By John Portch

John Crawley explains that athletes have turned away from their sport because they have been left burnt out from 24-7 attention.

Whether it’s high performance or data-related (or even the regular anti-doping tests), it can be intrusive and dehumanising.

“While I appreciate the opportunity for data to inform decision making, I also think we have to be really careful about too much information clouding our judgement, too much information getting in the way of relationships, and too much information turning into surveillance that turns athletes away from sport itself,” says Crawley, the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee’s High Performance Director for team sports.

“We’ve lost athletes because of that,” he continues. “Let’s be honest here: there are athletes who have said ‘once this is over with I want to have my life back’.”

Such micromanagement would not be tolerated in other fields, he believes, and no athlete wants to feel like “a pin cushion that is being monitored 24 hours a day; and if anything is perceived to be off or not optimised then something is wrong and there needs to be an intervention.

“I think we have to be really careful about that.”

Crawley was a contributor to our Teamworks Special Report earlier this year and candidly shares his thoughts on the consequences of the growing sophistication and complexity of high performance environments.

“While increasingly specialised areas of service and support present a challenge, there is also an opportunity to be more reflective and critical around how and why things are evolving the way they are,” he says.

“We want to get back to what these systems were designed to do, making sure that they are operating in the most effective manner possible without becoming overly burdensome, intrusive, or otherwise counterproductive.”

Here, Crawley reflects on how the high performance system may get there.

Coaching, connecting and caring

Crawley recalls a conversation with a friend who happens to be a serial-winning US coach. That coach had three focuses for the LA cycle, telling Crawley ‘I want to focus on coaching, connecting and caring.’

“Coaches have the ability to cut right to the heart of it,” says Crawley.

Don’t always add – try to take away

Crawley remains open-minded to new ideas and approaches but in some respects his approach has evolved from where it might have been 20 years ago. He’s gone from routinely exploring where he can add services or modalities, to asking the opposite. “Are there things that we don’t need to be doing anymore that are getting in the way? Are there things that are counterproductive to ultimately what we’re trying to do? Are there things that are too invasive? Are we getting away from connection between the provider and the athlete and are we now operating more through a filter of some kind of technological gadget?” he says.

“I’m asking more critical questions to get to the heart of why things are being done, their impact, and ensuring we are being supportive and not being overly prescriptive or dehumanising those interactions in any way.”

How does the athlete experience us?

Crawley is also wary of the myriad voices an athlete will hear each day. He says: “When we think about design and implementation, one of the things that’s really important for us to understand is how does the athlete experience this? How many different voices are they hearing and how many different perspectives are they getting? How can we think with the end in mind and bring that back to how we operate as a team?”

It becomes a question of wellbeing. “Unless their personal lives are supported as well – mental capabilities, emotional support, educational desires, professional desires, career aspirations, etcetera – I don’t think the athletes would be in the best position to really aspire towards their ultimate athletic aspirations.”

Surveillance versus support

Crawley stresses that he is not a Luddite but, when using tech, he says: “we have to be mindful of moving into a space of surveillance versus a space of support and there needs to be a strong distinction made between the two.”

The tech must prove to be a demonstrable asset. “I think there is real value in what we’re doing but I also want to have a sober assessment of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, how we’re doing it and, going back to what that coach said, I want to be able to coach with my full capability, I want to be able to connect to the individuals, the human being, and I want to be able to care for them and myself. How can I best go about doing that? What’s going to pull me in that direction and what’s going to push me away?”

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Your Team Is Probably Not as Aligned as you Think, But you Can Get Better at it

By John Portch

In sporting terms, the conductor of an orchestra most resembles the head coach.

British conductor Toby Purser also serves as Head of Conducting at the Royal College of Music [RCM], which makes him an educator too.

“There’s always an element in conducting of being a trainer because you are literally coaching the orchestra in what it is you want musically,” says Purser from the stage of the Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall at the RCM in London.

The question of teaching vs coaching in youth contexts comes up time and again during the day’s programme at Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey.

There is a subtle distinction, which was succinctly expressed by Eric Reveno, the Associate Head Men’s Basketball Coach at Stanford University, in words that resonated this week on LinkedIn.

‘A teacher is responsible for making sure you know what to do,’ he wrote. ‘A coach is responsible for making sure you do it.’

In musical terms, the conductor creates the environment for musicians to perform. “It isn’t just about dictating,” adds Purser. “It’s about being open, listening, and knowing how to process the information you hear reflected back at you.”

A performance will succeed or fail based on how well the conductor “adapts what you do to the way your ensemble is understanding you”.

A good conductor must have a strong feeling or vision but “be open enough to allow people around you to be individual, to have their own personality, to have their own talent on show for the audience. The more empowered an orchestra feels, the better the final result.”

Here, we look at both elements of Purser’s work in turn.

The conductor as coach

Purser’s expert musical ear is similar to a coach’s tactical intuition. He has a vision for the music and, if the violins in an orchestra are playing the same thing but not in the same way, he must act. It starts with a ‘feeling’ – you need to know who is right and who is wrong – and it ends with the musicians making the correction.

