By John Portch & Luke Whitworth

“I very rarely see organisations that are genuinely working towards the same goal.”

Alignment is perhaps more crucial than ever in high performance, yet as this practitioner noted, it is absent too often.

They were speaking at a Leaders Virtual Roundtable that dug into the topic.

“We’ve got a large team of staff, whether that’s coaches, practitioners, athletes, and that starting point of knowing where you’re going or what you’re aiming for is really important,” said one attendee who works for a Premier League team. “Then we build a strategy around that. So what we’re looking to do and the type of things we’re trying to do – and the things we’re not going to try and do.”

“I think the point of making it intentional is a huge one for us,” said another participant who works in the NWSL. “That’s been a huge emphasis with us as a staff this year – just making sure that we are all aligned and all on the same page.”

It takes time and effort and, over the course of the conversation, the participants shared their experiences and offered some best practice tips to help you and your team.

Alignment starts at the top

The consensus was that alignment flows from the top of an organisation. The table said that senior leaders must articulate an organisation’s goals and consistently reinforce them.

“Ownership has come in and been very clear about the goal of the club,” said the practitioner from the NWSL. “We want to be a leading global sports franchise, not just within the soccer space, not just within the women’s football space.” It is a lofty aspiration but all staff members understand the aim.

Find the low-hanging fruit

Next is identifying the obstacles, “the low-hanging fruit”, which means “each department approaching the general structure of practice by identifying what’s important and then identifying how you’re going to measure those things,” as a participant working in Major League Baseball explained. “Then you break that down into its subcomponents and figure out how you’re going to identify where the lowest-hanging fruit is to then solve those problems.”

Frequent check-ins

Find opportunities to check against your team’s objectives. As one attendee said of their team’s meetings, “we started with the end goal for the end of the season and how we are going to break that up.”

It requires “crystal clarity,” as another attendee put it. They said: “do we reduce the amount of interpretation, and then on the back of that, how are we checking for understanding?” It cannot just be a case of the leader “broadcasting” messages of expectation or definitions. “What’s actually being heard and understood? How frequently do we check that?”

Develop a common lexicon

Words are critical in ensuring that athletes are presented with a united front. “That comes with knowing what are the goals, the mission, the vision of the club,” said the same attendee, “and then all being able to speak from a common language.”

“It’s in how we use strategy and try and bring it to life,” said another attendee. “I’ve seen staff buy-in, not only in one-to-one meetings or annual reviews, but day to day. They are using the language that exists in our strategy – we’re talking the same way, and we’re trying to achieve the same things.”

Let staff shape how your vision comes to life

As a leader, it is also critical to understand staff motivations and aspirations. “There’s so many compartmentalised pieces to some environments,” said one attendee with knowledge of the British sports system. “How do we actually align where there are different motivations and aspirations?”

“If you get buy-in from people and input from day one, I always find that more impactful,” offered one participant. When people are invested it leads to smarter ideas and strategies – and everyone understands how they can help to achieve them.

Make accountability the norm

Each department must articulate their goals within the bigger picture. One attendee said: “We all have a vision of what each department is working towards and who’s going to be responsible for those elements.” A team can also ask, “‘this is what this department is working on – is that getting us to where we want to go?’”

Where your values are on the wall, they can serve as a useful conversation-starter. One attendee, who works as a director of performance, spoke of approaching a staff member “standing in front of our strategy and saying, ‘where’s the work you’re doing? Where does it fit in our strategy? The acid test is they say, ‘oh, yeah, I work on this, and I know I contribute to that’. If they can’t do it then that’s on me, because we haven’t made it really clear where their work fits.”

Where there’s progress, you can celebrate the wins. “People get the chance to be appreciated. ‘OK, this is what you’re working on, this is how it’s going’” said the participant from a club in the NWSL, “and we can celebrate the victories where we’ve started to move the needle towards that ultimate goal.”

Be agile in your programmes

Alignment is not fixed, it requires constant revisiting. As one attendee said, “when we start to add more staff and the structure sometimes becomes redundant” as reporting lines change. The risk is “you have people who are tied to titles and roles that may not function anymore.”

