By Iain Brunnschweiler

Within many of the highest performing football academies in the UK, the average 12-13 year-old is subjected to a level of monitoring – actually, let’s call it surveillance – that is tantamount to being a person of significant interest to the national security agencies!

Whilst this is well-intended, imagine having your every output filmed, your individual footage analysed and, in many cases, your every performance graded, your distance and speed outputs tracked using high tech GPS systems, and every weight you lift being measured and monitored. Every six weeks your bosses (your parents) are brought in for a performance review and update, with figures discussed and plans updated.

Just pause for a moment and consider: how might this make you feel if you were in their shoes?

Clearly, there are some significant positives. Youth development, when delivered effectively, will always include some form of monitoring and review processes that allow coaches, support staff and those investing in the system to gain an insight into how their efforts are trending from a player development perspective. Video footage, match grades and player reviews can be a hugely useful tool in providing feedback to all stakeholders.

But imagine if this level of scrutiny was the norm in your adult working environment. My sense is that this would bring up different emotions for different readers. For some, this would excite them with the level of professionalism involved; precise numbers and figures indicating an elite performance environment. For others, this could evoke feelings of anxiety and possibly fear, considering the level of scrutiny being applied.

Mastery and joy

Academy in football in the UK is a major business. Huge amounts of money are being spent in order to unearth the ‘next big thing’ and I’m certain that these dynamics will drive some potentially unhelpful adult behaviours.

I’ve also seen some incredible efforts. At a recent visit to a Premier League club, I witnessed some absolutely brilliant work from the U9-U10 lead coach. She has brought in music, dancing, and a sense of childlike joy to the footballing environment – the group even had a pumpkin carving night! – whilst also encouraging the players to engage in 1v1 battles and high levels of competition. She encourages a sense of joy as they enhance their mastery of the ball.

This highly skilful coach has positioned herself as an appropriate resource to the young people in her care, sensing that they probably don’t need any additional pressure than is already present simply by engaging with academy football. I did not get such a sense of surveillance at this place compared to others and I suspect it will yield better talent development outcomes.

I am aware that in some industries there is rigorous monitoring of time on task and productivity. I have, however, been fortunate to have operated predominantly in roles where I had guidance from senior leaders and a level of autonomy that allows me to deliver my role in my own personal manner.

This autonomy was not simply given without direction. My manager ensured that I was clear on the overarching mission that we were all in it for, as well as my part of the puzzle. I was the recipient of weekly or fortnightly catchups where progress in my area was discussed in a manner which felt safe to me, whilst also holding me to account.

However, this has not always been the case. I have also experienced at close hand senior leaders seemingly ruling with fear and overt scrutiny, rather than an appropriate level of challenge and support. My experience of this was that it was much more unhelpful than helpful. It caused anxiety in many and actually resulted in the more stubborn folk still doing things the way they wanted, when out of sight!

Surveillance shows up in many different ways. The French philosopher Michel Foucault studied the impact of how surveillance is used to control society. His 1975 book Discipline and Punish built on the theory of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon’ as a metaphor for how power circulates through the use of surveillance, but it also talks to the positive impact upon self-discipline. (I recommend an internet search if you want to know more.)

The right balance of challenge and support

I wonder what the level of surveillance is within your environment. To what extent have you considered the consequences (intended or otherwise) of this subtle force on those within your care and guidance?

How does surveillance, and indeed pressure of any kind, show up in your environment?

For any of us who have read some research around optimal performance states, one is likely to agree that having a level of perceived pressure is probably useful, but too much can be challenging or even catastrophic to an individual or individuals. Think of the ‘inverted-U’ theory in the Yerkes-Dodson law, which is beautifully simple and has stuck with me since my undergraduate degree many, many years ago.

Of course, this subject talks to some complex topics and provokes several questions for leaders:

• What sort of environment are you seeking to facilitate?
• What are the performance outputs that are required from different individuals and teams in order to meet your organisational goals?
• How do you want the people within your organisation to feel when they show up for work?
• Have you created the space with other leaders in your organisation to have these conversations and agree what it is you are going after, and why?

Your answers may lead to consider how much surveillance might be helpful and how much deliberate pressure you apply.

As the proud father of a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old who both love playing football, I am not convinced that the level of surveillance I have described above would be optimal for them. I watch the joy in their faces when they play sport, as well as the moments of intense anger, sadness and frustration when things don’t go their way.

I approach my role as a parent to sit alongside them on this rollercoaster, seeking to be a resource rather than an added pressure. I love seeing them explore what is possible, rather than playing with a level of scrutiny and fear that might constrain them.

There is a time for extremely high levels of observation, monitoring and professionalism, but let’s consider when this might be appropriate… both for children and adults.

Iain Brunnschweiler runs the Focus Performance Consultancy. He is a former professional cricketer, has authored two published books, and previously served as the Head of Technical Development at Southampton Football Club.

What to read next

Performance Special Report – High Performance Unpacked

By Joe Lemire

Naomi Metzger is an 11-time British champion in the triple jump who recently became an athlete ambassador for Cudis, a wearable ring technology with a Web3 component. Cudis is an Oura competitor that tracks sleep, stress and recovery and offers AI-powered insights — but it also provides the opportunity for wearers to earn crypto rewards for sharing their data.

After narrowly missing the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, Metzger is documenting her goal of qualifying for the LA28 Games on the blockchain. Cudis was founded by UCLA graduate Edison Chen, and it targets Gen Z athletes, having also secured partnerships with UCLA athletics and individuals competing for Lamborghini Racing (Cam Aliabadi), in Ironman (Patrick Schilz) and in Olympic rowing (Kate Knifton, a two-time NCAA champion at Texas who was Big 12 Athlete of the Year in 2023).