“Your job a little bit like a doctor in a way, you have to evaluate what’s wrong with this body,” he says. “Sometimes the reason some people can’t hear each other is because of the acoustics or it might be because of the way they’re sitting.”

Rather than “go back to basics” – professional orchestras don’t require technical instruction – “what you are primarily doing is enabling them to know how to listen to each other and also when to step forward into the limelight.”

This must stem from the conductor’s vision. “If everyone in the orchestra just played what was on their page it would be awful, noisy and unbalanced. The trumpets would be too loud – they’re too loud anyway! – you also wouldn’t have any kind of leadership or musical direction behind it. Just a series of notes that didn’t hang together.

“So as a conductor, you’re trying to explain to an orchestra in the easiest way possible what the intention is behind the music. And the intention is not only the big emotional idea, but the person you need to listen to and accompany at any particular moment.

“I would say 90% of your work as a conductor is getting that balance right.”

And in delivering the remedy, less is always more. There are even some elements that he will leave musicians to correct on their own. “If something goes wrong in a performance you need to do less,” says Purser. “The worst mistake you can make is to suddenly conduct really big and with huge energy thinking that you’re going to bring it back by throwing yourself around. When you leap around, you kick energy in all directions and it becomes unclear. Like ripples in water. If you drop too many stones in all you can see is waves when you want something really clear.”

There is also a psychological element. “You can feel the room,” says Purser of rehearsals. “Is the orchestra in the mood for the sort of things you want to work on or is it better to wait for later?”

He must trust his instincts. One time that meant losing his temper one time, in Russia, when he snapped after two days of being “very English, polite and collegial”.

“Oh, maestro,” said the suddenly impressed concert master (the first violinist) at the outburst, “we just needed you to pull your weight.”

“It was just the case that the orchestra needed somebody to be a bit of a tyrant in order to get the result, which means you have to go against your own nature because you have to give the orchestra what they need.”

The conductor as teacher

Purser explains that truly great conductors have an innate qualities, which is why just two students are admitted to the RCM’s conductors’ master’s course each year (although 150 students take conducting as a secondary study).

He says: “What we’re looking for is not so much that somebody comes in and conducts the best Beethoven symphony we’ve ever heard,  it’s more about seeing that magic thing which is sometimes a conductor changes the sound of an orchestra without saying anything”.

The RCM can work on a student conductor’s taste, but it’s almost impossible to put into them the “spark of genius”.

Purser will work to identify if the student candidate has the right attributes by asking probing questions that force them to dig deep. “This is something you have to be psychologically sensitive about,” he continues. “Sometimes you need to get into somebody’s personal space to force something out of them.”

Conducting is, Purser estimates, “90% in the head”. “You spend your time at your desk reading notes and building a mental image. Transferring that from the brain to something more physical and passionate can be a big leap for some students.

“You need to encourage them, as soon as they’re in front of an orchestra, to let go of the brain.”

The reasons are practical too. “If you lead with your feelings you can make a quicker decision than if you go through all the pros and cons in your head first.”

The RCM approach in general is to “help people have confidence in their opinions and ideas and be able to express them.”

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When it Comes to Learning, the Coach Must Create the Right Environment, But the Athlete Must Want to Step into it

By Joe Lemire

Sony’s newly engineered NFL Coach’s Headsets will soon be appearing on the sidelines with a series of new innovations to ensure proper noise-cancellation, vocal clarity, comfort and durability regardless of the weather.

The custom-made headsets — developed in less than a year since the NFL and Sony announced their wide-ranging partnership — borrow some features from their high-end consumer headphones while incorporating a new highly-directional mic to isolate the coach’s voice and new water resistance to ensure operability in all conditions.

The new Sony-branded headsets were tested in the background on NFL sidelines last season and were distributed to team coaching staffs late last month in advance of training camps opening this week.

“Sony engineers visited each of the sidelines — they heard feedback from the coaches to make sure that what are some of the points that they should be addressing?” said NFL VP/Football Technology Rama Ravindranathan. “So it’s an iterative development process where Sony engineers partnered with NFL IT, football operations, game operations, to ensure every bit of the feedback was gathered and consolidated.”

That included data collection of hottest and coldest NFL games from the past 20 years, as well as recording crowd noise from a Monday Night Football game at SoFi Stadium where the volume exceeded 100 decibels.

Shunsuke Nakahashi, Product Manager for Audio at Sony, said engineers replicated that noise in a special studio in Tokyo, wore the headsets in the shower and in large refrigerators to test its all-conditions functionality. The belt pack connects to the Verizon private network in use in all stadiums. Ravindranathan said that was tested by the yellow hat-wearing communications technicians last season as “coach proxies.”

“We use the insights and principle from XM6,” Nakahashi said, referring to the top Sony consumer product, “and also we have a deep engineering foundation in precision sound and also vocal clarity.”