Therefore, it is important to move beyond grand gestures of alignment and place emphasis on those day to day interactions. “The behaviour layer”, as one attendee phrased it. “‘If we do this well, we would see this, this and this’. So now you actually have things to hold people to or, if they are demonstrating it, celebrate it. ‘Great! Let’s have more of that’. If they’re falling short, ‘let’s have a conversation. Why aren’t we seeing some of that? It’s taking it from the grand gesture to the day to day: ‘demonstrate it, live it, breathe it’.”

Main image: Pison

By Rob Schaefer

Pison, maker of AI-powered neural sensors that measure cognitive functions through smart wristbands, is today unveiling a baseball product called Pison Baseball Pro.

Priced annually at $359 per player, the package comes with the same hardware and ENG technology as the company’s Pison Perform product – which encompasses sleep tracking in addition to cognitive assessments – plus access to an online data visualization dashboard and Pison Baseball Pro app with drills specific to the sport.

“As far as this game goes, it’s been known to be 90% mental, but how often do we train the mental part of the game?” said Marc Deschenes, Pison’s VP/Sports Operations and a former professional pitcher. “Us being able to use that information and integrating that into player development for performance and awareness on the baseball field is integral in making this game more complete for our players.”

Pison’s sensors detect electrical signals that emanate from the brain, pass through the nervous system and manifest in muscle movements. Its breakthrough is in coining what it calls ENG (electroneurography), which measures electrical signals in a way that would typically require complex lab testing via a chip pressed to the surface of the skin.

The roots of the company’s technology are in treating degenerative brain illnesses such as ALS, but it broke into sports about one year ago with an eye on performance and evaluation use-cases. Pison’s sensors measure cognitive functions such as reaction time, mental agility and focus through light-based reaction tests that range from 20 seconds to three minutes.

Image: Pison

Pison has public partnerships with the baseball programs at Penn State, Oral Roberts, West Virginia (including use by 2024 No. 7 overall MLB draft pick of the St. Louis Cardinals JJ Wetherholt), and Lansing Community College, which Deschenes calls a “power user” because of feedback they have provided. At the youth level, Pison works with USA Prime New England (which Deschenes owns) and Fort Worth Christian Academy for baseball, as well as the Boston Hockey Academy.

Multiple MLB teams are also evaluating the technology, and the league itself is in the process of testing it for on-field approval.

The new product was formally announced at the American Baseball Coaches Association conference in Washington D.C. this morning. In the future, Pison will look to expand to other sports and potentially integrate its sensors into existing wearable vendors.

“The product, really, is taking a sophisticated technology that has been in the medical world – and kind of out of reach even there because of the cost – and bringing it down to something that everybody can use,” said John Joseph, Pison’s CRO. “When we look at the market, we aren’t just going after the MLB market or college. This is really for anybody that wants to develop that elite mental game.”

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.

Main photo courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania

By Joe Lemire

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have completed the first study demonstrating that the special mud Major League Baseball uses to rub all of its game balls does, in fact, enhance friction and ensure pitchers have a consistent grip.

While questions remain about the compositional qualities of the South Jersey mud that create this effect, the new paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that the Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud — harvested by the Bintliff family for generations — spreads like skin cream and grips like sandpaper.

“The non-complicated headline, is that, in general, the friction is enhanced with the mud on the ball,” said Douglas Jerolmack, a Penn professor of engineering and environmental sciences, who said the combination was “kind of magical” how it spreads smoothly and still has grit. “The thing, though, that makes it delicate and complicated is that the sliding speed matters.”

The lead author of the paper is Shravan Pradeep, a postdoctoral researcher working in Jerolmack’s lab. He worked closely with a student, Xiangyu Chen, to design the experiments. Jerolmack and Paulo Arratia, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, supervised the work.

Photo: University of Pennsylvania

Much of their recent, grant-funded work studies the behavior of natural mud in debris flows — “catastrophic landslides,” as Jerolmack put it — but the baseball mud became a passion project after learning of its existence when approached by a journalist for comment in 2019.