On how she learned about Cudis…

I actually found it on X. I was scrolling through, and I’m always having a look at what the next thing in crypto is — and then Cudis popped up. I saw wellness, web, crypto all combined — own your data — all these words that I’m thinking, ‘This sounds really interesting.’ So I shot them a message, and I was like, ‘Hi, I would love to be an athlete ambassador.’ I got talking to Edison, and then they made it happen. So I got sent the ring to test out, and then I got sent the version two ring. For the past six months, I’ve been playing around with the ring and really got to enjoy using it.

Cudis rings add a new layer to the wearable experience with their Web3 features that can transform real-time data into valuable points redeemable for exclusive rewards. (Image: Cudis)

On her interest in crypto…

Kind of out of desperation because I got dropped by my sponsor in 2021, so I wanted to find a way of how I can fund my athletics. I was on TikTok and stumbled across a Gary Vee video talking about NFTs. He was really passionate. So I was like, OK, let me just see if this works. So I created my own NFT collection in 2021 and stuck around since then.

On her prior use of wearables…

I used the Apple Watch but never to monitor my sleep because the problem I found with the Apple Watch is that you constantly need to charge it, and then when I’m sleeping, I might forget. So I never really tracked my sleep. A lot of athletes were using a Whoop, but they have to pay a monthly or yearly [fee] — it is a subscription-based model.

I don’t really like to pay monthly fees. I’m an ambassador, but I knew Cudis is a one-off payment. And I was like, OK, that appeals a little bit more to me. Since getting the ring, I’ve started to track my sleep as well, and that’s been pretty helpful.

On what she’s learned about her sleep…

I basically learned that I wasn’t getting as good of a sleep as I thought I was because I’m always quite proud of the fact that I get eight hours, but a lot of that was very light sleep. It wasn’t deep sleep, and I realized that once I got more deep sleep, that meant spending longer time actually in bed and trying to aim for a bit more than that eight hours, I felt a lot better, and the more I started tracking that, I realized that training was better when I well rested, my mood felt better. So that’s something that I wouldn’t have learned if I wasn’t really tracking it and looking at the data.

On how she tried improving her deep sleep…

I Googled, and I was asking people, “Do you have any tips?” I went with magnesium before bed, and that seemed to really help. A colder room and weighted bed sheets. I literally tried everything because, even though I was getting those hours, I really wanted to maximize my sleep because I know that’s super important for recovery.

On her analysis of daytime metrics…

It was the stress levels that I found really interesting with the ring. Although I’m pretty in tune with my body and what aches and pains, because I’m at 100% all of the time, whether that’s training or I’m doing the crypto things or making videos, I didn’t realize how stressed that I’m actually becoming when doing that. So when I started to have a look at the ring data and seeing that way the stress levels are pretty high, that told me to maybe rest a little bit, self-care, and prioritize my mental health a little bit more. And it sounds silly that I wasn’t in tune with my own brain, but I feel like the ring almost helped me to figure that out a little bit.

Naomi Metzger is an athlete ambassador for Cudis, a wearable ring technology with a Web3 component. (Photo: Corbis via Getty Images)

On using Cudis’ AI coaching functionality…

It really helped when I was looking at my sleep and looking at that deep sleep. When I first got the data, it was almost so much data, and I didn’t quite know what to make of it, so I asked the AI component, the coach, ‘Can you have a look at my sleep data and let me know what needs to improve and what’s the average and that type of thing?’ It was able to feed back [info] using my data what I should aim for, and I found that really helpful.

I also sometimes just ask for a little bit of advice. It sounds weird to speak to AI for advice, but sometimes I’m like, ‘Hmm, is it okay do you think to have a coffee now? Or do you think I should wait till maybe a bit later?’ And then it would be like, ‘This is the optimal times of having coffee.’ It’s quite cool to use AI in these ways, when I’d normally, I guess, be a bit too embarrassed to ask my actual coach.

On the ring’s Web3 component…

I’m really incentivized by rewards. As athletes, we’re obviously aiming for medals and things like that. The idea that your fitness gives you points, and those points can add up, and soon, I think, it’ll be able to be monetized, which is really cool. It’s a really good way for me to make sure that I’m tracking my workouts, sharing them, to get other people to, I don’t know, give them a bit of a boost — but it also just holds me a little bit more accountable.

You have a vitality score, and I’m always trying to aim for that 100 score. But sometimes I can be like, I don’t really need to do this rep, and I remember I’ve got the ring, it’s tracking me. I’m like, Okay, let me just do it. So I think, especially because I train on my own quite a bit, it’s a good way to hold me accountable.

On how much she continues doing her art…

I actually feel like I don’t have the time but definitely something that I want to get back into a little bit more. That was something that calmed me down. As I said, I’m always at like 100 but drawing was a way of calming me. And when I was doing the NFT collection, I was drawing a lot, and I had a really good athletic season. And also, when I was injured, I was drawing a lot as well because it was keeping my brain active when my body couldn’t move.

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 & Luke Whitworth

More than a quarter of practitioners believe their organisation’s psychological services are having next to no impact. Little more than 10 per cent say their provisions are having a ‘positive’ impact. No-one at all described their services as having a ‘very positive’ impact. 

This is all according to a straw poll of Leaders Performance Institute members during a recent Virtual Roundtable. 

“I’m not surprised,” said Angus Mugford, the former Senior Vice President of Player Development & Performance at the New Jersey Devils. “I would be curious to ask the group what kind of services and provisions you have because the thing that always jumps out when you mention sports psychology or psychological services is that it means different things to every stakeholder.” 

That’s the first problem. “You’re often setting your services up for failure.” 