The Sony lettering on the headsets is large and unmistakable and becomes some of the most visible on-field signage, said NFL SVP/Sponsorship Tracie Rodburg, noting that Sony joins Nike, Gatorade and Microsoft among the most prominent branding. Sponsorship of the NFL headsets had been vacant for two years since Bose exited its deal after eight seasons of holding that inventory.

“Working with Sony, we’re both committed to innovation,” she said, adding: “We want to make sure everybody knows that we have a trusted partner on the sideline.”

While the new Sony headsets are custom-built for the demands of NFL coaches, some of the newly developed features might eventually trickle their way down to the broader market.

“Right now, we’re just razor-focused on delivering the NFL Coach’s Headset, but once everything is settled, then probably we can foresee what element we can bring to the consumer,” Nakahashi said.

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.

By Joe Lemire

You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.

* * * * *

Alistair Brownlee is a two-time Olympic champion triathlete, winning gold in the 2012 and 2016 events. He later competed in half-Ironmans, twice earning silver in the world championships at that distance.

Since announcing his retirement last November, the 37-year-old has grown increasingly immersed in business. He co-founded a nutrition brand, TrueFuels, and has invested in more than 20 startups. Brownlee is an associate partner at Redrice Ventures and a member of the IOC Athletes’ Commission who consults on human performance and emerging technologies. He also leads The Brownlee Foundation, the charitable endeavor he started with his Olympic triathlete brother, Jonny.

On the impact of tech in his career…

Some technology happens in, let’s call it, a relatively linear progression. But the example of a technology that hasn’t happened in a linear progression is shoe tech, which is incredible. Of course, there were small innovations here and there in shoes, using slightly different forms of rubber soles. Then, all of a sudden, we see a steep change in innovation, with using the light, thicker foam and inserting the carbon rods that we started seeing probably 2018, 2019 and really exploded in 2020 and ’21.

The real innovation in terms of technology, for me, is training attitudes and approaches, which isn’t as sexy and obvious. I saw technological progressions on every form, in terms of attitudes, in terms of the scientific approach to training, in terms of the equipment we’re using, whether that is shoes or bikes. I started out with a bike that was all made of metal and your gear-changing happened very manually, and I went to electric gears with a power meter on a bike that was mostly carbon fiber.

Technological innovation is across all those different domains. In terms of tech, like hardcore tech — wearables and monitoring and having an impact on training — I started out in a world where [there was] a stopwatch and you might use a heart rate monitor as your primary training monitoring devices. I remember, as a 16-year-old, using a heart rate monitor and starting to use the first GPS watches to now where there’s all kinds of training monitoring devices, whether that’s internal — heart rate monitoring, HRV, muscle oxygenation — to external: power meters, GPS watches and bike computers.

 

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On his business interests…

I did a finance master’s at university, and so that business approach always interested me. I always had an attitude that I wanted to invest and build value for the long term because I knew that my athletic career won’t last forever, so that was an important aspect to me. Some of my early sponsorship deals had bits of equity in them. So a business like Boardman Bikes, for example, that was a big sponsor of mine from the early days — part of that was an equity deal.

I also had always been interested in businesses that can be a solution to make people perform better in elite sport but also perform better in terms of living healthier, active lifestyles. Obviously, backing great people to make great companies and great solutions is part of the answer. It’s not the whole answer — government plays a role in that, and charities play a role in that — but also great private businesses play a role in that.

On the impact of AI…

AI will affect sport in every different domain, as it’ll have an impact on all our lives in every domain. It will affect how people train. It will affect how people integrate data, use data, interact with data, how they’ll use all that information to prescribe their training going forwards, how it will help people understand more and deeper insights in recovery.

In terms of how we engage fans, obviously, there’s going to be massive changes there — engaging fans on a really personal level to watch events and interact with athletes and teams. Whether that’s camera angles or following a particular player or athlete or learning more about them as the events are happening, or learning more about how you can engage in whatever that sport might be, whether it’s badminton or football or triathlon or whatever.

The IOC are looking at it from an organization point of view as well. How can you use that technology to be more efficient? Use energy better, help people get in and out of stadia better.

On co-founding TrueFuels…

I was always being fascinated by maximizing human performance, and my [approach to] nutrition probably came out of me developing my own fuels in the last few years to race on was a challenge. I’ve got a feeling that the majority of people for whom a marathon or an Ironman or whatever endurance challenge goes wrong, nutrition is the primary reason for that.

 

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I had this idea of, how do you create a brand that is about helping the consumer to understand what they need, to make sure that nutrition isn’t the limiting factor for the event, whatever the event that they’re doing? The combination of that is product and education and community.

On his role with Redrice…

I invested on my own, joined local angel networks and got known to invest in sports businesses. Over the last few years, I only really invested alongside various VC funds, one of those was Redrice. I got to know the team at Redrice over the last couple of years. They’re a consumer VC, but my thesis is that everything is going to become more wellness-based over the next five or 10 years, especially the consumer market. And we see all kinds of evidence of that increasing spend on wellness, especially in the younger demographic who are spending proportionally more on wellness than older people. Health and wellness is becoming a luxury signal.