The Bintliff’s mud is a quirky but essential part of baseball lore and logistics. It used to prepare every baseball to ensure the proper tack and feel of the ball. MLB has previously contracted with material science giant Dow to create pre-tacked baseballs, which were tried in the minor leagues but didn’t behave the way a traditional baseball does.

Mud procured by the Bintliffs is found along the Delaware River and is unique, even if it initially looks and feels the same, with Pradeep explaining, “When you try to spread it between your fingers, it looked and it felt like a face cream, like these clay masks we have you put on the face.”

“It allows you to spread a very thin and fairly uniform coating because it spreads so well,” Jerolmack added. “It makes this exquisitely thin layer.”

Based on published reports, the Bintliffs do treat the mud some, draining some water out to a certain consistency, sieving it to remove a particular fraction of larger particles and putting in a secret additive. The Penn researchers did some compositional analysis that identified the concentration of elements but not how they are combined. An area for further research is to examine the biological materials. They did note the product included “little bits of twigs and leaves and stuff because it’s actually natural mud from a real creek,” Jerolmack said.

“It behaves like a material that’s been optimized to do this,” he added. “They must have a very good working knowledge of this mud. . . . It appears that the ingredients don’t seem special, but the proportions of these ingredients are dialed in perfectly to make it have this behavior.”

The first of three tests conducted by Penn was the use of a rheometer, which measured its viscosity and found that it behaved similar to commercial skin creams. The second involved an atomic force microscope, which is essential a pin prick that measures the resisting force needed to pull the needle away — it assesses the stickiness of the substance, which Pradeep saying the Lena Blackburne mud-rubbed baseball was twice as sticky as an untreated ball.

The third test was the novel one involving the creation of artificial fingers for consistent force application. Pradeep and Chen used a silicone polymer called PDMS that has the same elasticity as human skin. They then added squalene, a fish oil that replicates what’s naturally found on fingertips. The scientists applied pressure on the baseball with these fingers and then created a shearing force by sliding the ball at various velocities.

Photo: University of Pennsylvania

What they found was that the mud created only a small amount of friction at slow sliding speeds and that the friction disappears at very fast speeds, presumably because the small sand particles in the mud are knocked off the ball’s cover. But, in the Goldilocks zone in between the extreme speeds, the friction is notably enhanced by the mud.

“Over the past decade, we have worked with many types of cohesive mud, frictional mud, different type of muds that are out there,” Arratia said, “and in our experience, none of them has those properties that we saw with this particular mud.”

The researchers bought the mud and the baseballs on the internet and were not in touch with the Bintliffs to avoid any conflict of interest. They were just keenly interested in how the mud works more than any business implication of how their findings might affect the family business or the progress of a chemically enhanced, tacky ball.

But Jerolmack said his team ultimately did develop a stance — which was to endorse the continuation of the Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud.

“It seems like the consistency of this mud has been more consistent than any other aspect of the manufacturing of these balls,” he said. “And our take now is that it’s 2024 and there’s a lot of people in material science and chemistry and other industries that are looking for sustainable and green solutions to replace synthetic and petroleum-based things. And here is a baseball tradition that is a material sustainably harvested, that’s replenished with the tides and takes very little of it to have this desired effect, and it’s a consistency for the pitchers — and I’m like, why would you try to change this?”

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

Ben Baroody’s department at the Texas Rangers is unique in Major League Baseball: it is focused on both player and staff development.

As such, his job title appears to cover every base: Director of Leadership & Staff Development, Player Enrichment Programs, & Mind Health.

“It’s a little fancier in title than in execution,” Baroody told the Leaders Performance Podcast of his role in January. “I think it comes down to a big emphasis on personal growth and development.”

Other elements of his work have been covered elsewhere. Below, we focus on staff development, which is too often neglected across MLB, although the league is not alone in that regard.

“We coined the phrase holistic human development,” Baroody continued. “Our business model as an organisation is to go out and win baseball games and I think helping the individual grow and develop translates to on-field success as well.”

The Rangers’ approach to staff development raises three questions that all teams can ask themselves.