Mugford was joined by Rich Hampson, the Head of Psychology on the men’s side at the Football Association, to discuss why psychological services are not set up to succeed and to propose some ideas for redressing the balance. 

Better developmental pathways for psychologists 

Sometimes, through no fault of their own, psychologists are ill-prepared for careers in sports performance and, when things go wrong, Hampson feels they can be scapegoated for structural failures elsewhere. “It’s almost like they’re going from reception [kindergarten] into year one of school,” he said. 

There should be better pathways for aspiring practitioners once they walk through the door. “The first thing you’d want is close supervision, guidance, the opportunity to observe and be observed in your practice,” Hampson continued. “There’s a lot to be desired in terms of the number of touchpoints in those first two years of applied practice and the kind of supervision that should go alongside that.” 

It is not hard to see why problems can mount without true accountability. “It is leaving practitioners with a load of uncertainty or potentially false confidence.” Or rather than focusing on their practice and its impact, they are potentially more focused on navigating the political landscape – “the things that keep them in a job”. 

Mugford, while serving as President of the Association of Applied Sports Psychology [AASP], oversaw the development of a certification pathway for mental performance consultants. However, there are few internship opportunities on offer in both professional and US college sports. “The system has not caught up with the pathway yet,” he said, adding, “there’s also a difference in the way the clinical pathway is creating and fostering development versus the mental skills pathway.”

Teams must establish what is required of their psychological services 

A team’s psychological services are a common point of misalignment. “If you think of the people that drive a job search, even just the definition. Let’s say we have a GM, head coach and director player of development talking about sports psychology, I’d be willing to bet each of their definitions and perspectives are different,” says Mugford. 

Hampson has observed this in job adverts. “You know they’re saying ‘we’re not sure’ because the job description lists key responsibilities and includes vague psychology words,” he said. “It’ll probably be ‘help with mental health’ and then something about ‘wellbeing’, then ‘athlete performance’ and ‘coach performance’.” 

For leaders tempted to type those words, he has some advice. “Consider: what is this helping us to achieve?” If it’s still unclear, you might instruct a consultant to complete an assessment. “What is going to make the biggest impact here in the short to medium term? Let’s go after that. If nothing else, you’re then clear on what success looks like and you’re actually clear on the skillset you need – it will help your hiring process to be more specific. It’s not because they’re ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This person might be the best fit here, but they may not fit what we’re going after here.” 

For Mugford, it is critical to decide who is running the hiring process and who to ask for their input. In his time at AASP, he developed a decision-making tree (see image below) to help provide clarity when developing a performance programme: 

Mugford said: “What information do you need to gather and seek? [After using a decision-making framework] I often find there might be a search and interview process that organisations sometimes put on hold because they realise they have now got a different decision to make.” 

Embed psychology as another performance service 

“High-profile sports environments are unforgiving,” said Mugford. “It’s like you put someone in a room and, if they fail, their credibility and trust may be done.” Psychologists have fallen into this trap in the absence of a proper induction. 

He argued that it is on key stakeholders to manage inductions and help the psychologist to build trust, particularly in environments where they might be unaware of social or sports norms. “It can create havoc and a longer pathway to building relationships,” he added. “The onboarding process can really minimise the downside and accelerate the positives. We underestimate that window.” 

The work can be hard and lonely, as Hampson explained. A psychologist might be spread thin due to budgetary reasons or because their role is too broad and ill-defined. “It’s always really hard to be in the helicopter and going ‘what is psychology trying to achieve here?’ and simultaneously be on the ground driving things forward while being a really good practitioner.” 

For Hampson, the solution is a leader able to set the direction, to bring in people with the right skillsets and develop them against established markers. Then, the psychologist “can deliver with the guidance of the person above them”.

That structure is critical, as Mugford explained. “Organisations will often over-index on fit, personality and EQ, whereas building a team or programme, even language that sticks for a culture, that goes beyond an individual’s preference or training is something for teams to think about.”

Find ways to track, test and refine your psychology work 

Some people in sport openly lament the perceived lack of metrics in psychology. This frustrates Hampson: “I see psych fall down because it’s not defined well enough early enough.” However, if you are clear at the beginning, “90 per cent of it can be tracked. The broader you are, the less defined you are, it’s harder to ask: ‘is this actually having impact?’” 

Benchmarking tends to be an area where sport excels, but not when it comes to psychological services. Hampson said: “I think sports should be more confident in going ‘if we’re clear on what we’re doing, more often than not, we’ll be able to give you an indicator here, whether that has done what we want it to do’; and then, like any science experiment, if your first intervention doesn’t lead to the outcome that you want, it gives you a real good platform to go ‘OK, why did that not work? And what do we need to adapt and change?’  

“I think that’s really hard to do in a really objective way when you’re not setting that in the first place.”

What to read next

Sports Science Research: the Strengths, Weaknesses and Opportunities

By Rob Schaefer

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.

* * * * *

It has only been eight months since the Cardinals took highly regarded infield prospect JJ Wetherholt with the No. 7 pick in the 2024 MLB Draft. But one could say he is nailing the transition to the pros.

Despite weathering an early injury, Wetherholt slashed .295/.405/.400 with 2 home runs and 20 RBI across 29 appearances for Single-A Palm Beach in his first season in the Cardinals organization, culminating in a game-winning double in the league’s championship game in September. He entered 2025 as MLB.com’s seventh-ranked SS prospect (23rd overall).