I started talking about a role with them as they work towards investing more in this space, and we came up with the idea of a sports collective that I’m leading and Andy Murray is a part of it.

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.

By Joe Lemire

The FIFA Club World Cup has not only been “a perfect test case” for trialing innovations that might debut at the men’s FIFA World Cup 26, but it also has marked the grand unveiling of the Football Technology Center AG.

That’s the joint venture created last November by FIFA and Hawk-Eye Innovations with an initial charge of assisting referees and automating data collection.

FIFA and Sony-owned Hawk-Eye first debuted Semi-Automated Offsides Technology at the Qatar World Cup in 2022, and now it has created an enhanced version of it. Only calls in which a player is within 10 centimeters of the offsides line require manual oversight from an official. Also at this tournament, the tabulation of event data — everything from shots, passes, corner kicks and the like — has been automated with computer vision algorithms, supplanting what historically had always been a very manual process.

Early feedback has been positive, putting those innovations on track for an appearance at next year’s tournament. The quadrennial World Cup typically serves as a debut for new tech. Goal-line technology first appeared in 2014, VAR in 2018 and SAOT in 2022.

“We recognize that, in order to do stuff which is pretty game-changing, you have to do it on a two-, three-, four-year cycle,” Rufus Hack, the CEO of Sony’s sports businesses, told SBJ. “It doesn’t take a year to develop the technology, to implement it, to refine it, to test it, to introduce it. And so we came on this concept of, let’s do an eight-year joint venture where, effectively, they put in some of their IP, some of their technology, their football expertise. We put in people, our technology expertise, our learnings from other sport.”

The vision of the FTC

The Football Technology Center is based in Zurich, like FIFA, and relies on dedicated personnel from both FIFA and Hawk-Eye. In lieu of a CEO, it is steered by a board of directors, consisting of Hawk-Eye’s Hack and Managing Director Ben Crossing and FIFA’s Dir of Innovation Johannes Holzmüller and Technical Director Steve Martens. There is also a separate joint operational management committee with equal representation from both entities.

“We see this as potentially the Football Technology Center creating new football technologies, assets and IP, which then can potentially be commercialized-slash-distributed to the rest of the sport,” Hack said. “Ultimately, FIFA are very much about looking to democratize sports technology down to the member associations,” referring to the 211 countries and territories across six continents that are represented by FIFA.

“For us, this is less about a significant revenue opportunity of being able to create new products,” he added. “It’s more about being able to be thought leaders and sitting side by side with FIFA, who are effectively the guardians of football technology in the game, to be able to do these new innovations, and then potentially working together to distribute some of that for the rest of the football community.”

Hawk-Eye’s cameras and algorithms capture data from 29 points on the human body, so a player’s limbs, hands and feet are fully tracked. That generates millions of datapoints per game, but FIFA sought practical use of it.

“We have high-quality data available, but at the end of the day, we also want to have valuable information — an outcome, not only for officiating, but also for other areas,” Holzmüller said. “We needed to have some vehicle where we can develop and explore how this data can be used in the future.”

The lead time for many of these projects is long, but there other avenues that can be explored. For instance, Hack said it might be possible in the future to use technology to determine whether that ball has gone out of bounds or whether it struck a player’s hand or other part of the body.

“We believe in these big, long-term strategic partnerships,” Hack said. “We believe it provides a much better opportunity for the rightsholder and partner to co-invest alongside each other and genuinely feels like a partnership, rather than that buyer/supplier relationship.”

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.

By John Portch

The reality of being available to everyone 24-7 is spelled out by a coach from Australia.

“I have a relentless stream of calls and messages,” she said. “It’s hard to sleep when your phone is on all night.”

The system may recognise the need to look after staff wellbeing but “the reality is that organisations might not understand the challenges staff face on the ground at camps and tours.”

The challenges are systemic and cultural, as Leaders Performance Institute members continually pointed out during a recent Virtual Roundtable on the creation of healthy environments in sport.

“Regardless of what you have written down on a piece of paper, the culture is that you know everyone is there all the time pushing for performance, because that’s what’s required when you’re at the top end of things,” said a sports scientist working in Canada.

“How do you chip away at that over time and shift people’s perspective to this idea that ‘I’m actually a detriment to my team when I show up not at my best, so out of respect for my teammates, I need to make sure I’m ready to be here’?”

The group put their finger on five enduring challenges and, while there’s no perfect solution in a world where the ‘martyr mindset’ still holds sway, five ways to better support coaches and staff.

Challenge #1: The typical focus on the athlete often comes at the expense of the coach

Athlete wellbeing is considered paramount. While understandable, but it can too often come at the expense of coaches and other staff.

“We’ve had athlete wellbeing and engagement in place for more than ten years. We still don’t have coach wellbeing and engagement in place at all.”

Response: Find space for coach and staff wellbeing in your strategy

You may face budgetary constraints and cultural reticence, but you can’t take away the stigma attached to asking for help without providing wellbeing services.

It can be as simple as baking wellbeing-based KPIs into your performance reviews, as is the case in the Australian system courtesy of its High Performance 2032+ Sport Strategy.

