.
The company’s founding story involved Moody seeing his teenage son and his friends prefer to play NBA2K inside rather than go outside and shoot hoops on a sunny day. “If I could build a gym like a video game,” Moody thought to himself, “I’d have it made.”
Just before our family visit, the training center hosted a group of young campers from NBA Brazil, while another international group visited a similar facility operated by the Cleveland Cavaliers. The coaching staffs at the two sites synced up the Shoot 360s at each location and organized a real-time contest — truly the video game ideal Moody had long envisioned.
Marissa Shorenstein, Chief External Affairs Officer at Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, said there’s a dual purpose to the franchise’s investment.
“We do it because we believe in giving back to the community, but we also do it because we know that engaging youth is the best way to engage long-term fandom for the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Liberty,” she said, noting that the Knicks, for example, have decades of inherited fandom whereas the Nets have only been in Brooklyn for 13 years and the Liberty for half that time. “For us, really creating that connective tissue with the community through the youth is what we believe is going to differentiate us long-term to build that generational growth.”
But there’s an appeal for adults, too. Collins said Nets players periodically pop in and shoot on the tech-enabled baskets. Jamal Crawford, Thad Young, Trae Young, Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart are among the former NBA and WNBA players to invest in Shoot 360. And weekend warrior adults (like me) had fun taking shots and getting feedback. It’s akin to what TopGolf, Home Run Dugout and other sport-tainment venues are offering.
“Where you have just the shooting piece, you don’t have to run up and play defense. You’re getting all the competition, you’re getting the social [element],” Moody said, adding, “We want people to play around the world for a lifetime.”
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
Leaders Performance Adviser Iain Brunnschweiler addresses the complex world of youth sport.
For all the experience in the virtual room – members that have spent decades working with youth athletes – each struggles to balance the elements that help young athletes to realise their potential.
“You’ll never solve it,” says Brunnschweiler, who has worked on successful talent pathways in both football and cricket. “The interesting part is how we make decisions and deliver on a strategic approach that’s appropriate for the context of the athlete.”
For the benefit of the virtual table, he outlined five common tensions that he has encountered on talent pathways:
The list is not exhaustive, but it is representative.
“The headline feedback from everyone at the roundtable is that probably they’re weaving down that ‘versus’ line in the middle when they’re doing this well,” adds Brunnschweiler.
He explains each tension in turn:
1. Group/Team learning vs Individual development
“Within your programme, how much time are you spending on team tactics, team interconnectivity, team culture, etc. versus identifying individual work-ons, individualised practices, individual focused development, individual prioritisation?”
2. Process focus vs Outcome/Match focus
“This is very similar to the first in many ways but, in my mind, is distinctly different. How much are you focusing on the process versus the outcome? And this is really around how you’re monitoring development. So if there’s a pathway lead or an academy director: are you looking at whether teams are winning when it comes to competition or are you looking at tracking progress against process markers that are embedded either within training or within the game?”
3. MDT staff input driving decisions vs Coaching/Technical staff driving decisions
“This is about athlete programming. How much of your emphasis is put on the ologists, multidisciplinary staff, the scientists versus coaching and technical staff? Who’s making the final call? How are you looking to integrate? What are the processes or systems that allow those two things to collide effectively? This was certainly one of the tensions that strongly resonated with the group.”
4. Holistic development of well‑rounded humans vs Targeted development of ruthless performers
“There’s been a massive growth in talent pathways around understanding the holistic nature of development and the growth in player care, support, psychology support, performance, wellbeing, and education off the pitch. The common question is ‘how do we develop well‑rounded humans?’ And the tension is someone saying ‘but surely it’s just about game performers can we spend all of our time targeting development of that ruthless in‑game performance?’”
5. Staff‑led teaching and guiding vs Player‑led discovery
“There’s a perception that it’s slower to do the player‑led, but it might be deeper; whereas it’s quicker and can feel more rewarding to do the staff‑led. ‘Let me tell you, here’s some guidance. Let me solve the problem for you.’”
Brunnschweiler then reflected on some of the available support mechanisms:
1. Consider if the athlete’s experience of a programme matches your teams’ intent. Much will depend on the athlete’s prior experiences, plus how and when they came to your programme.
“There’s a lot of insight generated around young athletes in all sports now and it’s like, well, how do you harness that background information as well as that current information you’re getting on them in order to make decisions around their programming?”
It requires a shared mental model between the different disciplines.