Before that, Wetherholt was a standout for West Virginia, where he was introduced to Pison, the maker of AI-powered neural sensors that measure cognitive functions through smart wristbands. WVU, along with several other collegiate and youth programs, use Pison’s tech as an athlete performance tool on an institutional basis, and MLB is in the process of testing it for on-field approval. The company recently launched a training platform specifically for baseball, called Pison BASEBALL Pro, and integrated sleep tracking data into its Pison Perform product. Wetherholt is a brand ambassador.

As he prepares for his second pro season, Wetherholt spoke to SBJ about his use of Pison and his goals moving forward.

On his first impressions of Pison…

I thought it was interesting. I wasn’t really sure the practical use of it. I thought it was cool to get a benchmark [of my reaction time] and compete with your friends. But then, after that, I didn’t really understand how it could be beneficial or helpful. It’s like, ‘You just got a score, what now?’

As I’ve gotten used to it, I’ve found cues that say, ‘Hey, do it on days that you’re feeling slow and you might see an improvement.’ Or, ‘Do it after your lift and you’ll see an improvement.’ Just different ways to mess around with it, use it on a more consistent basis, to remind your brain and wake it up on days that you’re sluggish.

On how he uses the reaction tests…

A light flashes, and you move your hand open, and it measures how fast you moved it in accordance to when the light flashed, basically. And then there’s also a mode, which is pretty cool, it lights white and you’re supposed to move your hand, or it’ll light yellow and you’re not supposed to move. It’s kind of a yes-yes-no type of thing, which is pretty similar to baseball and hitting.

I’m not a huge person to be like, ‘Oh, my reaction time is bad today, I’m going to stink.’ So, for the most part, I really wouldn’t pay attention to it too much on a gameday. But on an off day it’s cool to see where you’re at. If you had a heavy workload and you wake up and you feel good, but then you check and your reaction times are low, it’s like, ‘OK, maybe I have to do it a little bit more today to try to wake up.’ It’s cool as a benchmark in that regard.

 

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On his use of athlete performance technology…

I’m definitely not a genius in the tech field, but I’m open to it. Baseball is getting more and more tech-driven, so all of the stuff in regard to hitting, Trackman, where you can see all the metrics on your swing — that stuff’s really cool. The only other thing is sleep, which is the biggest selling point that [Pison] is introducing now, being able to track sleep. I want to know how I sleep, I want to know HRV rates, stuff like that, where it’s going to help me be able to see how I can recover better.

On differences in technology investment at pro and college levels…

We had decent exposure to it at school. We didn’t have the [same extent] of it as professional ball, as you would expect. Now, pretty much every swing is videoed, and you have your Blast [Motion] numbers and Trackman numbers, which we didn’t have at school.

But also, with [analytics], it’s a blurred line. You don’t want to dive too much into it, where it’s like, ‘Oh, I got perfect metrics on my Blast Motion sensor, but now I can’t hit.’ It’s about finding the middle ground of knowing what’s a red flag and what’s not.

It’s different from person-to-person, [coaches] are going to work with everyone differently. For me, I’m tracking bat speed, attack angle, vertical bat angle and rotational acceleration, which is all measured from the bat. So that stuff is concrete. Other people look at it differently. It’s definitely been a little bit of an adjustment — you can get over-consumed. That’s been a big point [from coaches], they’re like, ‘Do what you do. Play ball. We’re just here to help. If you have questions, ask, we’ll explain it to you. But here’s what we want you to focus on. We’ll bring [metrics] up to you if we think there’s a problem.’

On his goals for his second MLB season…

I’d say the biggest thing is to play as many games as possible. I want to be healthy. You can’t play good baseball and you can’t move up levels if you don’t play — and if you’re not healthy, you can’t play.

And then, no matter where I go, just competing to the highest level at that particular level, whether it’s Low-A, High-A, Double-A, whatever the case may be. Just competing and trying to dominate at that level and not looking at anything past that. It’s easy to get centered on, ‘This guy got moved up in this org,’ or ‘I want to go up.’ But at the end of the day, you’re going to move yourself up. If you’re too focused on jumping levels and not dominating the level that you’re in, you can look too far forward and forget to commit to where your feet are. So, just staying present, and then hopefully win a bunch of games.

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 Ethan Joyce

Athlete mental wellness continues to gain traction, both in the guidelines being established by leagues/governing bodies (such as the NFL and NBA efforts at the dawn of the decade) and the companies pitching in to support schools and franchises, as seen with  Peak Ai.

Outside of just being the right thing to do, there’s a straight line from holistic support of athletes and business success. Wellbeing begats better performance, which begats results, greater fan interest and, ultimately, a product fans will pay for.

Last year, the NCAA released the latest version of its mental health best practices, outlining obligations for all member schools (regardless of division) to create a healthy environment for athletes. Components of that plan included support via resources and connections to mental health professionals, as well as a screening tool to monitor athlete wellness.

The NCAA required D-I members to provide this by last August. And this November will be the first deadline for schools to prove they’re doing so. With that mile-marker approaching, The Zone is gearing up to test a new feature in its athlete wellness platform: the Mental Readiness Score. The metric will provide insight into an athlete’s mental state.

Knowing the score

In a walkthrough with SBJ, The Zone CEO and Co-Founder Ivan Tchatchouwo showed a series of check-in questions that help create the score. Prompts focused on physical essentials like hydration and sleep but also considered ratings for categories such as confidence and energy level. The quick series produces a score (scaled from 0-100) that a coach can see for each player, while the individual student view will show tiered descriptors (such as ‘Fully Ready’ or ‘Needs Attention’) to take away the pressure of potentially seeing a poor numerical score.

Tchatchouwo said the feature, which The Zone will pilot with select schools as part of its premium platform offering before a future rollout, came as an idea from numerous conversations on different campuses since the company was founded in 2021.