The Australian system also provides coaches and staff with access to the Australian Institute of Sport’s mental health referral network.

Challenge #2: Coaches don’t always want or seek help

The aforementioned ‘martyr’s mindset’ often makes coaches instinctively reluctant to seek help.

“We do offer our coaches mental health support. Very few of them take advantage of it. It speaks to the challenge of what are the things that are going to make a difference.”

Response: Encourage coaches and staff to develop work friendships

There’s no silver bullet, but it helps to talk. “One of the highest predictors of employee satisfaction is if that person has a best friend at work,” said a wellness director from the US. “You want a culture that encourages relationships to be formed organically.”

Challenge #3: Presenteeism

All coaches need an extended break from time to time. As one attendee said, “it’s about creating environments where it’s safe to take leave. So you feel relaxed when you’re on leave. Not like, ‘shit, things are falling apart”.

“Too often the culture makes coaches think ‘If I’m not here, then I’m not seen to be fully committed.’”

Response: Paint presenteeism as irresponsible

Stepping back is often the responsible thing to do. “Respect your team and don’t be selfish by turning up,” said a performance coach from New Zealand.

It can also help to arrange staff cover when people are taking a break. “We spend a lot of time setting up partnerships that allow performance support staff to be backfilled and allow them to have time off when they’ve been away at world championships,” said a performance director from Australia, although they also admitted it can be harder to cover for coaches.

Challenge #4: Risk-based approaches to wellbeing have made us reactive, not proactive

The volume of high-profile duty of care failures in sport has led to a risk-based, reactive approach to wellbeing. Teams too often wait for things to go wrong but, as a wellbeing manager from Australia said, “compliance should be the bare minimum”.

“Unfortunately, it’s an easier conversation with your board when you’re talking about risk rather than the potential opportunity or the performance-enabling aspect.”

Response: Take a more personalised approach

“We’re starting to have more individualised conversations with people,” said the Canadian sports scientist.

“We want to get into the habit of doing things a little bit differently and recognise that you can’t show up at your best 24-7.” The question they seek to ask is: “What stress do we need to take off of you in order for you to feel like you’re at your best?”

Challenge #5: Too much focus on technical expertise

An old trope that needs little explaining.

“Our practitioner education system is about your ability to deliver your expertise and communicate technical things well. Your role in supporting wellbeing, or even looking after your own wellbeing, isn’t really covered at all.”

Response: Demonstrate that wellbeing and performance are indivisible

It sounds obvious when someone from within the system spells it out. “Ultimately we are human, and if our wellbeing is going well, we’re much more likely to perform when we’re creating those environments,” said the Australian wellbeing manager.

It should be integral to coach development programmes and role modelled by leaders.

“I try to model taking time off when I’m feeling tired, admitting, ‘OK, I just need a personal day, guys, I’m just feeling a bit rough’,” said a wellness manager from the US system.

There is also a tacit acknowledgement of this link between wellbeing and performance from even the most resistant head coaches.

“If we challenged the culture by working with assistant coaches, hopefully creating the next generation of head coaches that are willing to prioritise their wellbeing, then the assistant coaches were viewed as the threat,” said a US college-based performance coach.

It is important to encourage wellbeing for all.

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When it Comes to Learning, the Coach Must Create the Right Environment, But the Athlete Must Want to Step into it

By John Portch

“We know that learning has to be important because if you’re out-learning your competitors, you’re probably going to be outperforming them too.”

So says Edd Vahid, the Premier League’s Head of Academy Football Operations.

The numbers as revealed in our Trend Report back him up. Almost one in five practitioners who completed our survey felt that learning and development had a direct impact on the quality of leadership in their teams.

“It has to come from senior leaders, it must be role-modelled from the top,” Vahid adds. “Role models are crucial in setting the tone for organisational learning.”

When it comes to teaching and learning, he has advice for coaches and athletes alike.

For coaches

Create the right environment…

The skill of the teacher, coach or trainer is to create an environment where you’ve got the capacity to learn, to receive feedback, and for it not to be immediately critical.

That means creating opportunities…

If you’re learning and you’re able to apply it, you’re going to see progress. You need the opportunity to because therein lies the application of knowledge.

You must also work to understand how people learn…

I think we could probably spend more time on this as an industry. To support an individual, you need to understand an individual, to understand an individual, you need to invest time in them. People learn where there’s been care, an attentiveness, and an investment in the person. The coach needs to understand what makes someone tick beyond the superficial level. What are their influences? What is creating an impact on them when turning up to do a session? What’s going on at home? Such considerations are crucial.

Also ask yourself: what are you trying to achieve?

What outcome are you trying to achieve? That will determine the approach, timing and future support. If you simply use feedback as an opportunity to offload, especially when a learner hasn’t done well, it may serve your benefit because you’ve been able to get rid of some of your frustrations. But that’s not right. To help them, you have to offer them something they haven’t seen themselves or it’s going to drive them further down.