1. Do you have the right people in the decision-making room?

Baroody’s department stands alone in several regards but it is not an island. His team collaborates with other areas of baseball ops and the Rangers front office to ensure their staff development efforts resonate. “Most of the leadership on the baseball side have been players or coaches, so they understand the pressure,” he said, adding that they work together to establish priorities and emphases. “I collaborate with them on what kind of programmes we’re developing or what type of questions we are facilitating for individuals or group discussions knowing that their perspective on being a player or a being coach is priceless.”

2. How can you help people establish the right habits and routines?

Burning the candle at both ends is a road to nowhere. Baroody suggested focusing on the habits and routines that build in balance and self-care. “Being at the ballpark 14 hours a day probably doesn’t help if you’re burnt out by mid-season,” he said. He vividly recalled a time when he skated close to burnout. “On paper I may have been successful but my wellbeing may have been suffering. I didn’t have balance, I didn’t have the security, I was compromising a lot, but when I really dedicated and focused on my wellbeing it tapped into parts of me that I never knew I had.” How balance and self-care look depends on the person. “Every individual must find and determine that for themselves is when I’m at my best. What does it look like? What helps me be the best version I can be or what detracts from me showing up consistently? It comes down to what’s most important and how to prioritise [those things] and build a system in which you can stay consistent with them.”

3. Where can you help your staff to have the biggest impact?

Baroody said it is important for staff members to know the resonant and beneficial elements of their work so that they can have an “exponential impact on the players”. This does not happen automatically. The Rangers took their staff on a week-long development retreat in the off-season. It was, as Baroody explained, “about posing different questions and helping guys understand who they are what they do well and [then] lean into those items.” Each and every staff member could probably write a long list of areas where they could improve, but Baroody told them: “‘let’s focus on the ones that are critical to the impact of your role and responsibility rather than chasing every white rabbit in every opportunity’.”

Ben Baroody also features in our Performance Special Report Human Flourishing: a Snapshot of Wellbeing in the High Performance Landscape. He is joined by the AFL, Australian Institute of Sport and Harlequins to discuss wellbeing as the centrepiece of their performance planning.

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Main Image: Bat Around

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other high-impact areas in sports.

* * * * *

World’s shortest elevator pitch: “Bat Around is gamifying baseball batting practice.”

Company: Bat Around

Location: New York, N.Y.

Year founded: 2020

Website/App: https://www.letsbataround.com | Apple Store app | Google Play app

Funding round to date: “We are self-funded at this point. Pre-revenue.”

Who are your investors? “The main investor is single-sourced, Steve Zelin of PJT Partners in New York.”

Are you looking for more investment? “Yes.”

Tell us about yourself, CEO Matt Farrell: “I’m a career-long sports marketer with about 30 years working in the sports business. I mainly have worked for leagues and governing bodies – Golf Channel, USA Swimming, the U.S. Olympics and Paralympic Committee, as well as Warner Bros. in the early days of the internet. I started a consulting business in 2020 during the pandemic, and I started out as a contractor working for what is now Bat Around, and that eventually led to this role.”

Who are your co-founders/partners? “Steve Zelin, he’s a partner and the head of restructuring and special situations group at PJT Partners. Ken Byck, he was a co-owner of one of the largest fantasy baseball vacation companies licensed by MLB. Robert Lipps, 20 years of investment banking experience. Clint Hurdle, former manager of the Rockies and Pirates, 1,269 career wins as a manager, National League Manager of the Year in 2013 with the Pirates. He’s really the vision and the soul behind what is Bat Around.”

How does your platform work? “If you think about any type of simulator, most notably in the golf industry, hit the ball and watch the animation take place on the screen – that is essentially what we are for baseball. We’ve created a game out of that. We took a technical player development tool of swing analytics, swing outcome and turned that into a game. We call it “sportainment.” It’s a mixture of sports and entertainment. Hitting the ball with live, on-screen results.”

What problem is your company solving? “When we started this, we saw two things that weren’t necessarily headed in the same path but we thought they could. One is we saw the baseball/softball industry have a lot of really strong player development tools that were very technical, but few that really gamified the experience. That was happening at the same time we certainly saw the explosion of Topgolf, golf simulators generally and, believe it or not, even some activities like axe throwing that were getting people active in something they didn’t really think they could do or they didn’t think the game was available to them. We felt like that was a convergence of where we wanted to be.”