The Zone has a client base of roughly 200 teams at various levels of the NCAA, offering three tiers of its platform: basic, premium and enterprise.

“The biggest thing, and we’re seeing this in all sets of industries and technology in college sports, is how do you harmonize this data to drive value for the athlete but also to drive value for the administration?” Tchatchouwo said.

Coaches will be able to see Mental Readiness Scores for each athlete and a collective score for a team, allowing for responses at the individual and group levels in their teaching and preparation. The Zone’s athlete experience also offers support via breathing and visualization exercises that cater to the user’s preference.

One of The Zone’s biggest triumphs of 2024 came through validation from its own data and research. Tchatchouwo said that athletes who used The Zone 15 times saw their moods “significantly” improve, and that was especially true for women who used The Zone’s platforms. He also added that client schools see up to 3X more access to their athletes via The Zone platform, meaning an increased understanding in what their athletes are collectively experiencing on the mental side.

“What we’re seeing is the athletes that are stigmatized, that don’t talk about it, are getting help from The Zone,” Tchatchouwo 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 Rob Schaefer

It is an annual tradition for NFL Draft prospects participating in the Senior Bowl to undergo several days of evaluation, including interpersonal interviews with scouts that are distributed to NFL teams.

This year, analyses of those sessions included reports created by language processing technology vendor Receptiviti, which worked with existing Senior Bowl partner Tatnuck Group to ingest and transcribe interviews, then create 52 reports that measured and compared players based on psychological traits.

“We’ve always looked for the most effective and reliable means to objectify what we do from an interview and assessment standpoint,” said AJ Scola, the former Assistant Director/Personnel at the Atlanta Braves who founded Tatnuck Group in 2020 as a sports-focused talent assessment and development firm. “Receptiviti did a great job of delivering on that.”

This was Tatnuck Group’s fourth year supporting Senior Bowl staff, a mandate that includes providing performance coaches for players and interview training to scouts, but its first wrapping Receptiviti’s API into its offering.

Receptiviti’s software, called LIWC, was invented by Dr. James W. Pennebaker on the back of several decades of psychological research. Its thesis is that the propensity with which humans use different categories of words – ranging from the academic (e.g., prepositions, conjunctions) to sentiment-based (positive emotion words) – can correlate to different psychological characteristics.

“Two different people who see the world differently, who see their own place in the world differently, are going to use these different grammatical categories at slightly different rates,” said Kiki Adams, Receptiviti’s Head of Linguistics. “By combining those word categories, we have formulas that give us the probability to which someone is in a certain psychological state or trait; things ranging from personality – like extroversion, agreeableness – to their emotions – fear, sadness, happiness.”

Photo: Don Juan Moore / Getty Images

Receptiviti’s tech analyzes thousands of word categories and subcategories to ultimately score speakers in more than 200 “dimensions,” which include everything from personality type to whether someone is a more intuitive or deliberative decision-maker.

It then feeds that data to large language models, trained on the company’s psychological research, to place that raw data into context.

Receptiviti’s Senior Bowl reports, as one example, charted each quarterback’s standing across the “Big Five” personality traits, with text summaries attached that described what those measures mean and how they apply to football.

“If a player scores higher on a measure like neuroticism, meaning they’re more likely to experience things like anxiety and stress and negative emotionality,” said Jade Marion, Receptiviti’s Senior Manager/Customer Success, “we include information about how a coach might work with a player with that type of disposition.”

Such assessments have a clear use-case in athletics, where optimal performance is table stakes and, on-field talent aside, relationships can make or break a team’s chemistry.

But Jennifer Glista, Receptiviti’s CRO, said the company’s integration engine is used by sports organizations for more than just personnel scouting, including to better inform coach and executive hires.

“Language is so flexible, and so, from our perspective, the more data you have around the entire organization, the more effective you can be,” Glista said. “But it depends on what each customer’s application is setting out to do.”

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.

* * * * *

Howard Shu is a two-time Olympic badminton player and US national champion who recently retired from competition after the Paris Games.

In January, the self-described “tech nerd” appeared at CES to try out a new AI-powered badminton training system developed by Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). An automatic serve machine fired shuttles, and when Shu returned the serves, cameras using computer vision relayed data such as shot speed and trajectory as well as on his own swinging motion.

Shu, 34, is a UCLA graduate and former EY consultant now working in supply chain logistics as Manager Business Development & Operations for Hizooo Network Technology. He was recently starred in a short film about his athletic career called 10,000 Days of Chasing My Dreams.

On connecting with ITRI before CES…

I didn’t know anything about it, actually, so it was really exciting. They reached out. I did a little bit of quick Google search as well and saw the machine that they had. This was my first time actually seeing it and testing it out. First impression, it’s cool. I think there’s some refinement [to be done], and we weren’t in a perfect, controlled environment, but just running through my head, there’s so many use cases for it already.

On the AI trainer…

Basically, it’s a typical shuttle feeding machine, which we’ve seen already. That’s not new, where it basically shoots a shuttle at you. You see this in tennis as well, if you’re trying to practice by yourself. But what happens is, after I hit the shuttle, it gives me some data output, like speed of my return shot, positioning, height. So those are some of the metrics that it was actually giving me after I hit the shuttle that it fed to me.

Photo: Getty Images

On whether he typically saw such data…

I haven’t. If we talk about AI or technology in the space with other racket sports like pickleball or padel, we’ve seen some other technologies trying to track number of shots in a rally or where you made the mistake. On tour, we do have metrics like speed, but it’s not to your own use where you can track every shot. Sometimes they’ll track a big smash or something like that, but not [it’s] something in your hands where you can track every single shot of your own.