Enable good feedback loops…

It starts with an expectation. The feedback is specific to that expectation. Then identify what the development opportunities are. So how do you avoid or improve a certain situation in the future? Then there’s the monitoring.

Inviting people to share their feedback on the process is an important part of the feedback loop. The best coaches plan but they’re also responding to emerging themes and the needs of players within a particular session. It goes back to understanding the player’s needs and considering those in session design. We probably don’t seek their feedback often enough. Ask simple questions: how is this working for you? What’s landing? What influences that? Are you progressing?

For the athlete

And learners must be adaptive…

We each have our learning preferences – others will be better equipped to talk about the myths that surround learning styles and other elements – but you have to find a way to respond to the stimulus in the environment. If you haven’t had opportunities how are you going to accelerate your learning without the chance to compete?

That means there has to be personal responsibility…

You see it all the time: the highest performers, whether implicitly or explicitly, go out of their way to make sure they’re ready to learn. There has to be personal responsibility when it comes to how you turn up to learn, how prepared you are to absorb the information that’s available in the environment, whether that’s through players, coaches or other ways. You must be prepared to learn.

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From the Practice Room to the World Stage: How the Royal College of Music Prepares its Students for Careers as Musicians

Main Image: courtesy of NOCSAE

By Joe Lemire

The number of American youth playing tackle football has declined precipitously in the past decade, largely driven by concerns over concussions and other head impacts.

The Sports & Fitness Industry Association reported that 758,000 youth ages 6-12 were regularly playing tackle football as of 2023, which is down from 965,000 who consistently played a decade ago in 2015 — a 21% decrease. And those who do play have been wearing helmets certified by a safety standard primarily with adults in mind, not kids.

That is now changing, as the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, which first established safety guidelines for football helmets in 1973, is introducing its first youth football helmet standard specifically designed to protect players before they reach high school.

While the existing NOCSAE testing standards minimized impact energy in all helmets, from youth to pros, this more targeted measure should offer further protection to those players participating in leagues affiliated with Pop Warner, American Youth Football, USA Football and similar organizations.

“That’s been really very effective in preventing injuries in kids, too,” renowned neurosurgeon and NOCSAE Vice President Dr Robert Cantu said of the standard previously in place, “but we are very well aware of the fact that kids are not miniature adults. They have unique situations. Their brains are not as myelinated. Their necks are quite weak, so their head is a bobblehead doll. Their heads are quite big when they’re young, and quite heavy. And the types of hits that they take in football are not the same as older kids take.”

Peer-reviewed, university-led research more than a decade in the making drove the new youth standard led by NOCSAE’s Scientific Advisory Committee, which Cantu chairs. The most critical change in the new mandate, which goes into effect in March 2027 to give manufacturers time to adapt, is that helmets for the youngest players — facemask included — cannot exceed 3.5 pounds.

Only a few manufacturers already make sufficiently light youth football helmets, such as Light, Riddell and Schutt, but they represent a limited selection in the market. Light CEO Nicholas Esayian explained that heavier helmets typically fare better in lab tests but often don’t serve the needs of players on the field, especially younger players.

While the NFL and NFLPA have led pioneering work to test helmets for that league and NOCSAE has continued to iterate and improve its standards required at the pro, collegiate and high school levels, the youth player had been overlooked.

“Everybody tends to think, well, as long as they’re not going any faster than the [older] guys up above, then the helmet should be OK,” said Mike Oliver, who served as NOCSAE executive director for 20 years before stepping down this spring and remaining as the organization’s general counsel. “But the comment was made that we really don’t know what the risk exposure is. So how likely are you to get hit at some velocity versus hitting the ground versus hitting another player?”

Research funded by NOCSAE and led by professors Steve Rowson (Virginia Tech) and Blaine Hoshizaki (University of Ottawa) investigated head impacts, collecting data from sensors, triangulated cameras and predictive modeling in youth players. Rowson looked at ages 10 through 14, while Hoshizaki focused on ages 5 through 9. The results were surprising, Oliver said, noting that “the younger group actually had the higher head accelerations in games and practices than the older group, and turns out the primary reason is they hit the ground more often.”

New standards for helmets are designed to provide more protection for young players before they reach high school. (Image courtesy of NOCSAE)

While most governmental agencies require only self-certification of compliance, NOCSAE, an independent nonprofit, has required third-party certification since 2015, with manufacturers needing accredited institutions to assess products.

Cantu previously has recommended that there not be any tackle football for children younger than 14, but that’s his personal position. With NOCSAE, he views his role as ensuring best practices.

“If somebody is going to be doing something, I feel very strongly that I would like to be, if I can, helpful in making the activity as safe as absolutely possible,” he said.

There’s a compounding effect with head impacts. There’s greater research and understanding that the accumulation of sub-concussive hits can lead to problems over time, so minimizing that exposure early can pay dividends.

“To the extent we can attenuate the forces the brain sees, even if it’s 10%, that’s meaningful over thousands of hits to the head over a lengthy career playing a sport,” Cantu said.