What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “Right now, we’re distributing the product free to batting cages that have a HitTrax system. That’s a product very prevalent in the batting cage world. We’re going to support that with sponsorships and partnerships, but starting this out to grow the user base and get as many people playing this game as possible as we start on this HitTrax platform. We have two target audiences. The first being baseball/softball batting cages with a HitTrax system. The second is more in the entertainment space of baseball stadium concourses, family fun centers or even entertainment locations.”

How are you marketing your product? “It’s a little bit of a combination. We have 12 former MLB players with 29,000 combined hits that are advisors on the project, and they are a great source of introductions, content and giving validation to what the product is all about. We’ve done an on-site activation for two weeks at the College World Series in the summer of 2023. We just finished in (early January) at a baseball conference in Dallas for coaches. We did a demonstration and were invited to be part of the MLB Winter Meetings in a tech innovation expo. We’re really starting to use experiential activations and digital marketing to spread the world about how you can get this in an area near you.”

How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “The good news about scale with the product being software is it’s really a one-click download to get the product onto your HitTrax system. We came out of our beta mode of three pilot cages in January to release the product. We see starting and building authenticity in the baseball/softball world first, but we really see growth coming in entertainment venues and restaurants. We have signed our first agreement with an MLB team and will be on their concourse as a fan activity starting this season. We will announce the team in the coming weeks.”

Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “In many ways, we’re at the beginning of this sport and entertainment mixture within baseball and softball. The golf world is very well advanced in this, but baseball/softball has not been as much. Our competitors come in other sources of entertainment for people. Within the baseball world, it’s re-educating people how to take player development tools and turn them into a game. HitTrax is a great example of that. In the future, there are a ton of great player development technology tools in baseball – Diamond Kinetics, Blast Motion, Rapsodo, TrackMan. Really, we just see the universe of gamification in baseball having so much opportunity.”

What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “What we think is the special sauce to our game is we’ve created our own specific metric that actually measures your success of the game, it’s called your Bat Around Metric or your BAM Score. Obviously, baseball is a very statistics-driven sport. What we’ve done is taken different strategic hitting skills, strategy of the game, hitting a line drive, moving the ball around the field, moving runners and we’ve taken your overall success rate of all of these different hitting skills, not just hitting the ball hard, which is an over-focused area right now of just exit velocity and how hard you can hit the ball. What we’ve done is taken all of these hitting skills and rolled them into one successful number, where you’re a power hitter and I’m a singles hitter, we can actually score well in this game and maybe just perform well on different skills, roll that up into your BAM, which I describe as a decathlon of hitting. From there, just the other soft advantages are first mover in the gamification space, the advisors we have on the project, like Clint Hurdle, and being that early adopter in the space.”

What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “We just came out of our Beta mode and we are now in 18 cages and adding new ones each day. Our major milestone, our coming-out party as a product, was really this past College World Series in Omaha. Having the feather in the cap of being invited by MLB to display at the Winter Meetings was huge for us as a young company. Another is this MLB team concourse.”

What are the values that are core to your brand? “We have a mission and our guiding principles of the game. Our mission statement is connect with the ball and others, meaning we want you to hit but we want it to be a social activity. That’s the simplicity of our mission, connect with the ball and others. Then, we have three guiding principles. One is everybody hits, which essentially means making the game, swinging a bat, accessible for anyone and everyone. The second guiding principle is what we call baseball with more BAM, which means there’s a fun element to this and also a scoring element that can actually help us – think of a handicap in golf – that can allow us to play different skills with each other. The third, really inspired by Clint Hurdle, is innovation built on tradition. We want to take old school hitting strategy and elements of the game of baseball but have it be packaged with modern technology, and in many ways trick people into learning the strategy of the game and strategy of hitting, versus just trying to hit bombs all day.”