On the limited data on tour…

If you’re in a big match, you might see, ‘Hey, this player hit a 400-kilometer-an-hour smash once during the match.’ It’s not like I would be able to dial in and say, ‘Hey, during the third match, I was feeling a little bit more tired. I want to know if my smashes were dropping off by 5 per cent or 10 per cent.’ So those are the kind of metrics that you would really be able to act on if you had something like this.

On using this new badminton data for racket fitting…

One of the main use cases that I thought right away is — I follow a lot of other sports like tennis and golf — I think this type of technology would be extremely helpful in customizing or picking out the proper equipment for the athlete. So we see this in golf a lot, right? They use their Foresight [launch monitor]. They track ball speed, ball spin, height, all these details that are really meticulous, right?

And so if I’m an athlete and maybe I’m not optimizing the proper equipment, whether it’s string tension or there’s head light or head heavy. I could go on to a court, test out 10 different models with 10 different variations of strings tensions and figure out which one is giving me the best smash, the best speed, things like that, which otherwise would just right now be going by feeling like, ‘Hey, this racket feels good. That smash felt good, [but] I don’t know exactly what the speed was.’ You’re seeing it in some of these other sports that have a little bit more money, that are already implementing it into a lot of their strategies.

On other tendencies the system could learn…

I’m sure those cameras are capable of [identifying tendencies], whether you put in a match video and it spits out some sort of post-analysis data like, ‘Hey, I made X amount of mistakes in my backhand or X amount of mistakes in my forehand.’ They might even be able to drill down to more meticulous details like, ‘Hey, the height over the net on this shot was five inches or 10 inches, and that’s what led to losing this point.’ It’s obviously a lot of back-end code and different scenarios that they have to run, but there’s definitely a ton of use cases for something like this.

 

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On his own data-driven training…

Very late in my career, at 34 years old, one of the things I’ve done is I’ve laid off of all the impact cardio. So, for example, no more running, whereas in my early 20s, I did a lot of that. But now it’s always low-impact cardio — swimming, biking — but then it’s tracking my heart rate, making sure I’m getting into the right zones to push that cardio.

There’s so much recovery tech out there, whether it’s compression boots, plunge, infrared sauna. These are just all things that I would say were not accessible to the average consumer, five years ago, 10 years ago, and now we’re really seeing companies push the envelope where it is very accessible to consumers. And I don’t know what the timeline is on a machine like this, or a technology like this, but I’m sure it’ll be scalable to one day where it will be in the hands of consumers.

On the surprising speeds of badminton smashes…

The world record now is [565] kilometers an hour. That’s [351] plus miles an hour. That’s obviously at contact because the way the shuttle works is, there’s a cork, right? So as it flips when it lands on the other side, it’s not traveling at 300 miles an hour anymore. It’s impact that they’re tracking. But I’m confident to say I could probably still get it over 240 [mph, I would say. I’ve seen people do challenges where they smash a shuttle into a watermelon or break through cardboard and things like that.

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

Sprawled across four parking spots outside Wayfair Arena in suburban Miami earlier this month sat a long, white trailer. But this wasn’t part of a TV broadcast production, nor was it for a movie star, although nearly every player in the new Unrivaled basketball league took turns ascending the metal stairs and entering.

Inside, a portable MRI machine needed only 10 minutes to scan the women’s lower bodies, at which point AI algorithms from Springbok Analytics took the 2D imaging and converted them into 3D digital twins that can be used for muscle analysis — establishing baselines that can be used to individualize training and flag latent injury risk.

Unrivaled, the 3-on-3 women’s league that debuted on Jan. 17 in Miami, is the latest league to partner with Springbok Analytics. In the past two years alone, Springbok has collaborated with three of the five biggest North American sports leagues: It graduated from NBA Launchpad; completed data collection on an NFL-funded research project into hamstring injuries; and began the initial phase of an MLB-backed study into pitcher health.

Now boosting Springbok’s rapid growth across pro sports and into broader populations is a newly closed, oversubscribed $5 million Series A led by Transition Equity Partners , which also led a $3 million seed round in 2023. Joining the investment were the NBA, which added to its initial equity stake from Launchpad, and Cartan Capital , a sports tech venture firm led by former pro tennis player CiCi Bellis .

“This is a clear sign that our current and new investors are excited to see us scale all aspects of our business,” Springbok CEO Scott Magargee said, “and from a dollars-in-the-door perspective, it allows us to advance what we believe is our global leadership in the area of muscle analysis for large demographics of athletes and patients across the entire health care landscape.”

The interactive reports Springbok produces are musculoskeletal avatars shaded various hues of red, orange, tan and blue that detail muscle asymmetries, fat infiltration and a proprietary score comparing a person’s muscle size with others of similar sex, size and sport. Springbok recently released sport-specific databases for men’s pro basketball and soccer athletes — a women’s soccer counterpart is planned soon — for more apt comparisons. It received FDA clearance in October on its flagship lower-body scan, and added core and upper-body scans to what previously was lower extremity only.

Such a tool is even more important when the athletes are such physical outliers as in the NBA. More than 100 players are in that database, and in addition to partnering with nearly half the league’s teams, Springbok continues working at the league level during the pre-draft process.

“Their work with us proved that this is a really interesting new dataset in elite sports,” said NBA Senior Vice President Tom Ryan , who oversees Launchpad and all basketball R&D. “Springbok data is starting to become an important piece of the puzzle to help support player health and performance initiatives. That’s really the story: It’s very strategic for us, both at the league and team level.”

The continued strategic relationship helped facilitate the additional funding, NBA Investments Associate Vice President Pat Crouch added. “First and foremost, for companies that come out of the NBA’s Launchpad program, we look for follow-on investment opportunities when there is a continued strategic relationship. We only invest in companies where there’s some type of commercial partnership, at either the league or the team level, that has gained meaningful traction and has upside to continue to grow and expand.”