New NOCSAE Executive Director John Parsons previously served as director of the NCAA Sport Science Institute and indicated the importance of how the college and pro games have taken steps to modify rules to mitigate risk of all head impacts.

“The conversation has shifted a little bit, so we’re not only just talking about concussion, but we’re also talking about head impact exposure,” Parsons said.

To date, NOCSAE has funded roughly $12 million in grants for researching concussions in sports. In addition to the work done by Rowson and Hoshizaki, the SAC reviewed more than 40 other studies related to injury risk in youth football to help inform the new policy. The weight limit is the biggest change, but the youth standard also has a lower threshold for acceptable rotational acceleration, as that type of impact is shown to cause injuries.

What neither the new standard nor the one for older players requires is any particular material or shape.

“Our standards are intentionally design neutral,” Oliver said. “Technology is moving pretty quickly, and if we did that, our standard may specify something today and six months from now, there’s something better, or there’s something new. And so we don’t do that, and it’s one of the reasons why you see such a divergence of engineering approaches to helmet design, whether it’s pro or otherwise.”

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.

By John Portch

As both a musician and a teacher, Ashley Solomon says “I must put my neck on the block” and be willing to perform for the students whom he tutors.

Solomon is the Chair and Head of Historical Performance at the Royal College of Music – the capacity in which he took to the college’s stage at April’s Leaders Meet: the Talent Journey – but he is also a world-renowned flautist and Director of an award-winning ensemble named Florilegium.

When Florilegium were booked to perform at central London’s Wigmore Hall in March, it was the perfect opportunity for Solomon to show his students how it’s done.

“I managed to persuade the hall to offer some under-35s £5 tickets and I said to my students ‘it costs you more to buy a pint in the pub, so if I’m not worth more than that I’m very upset’,” he says.

“As a result, 30 of them came, which was wonderful for the hall, because it tends to be full of white-haired people of a certain age. They could see me and my colleagues try to promote what we teach them to do. Part of my job here is to try and inspire the next generation to be better than me.”

Solomon tells the audience that he tutors a range of bachelors, masters and PhD students but, as he explains, “it’s no good having the theory without being able to do the practice.”

Here, in his own words, Solomon explains how the Royal College of Music prepares gifted students for careers as musicians.

It is best to spot the talent when it’s not fully formed… The Royal College of Music is one of the greatest institutions in the world, so we rarely have people apply who don’t think they have a chance of getting in, but we have hundreds apply for a small number of places. You have to spot their potential during the audition phase.

If they have passions beyond their music, I’m not interested… The last question I like to ask undergraduate candidates is usually the most telling: ‘is there anything else that you’re passionate about?’ I lose interest in those that give me a list of other things. We’re training elite athletes and you have to be so single-minded and you have to make so many sacrifices to be absolutely the top of your game emotionally, physically and mentally. If they’re distracted, then I’m not sure this is the right place for them.

Where the talent is not exceptional, there must be a glimmer of excitement when they play… You hear it in a sound, in a music shape, in the passion, the moment when the hairs on your arms stand on end. It might not be the best playing in the room but there’s been something that touched you.

Students from more deprived areas are the most interesting… Most of those who come at undergraduate level have either been to specialist music schools or their parents have paid for private instrumental lessons. They know their talent and you can see those who walk into the building from a music school. They have confidence – I wouldn’t use the word ‘arrogance’ – and feel comfortable here. Students from our Tri-Borough Hubs [government-funded music schools in the west London area], on the other hand, are desperate to impress and there’s a different energy about them. We might think a little differently about those students when they apply if they’re not quite achieving the highest level because you see the potential and the fire in their eyes. That’s worth much more than being able to do it all – if you can do it all you’re actually quite hard to teach.

An ego is a healthy thing… I tell my students that I have a healthy ego. Otherwise why would I want to stand in front of 2,000 people and play? That’s to be embraced. There’s no point in being falsely modest about it if you’re really good and you’ve done years of training. You should know you have the skill to deliver in your back pocket. How do you feed off an audience who are fidgeting? Many of you here today will have seen our performance simulator. We show students what it’s like to be in the green room before the concert, to walk onto the stage to the applause, to cope with the silence before you play. We have students here who delight in all those areas and who have the healthy ego required to develop those skillsets.

As a teacher, it’s important to know what not to say… I’ve spent a lot of lessons saying to myself ‘that won’t flick the switch on if I make that comment’. You need to look for that kernel of words that will draw out of that person exactly what you want without being too explicit. Like all of you, I carry with me things that don’t work and know not to repeat those.

We try to replicate the profession while they are students… the best way of seeing how musicians cope is to take them on tour. Every two years we take a group of students to perform at a festival in the heart of the Bolivian Amazon. We tell them it’s an eight-hour coach journey, followed by a two-hour rehearsal and the show. You’ve got to drink plenty of water and eat sensibly because musicians need to know when to release the right energy for you to deliver the goods. We don’t wait until the last minute to push them over the edge and say ‘sink or swim’.

We support all graduates for the first five years of their careers… We can’t just say ‘thank you, now off you go’. We have a careers advice department and help them to make connections in the industry.