“There were some good examples at the roundtable where team culture means people’s view are respected, taken onboard and valued. And that’s utilised as a part of a decision-making approach.”
2. Retain coaches with age-specific expertise. Too little value is placed on age-group coaches, which can lead to those individuals seeking employment with more mature athletes.
“If I’m the first team coach, there’s a perception I’m better than the under-12s coach; whereas they’re equally challenging in different ways. Someone who’s brilliant at working with 10 to 12 year olds may end up working with older athletes because they get paid more.”
They may or may not be equipped to make that transition but he argues that teams can make it less of a problem by asking:
“Can you manipulate your wage structure to ensure these academy coaches stay valued within the role they’re best deployed in?”
3. Remember: well-rounded athlete can still possess an edge. While there is a desire to ensure holistic approaches that promote well-rounded development, there is a risk in taking it too far.
“There’s a danger that we over-index on compliance within pathways; and, actually, being an edgy, ruthless person is an imperative characteristic for an elite performance athlete.”
4. Development support for coaches. There is a time when a coach needs to be instructional and clear as well as a time when they need to skilfully draw a decision from an athlete.
“How do we provide learning and development support for coaches and other members of the MDT in this space so they can be skilful at learning design and skilful at knowing when to provide which approach based on the context and the athlete?”
5. Give the young athlete a sense of agency. Let young athletes speak in conversations around their IDPs and help them understand why things may feel challenging.
“I’ve seen people saying we want to put on sessions that look slick. That may or may not be the objective. It might also be that we’re really clear as a club that we think the deep learning and progress occurs in messy sessions where it’s clunky and we’re allowing players to play and solve problems. As coaches, we should be the best problem-setters.”
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Owl AI’s software would have flipped the gold and silver medalists at the women’s slopestyle in Milano Cortina.
Main Image: AFP via Getty Images
The women’s snowboard slopestyle finish prompted immediate criticism for the judges who awarded Japan’s Mari Fukada the gold (with a score of 87.83) and New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott (87.48) the silver — with notable reactions from NBC analyst Todd Richards and others.
The frustration focused on the inconsistency of scoring on jumps — specifically Fukada’s high scoring on the 720s (two full rotations) in her routine, while Sadowski-Synnott’s attempted more difficult 1080s (three full rotations) as part of her set. And it hit the exact reason why Bloom founded the tech startup to begin with — and in this case, the difference between silver and gold after a rejudging from Owl.
This graph shows the data sets utilized by Owl AI to determine that the women’s snowboard slopestyle at the Milano Cortina Games should have likely flipped the gold and silver finishes for the event. (Graphic used courtesy of Owl AI.)
“I don’t think much needs to be said about how important these moments are for the athletes,” Bloom told SBJ. “They’ve worked their entire lives to just make an Olympic team, let alone put down the best run and either miss the podium or have the wrong color medal for whatever reason.”
To check the medal finish, Owl AI created a data set to look back at the past five years of judging for both 720s and 1080s. What it discovered: The two scores Fukada earned in Milan Cortina on her 720s (7.7 and 8.3, respectively) stood out drastically. The scores on Sadowski-Synnott’s 1080s were also near the peak of scoring for the moves but still very in line historically with the judging from which Owl pulled.
Owl rejudging still slates Kokomo Murase as the bronze winner. But it flipped the finishes of Fukada (with an 86.67 adjusted score) and Sadowski-Synnott’s (89.13).
“This is where we really think we could augment the judges,” said Josh Gwyther, Owl AI’s CEO. “Because if you, as a judge, are putting in a score and immediately saw this deviation, you might be like, ‘Okay, let me see, Is there something there?’ And maybe notate that anomaly.”
Both Bloom and Gwyther have often shared that Owl is not meant to replace judges but to be a helpful tool to set everyone (judges, athletes, fans) up for success around an event. But because judges can vary in their experience, background, and biases, Owl becomes guardrails of context. For example, Bloom pointed out, 720s won the men’s version of this event in the 2006 Olympics. It’s no longer a cutting-edge move, which should be reflected in the score.
Because Olympic moments happen at a four-year frequency, it adds extra pressure to make these decisions as correct as possible.
“On one hand, you want to honor those who won,” said Bloom, a former world champion and two-time Olympic skier. “You want to say, listen, on this day, given this criteria, that’s your gold medal. And any sort of commentary beyond that shouldn’t sort of diminish you because that was their day.
“But at the same time, if that athlete or any athlete would agree that there’s a lot of subjectivity to these sports and everybody would like to push for a more objective world.”
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