What does success ultimately look like for your company? “It’s making the game of baseball and softball more accessible than ever before. Many people, such as myself, the game retired us. The game retired me at 19-years-old. Outside of adult leagues, I didn’t really feel as if there was much of an outlet for me to play. Now, we’re trying to re-open the door. We want to give the game back to people to enjoy, no matter what their skill level is. I feel like going back to our mission of making that a connected experience of the ball and with others, whether it be a restaurant or a professional stadium concourse or being able to play the game in your garage if you want – make the game more accessible again.”

What should investors or customers know about you — the person, your life experiences — that shows they can believe in you? “The depth and breadth of my experience working in sports and sports business, but not just that, but I’ve always worked for challenger brands in sports. It’s one thing to be a marketer and promote some of the biggest NFL, NBA, MLB teams. My career has been about building brands with Olympic sports, non-traditional golf events. It’s really the love of sports and sports business with being, of knowing the grind of building a brand and especially a challenger brand.”

How much does adding the gaming element of this more appealing across different sects of baseball fans? “In this case, I will make a loose connection to Topgolf and our game. What I love about both is if I stood out on a golf course or stood at home plate and hit a ball, the massive amount of real estate that is comes into reality really quick. When I can be in a more confined setting, then see the animation play out on the screen and see the defenders play my ball, score points, even if I hit a weak ground ball I’m still scoring some experiential points and there’s the phenomenon of seeing some numbers tally, whether they’re small or large, there’s a rush to that. And seeing some success. The same way in Topgolf, if I shank a shot, I can still hit a target and there’s some fun in it. It’s not the same in Bat Around, but we’re showing you constant feedback of you earned 50 experiential points for this hit, you earned 300 points for that hit, so we can give you instant feedback and keep the integrity of competing with someone but have some small wins along the way.”

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 with additional reporting by Joe Lemire

• Teams need the right KPIs if you’re going to leverage AI to your benefit.

• Leaders need to set the terms on which AI is used inside their building.

• The analysts of the future will be generalists who know how the datasets derived from AI transact.

AI will only ever be as good as the questions asked

Are you asking the right performance questions? Until you do, AI is only a secondary concern, according to Gary McCoy, the CEO of psycholinguistic specialists Peak AI, who are Main Partners of the Leaders performance Institute. “It’s really how you action the data,” McCoy told The People Behind the Tech podcast. “I always state in any technological sense whatsoever that we’ve got to have the question ahead of the technology,” he added.

To illustrate his point, he cited the question of preventable injury: “It’s called ‘preventable injury’ for a reason – it’s preventable.” In 2019, McCoy helped to deliver professional baseball’s only soft tissue injury-free season for Taiwan’s Chinatrust Brothers. There are, as he said, key performance indicators for baseball players in every position, yet injury rates across the sport are “off the charts”. McCoy attributes these rates in part to a lack of accountability in some quarters as teams push for “bigger, faster, stronger”players without considering the impact on the individual. “If an athlete’s injured and it’s a preventable injury, you haven’t conditioned him correctly.” Technology can help raise flags, but it has limited utility without meaningful KPIs. “Are we improving the athlete’s key performance indicators or reducing preventable injury?”

Coaches need to step in and guide AI

At November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Oval in London, a coach was overheard saying: ‘I have a team looking at AI but I have no idea what they do’. We put that to McCoy on the podcast. “If you don’t know what they do, go and lead them because they probably don’t know what they’re doing either,” he said. “Artificial intelligence and data, as a general staple in sports, needs guidance. It needs transactional guidance to evolve the athlete.”

He spoke of a Major League Baseball team whose analysts are “looking at spreadsheets [and] have no idea of what’s going on out on the field”. That disconnect is down to the coaches: “artificial intelligence and data, as a general staple, in sport needs guidance; and it needs transactional guidance to [help] evolve the athlete… we cannot get to a point of siloing data and letting it just run by itself.” McCoy does not believe that AI will replace the coach, but it can certainly remove coaching or performance biases. “It can show correlations that we have never seen that may be critical to improving performance or reducing injury.” In any case, it comes back to the coach and the environment they foster.