Notably, Springbok has no true competitor and a 15-year head start on understanding the use of this data, making it “a piece of the puzzle that nobody else is,” said Magargee.

“The fact that our expertise is the technology, but also in human performance and muscle physiology, we know where to keep going with it in a way that’s meaningful,” said Silvia Blemker , Springbok’s chief scientific officer. She added that one recently devised new metric is an objective injury severity score, which can quantitatively assess a strain or sprain rather than rely on a human practitioner to subjectively evaluate it.

Though Springbok Analytics’ work in sports has intensified in recent years, the foundational technology has roots dating back to 2009 and Blemker’s biomedical engineering lab at the University of Virginia. The company’s headquarters remain in Charlottesville, sitting in a nondescript office at one end of its pedestrian-friendly Downtown Mall. Springbok’s dual recognition in 2024 from SBJ Tech — as a Most Innovative Sports Tech company and SBJ Tech Award winner for Best in Athlete Performance — prominently greets visitors.

In those early days, Blemker was working on solutions to aid treatments of cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy when the lab began developing the machine learning to extrapolate 3D data from MRIs. Those life science use-cases remain a part of Springbok’s mission, while also adding the human performance sector that makes it a highly differentiated product appealing to investors.

“Not only do we really believe in the team, but the technology, we think, is pretty unprecedented, especially with the years of R&D,” Bellis said, “and then the beachhead that they’ve had into the sports market is super interesting, because they can really instantly provide value to these sports teams and instantly give them money back, so to say, by having this preventative health measure for athletes.”

That expediency of the scans — much quicker than what’s needed for traditional MRIs — has helped Springbok amass its large elite athlete databases, including a thousand college and pro American football players, Blemker said. Those were collected to build a hamstring injury predictive index in collaboration with researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Australian Catholic University, and funded by a $4 million grant awarded by the NFL’s Scientific Advisory Board.

It’s that rich dataset, as much as any algorithm or an investment check, that is sparking Springbok’s growth — and the same competitive advantage will only continue to grow the same way it started.

“It’s taken us time,” Magargee said, “and it’s taken us partnerships.”

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

When it comes to performance under pressure, Rachel Vickery argues that too often teams fall back on what she terms the ‘technical, tactical, hope’ strategy.

“There is so much focus on the technical and tactical aspects of craft, and then people hope that it shows up under pressure,” said Vickery, a high-performance specialist who has worked with a range of elite operators in sports, business, medicine and the military to help them improve their performance under pressure. She was speaking as the host of a recent Leaders virtual roundtable on the topic.

Too often, Vickery added, teams fail to understand “what’s changing in the biomechanics of a person, their situational awareness, their ability to read and see the field; their communication style and strategy, and their decision making” when the pressure mounts.

The key is “being able to help people understand what happens to them in those environments and then being able to train for that” because, as Vickery said, performance under pressure is a skill that can be learned and the trick is “putting actions behind the words”.

Below are seven training and environment-based tips or factors, gleaned from the conversation, to digest and take back to your teams.

1. Work out what each individual needs

Athletes and coaches want to be able to keep their ‘smart brain’ online in moments of pressure, but no two people are the same. Some are more proficient than others. However, as one participant put it, “all personalities are capable of performing at the highest level, it’s just that some have to be more intentional in their approach” to training. “Have you got enough buffer in the system to absorb that natural increase in arousal state peaking?” said Vickery, who explained that an individual can develop that ‘buffer’ through personalised support and training interventions.

2. Make it a performance question

Performance under pressure is not some mystical ‘other’. People should be encouraged to work out what enables them to be their best and what detracts from their performance. Get to the bottom of that and you can understand your performance when under pressure. “If it’s something that impacts an athlete or coach’s performance, then it’s fair game for the performance conversation,” said one participant from Major League Baseball. It’s also important to consider the outside elements that contribute to someone’s stress levels. As Vickery said: “Very often it’s less to do with the performance arena than what’s going on outside”.

3. Develop mental health first-aiders

Stress can lead to burnout and mental ill-health and so people at your team should look out for each other. A participant spoke of their general manager taking part in their team’s compulsory mental first aid programme and, in the act of doing so, helping to normalise the conversation. Another participant spoke of their team’s work to identify personal triggers and cues. Their key question was: ‘what will we see in you when you’re feeling pressure?’

4. Remember: you’re not just fixing ‘broken’

Vickery issued a timely reminder that mental elements need to be fine-tuned just as much as the physical, technical or tactical. “It’s not just about fixing ‘broken’,” she said. “How do we go on taking things to a higher level?” Giving athletes and coaches a chance to assess their mistakes is critical.

5. You can train for the feeling, if not the scenario

While you cannot truly replicate high-pressure moments in training, you may be able to replicate the feelings they elicit. One participant with experience of the British sports system spoke of a time his team tested their analysts. They sabotaged the analysts’ equipment 20 minutes before the start of a competition and asked them to identify and fix the problems they created. The key to such tactics is to “review it, learn from it, go again, get your reps.”

6. A coach’s messages – spoken and unspoken – are critical

A coach’s words and actions are critical in high-pressure moments. “As soon as something is set up as a threat – ‘if we don’t win this we’re not making the playoffs’ – the stress response kicks off,” said Vickery. “If we can flip that to opportunity – and I’m not talking about rainbows, crystals and unicorns – I’m talking about intentional language; ‘how clean can we play this?’ The language is really important in those moments.” She also spoke of a Premier League coach who worked to de-escalate his own arousal state before giving half-time team talks. It is also important for coaches (and their teams) to not fall prey to the notion or narrative that an undemonstrative touch line figure is somehow disinterested.