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By Joe Lemire

The so-called robot umpires are poised to receive a big league call-up in 2026, following MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred’s announcement that he plans to propose that ABS — the technology’s official name, for automated ball-strike system — be implemented for major league regular-season games next season.

But it won’t be the first top league to do so. The Korean Baseball Organization has had ABS in place for two seasons. Its robot umpires call every pitch, as opposed to the two-challenges-per-game system in place in Class AAA and expected in MLB, following a spring training trial.

MLB’s own testing has been rigorous, dating to the MLB-affiliated Atlantic League’s usage back in 2019 and continuing through all levels of the minor leagues. But the KBO represents an opportunity for learnings from the third-most prominent league in the world.

“We have a nice back and forth with KBO and NPB on these rule issues,” Manfred told SBJ, referring to the Korean and Japanese pro leagues. “We pay a lot of attention to those sorts of experiments, how they’ve worked. They were very satisfied with the way it played out in Korea, and we take that as encouraging as well.”

More details emerge on MLB’s robot umpire plan

The KBO uses a camera tracking system from its longtime data and technology provider, Sports2i, just as MLB will utilize Hawk-Eye cameras, the same system that powers Statcast. MLB’s minors have used a two-dimensional plane at the center of home plate, but the KBO ABS requires a pitch to cross through the strike zone at both the middle and back of the plate.

ABS in the KBO uses the corners of the plate and adds 2 centimeters to either side, using a formula based on a player’s height. The zone was lowered roughly 1 centimeter at the top and bottom edges between 2024 and 2025, based on feedback.

Any strike zone can be inputted into the technology, and it may take some iterations to get it just right. The rulebook defines a rectangle but, in practice, most human umpires call an oval — neglecting to call strikes in the upper and lower corners. Human umps also typically widen the zone in blowouts or on 3-0 counts.

The impact of ABS in the KBO: Walks have ticked up slightly, from 9.1% of all plate appearances in 2023 (the last non-ABS season) to 9.4% this year, while strikeouts have increased more dramatically, from 17.7% in 2023 to 19.9% in 2025.

Kwangwon Lee, Sports2i’s team leader for its global business unit, told SBJ, “Our partner, KBO, always makes bold and innovative decisions to develop the league,” and added that its R&D department continues to iterate and improve the tracking system.

Insiders Weigh In

Mets designated hitter Jared Young, who starred in a 38-game stint with the Doosan Bears last season, said pitches on the edges were called normally but noted it appeared to be “a very up-and-down strike zone” and that it seemed inconsistent from one stadium to the next. “But,” he added, “you can’t complain. Everyone’s got the same thing.” Having also spent time in Class AAA the past few seasons, Young endorsed the challenge system as his preference.

Daniel Kim, who formerly scouted for MLB clubs and made appearances on ESPN during its 2020 COVID coverage of the Korean league, is now a popular KBO media analyst with 164,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. Kim said fans, and even many players, were upset with the state of human umpiring.

“Fans love it,” Kim said, adding that all they want is consistency. “From the player side, surprisingly, we got some mixed reaction. Veteran players started complaining quite a bit in the early part of last year, whether pitchers or the hitters. As you know, the older established players had their own strike zone. They got the benefit of the doubt, I guess.”

One KBO team executive, who requested anonymity to speak freely about umpiring, said, “ABS shows no mercy or bias toward either side. It is as objective as it gets, and the machine does not care for any context of the situation at all. In a vacuum, that is how it should be, as the strike zone has been defined by the league of how it should be and the ABS follows the rules.”

Player evaluation is changing as a result of ABS: Pitchers with high velocity and big breaking pitches are being prioritized over pitchers with less dynamic stuff who try to command the outer edges.

“ABS does not care how well a pitcher locates the shadow zone” — referring to a baseball-width addendum on either side of the zone — “or how well a catcher frames a pitch,” the executive explained. “It only cares if a pitch crosses the zone or not. So the pitchers that used to live in the edges of the zone that would often benefit from umpire calls/framing are out of luck.”

ESPN and MLB Network analyst Xavier Scruggs, who hit 61 home runs in two KBO seasons, has kept in touch with old teammates who have shared good feedback about the system. He and Dan Kurtz, who runs the league’s leading English-language media site MyKBO.net, both noted that ABS was a safeguard against gambling improprieties, as it removes the human element. They pointed out the KBO endured some bad headlines — mostly a decade or longer ago — related to allegations of scandal.

“You have something that’s set in stone to where you don’t have umpires affecting the game in such a drastic way that could be concerning,” Scruggs said.

But the KBO even demoted a few umpires to the minors in 2020 for calling inconsistent strike zones, so technology can mitigate that variation.

“KBO looks at ABS as trying to help speed up the games and trying to prevent confrontations,” Kurtz said. He added, “Korea is a very forward-thinking, technology-using country in itself, and so they’re basically, if we have it, why are we not using it?”

Many US baseball fans have asked the same question, but won’t have to wait much longer — at least for a small taste of what the KBO has.

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.