7. Bad egos need to be parked

There are various ways to follow that aforementioned Premier League coach’s lead, but it requires trust, humility and a healthy dose of perspective, particularly for coaches to be able to accept feedback from their athletes and to self-reflect. Several participants have set up their coaches with cameras and microphones during training and competition as a learning exercise. During the heat of the moment, Vickery encourages leaders to ask themselves: “The ways I interact with you, my language, instruction and delivery – are they going to set you up for performance or going to detract from performance?”

By Joe Lemire

The NBA is launching a league-wide biomechanics program with motion capture labs to be installed at the training facilities of all 30 teams within a year.

The protocols, as explained in a league-wide memo in January, have been developed in consultation with the NBPA as well as sports medicine and performance experts. Provisions for such a screening program are codified in the current collective bargaining agreement, requiring players to participate in up to four assessments per season.

“It’s one of several major initiatives that we have in the works, including with the Players Association, to try to reduce injuries in the league,” NBA EVP for Operations & Administration David Weiss said, emphasizing its scope and ambition by adding, “We’re not aware of anything quite like this league-wide in the world.”

Planning for this project began long before a perceived uptick in the injury rate over the past year, but it remains set against the backdrop of ongoing conversations around appropriate load management and player participation policies.

The NBA is now in the process of installing biomechanics labs with four pilot teams: the Cavaliers, Jazz, Pacers and Suns. The goal is to have identical setups, with the same technology vendors and the same prescribed athlete motions, to ensure standardized data collection.

The four tech companies that won the league’s RFP are:

• Qualisys, which is providing its Miqus Video Plus markerless motion capture cameras

• Theia Markerless, whose software is being used for analysis

• Bertec, which is contributing its force plates

• BreakAway Data, which is supporting the athletes and teams with dashboards and visualizations.

P3, a private facility that independently has evaluated the biomechanics of roughly 70% of current NBA players, will work with the league as a consultant to the program. The NBA first hired P3 to assess prospects at the draft combine in 2014. Individual teams can also contract with the firm for additional insights and normative data.

Image courtesy of P3.

“This relationship between how we move and what happens to us is a strong relationship,” P3 founder and director Marcus Elliott said. “It’s stronger than most people realize, which is why we invested all this energy into all of it. And the more we can start actioning that — and not just waiting for bad things to happen — the better it is for everyone: for the players, for the teams, for the league. I’m super bullish on the potential of biomechanics to make lives better and for us to follow these signals.”

Access to the data collected in these biomechanics evaluations will follow similar guidelines to how the NBA handles medical records. Players have full access to their own reports, which they will retain even as they change teams. Coaches, executives and performance staff will be able to see data for players currently on their rosters. Weiss indicated MDs and PhDs conducting vetted research will also be to connect the data with injury information for studies on potential risks.

One source noted a “vast discrepancy” in the way franchises have utilized biomechanics data to date, praising this new program as a way to ensure consistent, efficient and accurate assessments. Some teams have been investing in biomechanics for years while others have yet to allocate any resources toward it. By implementing his program across the league, the NBA can collect in one year as much data as any team could collect in 30 — hastening the pace of understanding what correlations exist between movement and injuries.

Deployment of this program, which is scheduled to last at least through the end of the current CBA in 2030, has been measured to make sure it is properly communicated and rigorous. Evaluating success will take time, too.

“Certainly whether we can reduce injuries long-term or a particular type of injury — that’s going to be one of [the KPIs] — and whether we can connect certain movements or certain changes in the way an individual moves to injury,” Weiss said.

Image courtesy of P3.

Though the NBA’s in-game tracking system — powered by Sony’s Hawk-Eye — is camera-based and collects data on limbs and joint angles, that solution is only nominally a tool for rigorous biomechanics. Sony’s recent acquisition of KinaTrax, the leading baseball biomechanics technology, might help in the long run, but the current in-game tracking system doesn’t have the same fidelity the new lab-based system will provide.

There is a consensus that biomechanics might be an especially helpful tool in a sport like basketball “that certainly requires you to be a pretty impressive, high-flying athlete,” said BreakAway Data CEO Dave Anderson, a former NFL receiver. “The game is played well above the rim in the NBA, so jumping and your ability to land are critical to your career.”

Weiss added that experts with whom the league has conferred, including on its two biomechanics committees, point to “a number of factors — the size of players, the nature of the game, the number of games in the season, the hardcourt surface — that there’s reasons to think about biomechanics could be as helpful in basketball as almost any sport,” he said.

Image courtesy of P3.

These lab assessments are expected to take about 15 minutes, following a pre-scripted set of “motions that are directly applicable to their sport and health,” Theia CEO Marcus Brown said, describing his company’s software as “an accessible tool that also enables standardization within a vast data set. As a generalized neural network, Theia3D doesn’t require additional data for unique movements, environments or outlier athletes.”

It’s a highly technical distinction, but an important one: other motion capture solutions compare movement to various models, which can add to discrepancies when analyzing data from different sources and different seasons. “Having consistency in data collection over a long period of time on a big group of people is just something that I know our customers are looking for,” Qualisys product manager for life sciences Nils Betzler said, praising the “unified approach.”

“They’re really doing a tremendous job trying to better understand player biomechanics, player movement, and overall player health,” added Anderson about the NBA and NBPA. “They’re really trying to use science and numbers and research to make sure that the players are playing at the highest level. And I really appreciate that because a lot of these leagues are just adding games, changing roster sizes, and changing rules, and they just assume the players will figure it out. The NBA is taking this player-first initiative, and that’s just really cool to see.”

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.