AI needs a guiding ethos in sport

According to McCoy, if the world of sport is to better manage data and smooth the way for the widespread use of AI, “we need analysts, we need performance practitioners, we need data scientists and we need the general managers of organisations to come together and create almost an ethos around how organisations need to look at this moving forward.” AI can also free up the coach to be “creative”. “Coaches need to embrace it,” McCoy added. “It’s going to open up opportunities for you tactically on how to work with athletes. But for all coaches and even support staff, it’s going to open up hours and you can get creative by learning how to ask that next level of questions.”

Analysts need to understand how data derived from AI transacts

The most effective analysts in the future will know how the data transacts in their organisations. “Anybody coming into this space from a data science perspective has got to understand that they need to dive in and be generalists in areas like performance,” said McCoy. His advice: “work with high performance directors specifically to understand the physical demands on that athlete, the technical skillset of that athlete and understand what may be gaps in their technical efficiency and start to leverage [data insights]”. The analyst can “build the AI models with the direction of your coaching staff and your organisation but [they] can get creative around this [search] for unbiased correlations.” Do that and “you’ll be employed for the rest of your career.”

Listen to the full interview with Gary McCoy:

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

By Bobby L Scales II

The following scenario has historically played out with regularity across baseball in the United States.

A club signs a 16 or 17-year-old player from the Dominican Republic and they matriculate their way through the minor leagues of Florida or Arizona.

Inevitably, the player makes a poor play in a game or practice and their coach, typically an American, will need to correct the mistake.

The coach finds that the player will not look them in the eye and feels disrespected because, in American culture, you are taught from a young age to look a senior person in the eye and you say ‘yes sir’, ‘yes ma’am’, ‘no sir’, ‘no ma’am’.

By contrast, in Latin culture, you do not look your elders in the eye when they are correcting you.

There is a mutual misunderstanding that does little for team unity and does nothing to further the cause of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Teams are increasingly aware of this. When I worked at the Los Angeles Angels, we considered it important to take American coaches to the Dominican Republic, to let them immerse themselves in the culture at the academy and work with the players. We wanted them to understand what life looks like in the Dominican; to better understand how these young men grow up.

Equally, Latin American players need to be afforded the grace to learn the social norms of the United States.

This mutual understanding is the key to weaving the fabric of team unity and success.

So how can we better embrace diversity, equity and inclusion? Here are four thoughts.

1. Don’t be afraid of the conversation

No team is perfect and we could all be doing more to further the cause. But are you ready to have the conversation? It may sound obvious but people are often too afraid of the conversation for fear of saying something wrong or fear of being canceled. The benefits of diverse teams are clear in the world of business and sports has started to take note. But would you be comfortable or promoting, say, a female coach in a male-dominated environment? Is it within your gift to go against the grain and make what may be a counterintuitive appointment? To reach that point, a leader must construct an environment where people understand that players, coaches and practitioners are here because they are the best possible person to be in their position. I would rather lose with players that have a growth mindset – and I don’t think you’re going to win with players that have a fixed mindset anyway. There’s not a player on earth worth their salt who does not want to get better. They will listen to an individual if they have cultivated a relationship. For a complete culture, you need to have coaches and staff members that are aware of this, who feel supported.

2. Don’t get bogged down in the obvious differences

I am a 46-year-old black man and I could be sitting in a front office next another 46-year-old black man, but we could have grown up in different circumstances and, as such, we will bring different experiences to the table. As important as ethnic, religious and gender diversity are, they may not necessarily lead to diversity of thought – cognitive diversity. Someone in your team may have grown up on a council estate in a tough part of London and another may have grown up in Beverley Hills, California, and had people who worked in their house and they’ve never made their bed. Perfect: LEAN INTO IT! People from different walks of life, socio-economic backgrounds, and different cultures will come to a problem on the table in a different way. Perspectives – different perspectives – are exactly what I, as a leader, want. This allows for constructive dissent, which is where the best outcomes lie. When you have people who are willing to disagree with each other you will have a richer conversation. It’s then up to the leader to pull those opinions together, form a consensus, and move forward with an outcome or a solution that is beneficial to the team.

3. Identify the individuals in your team who are underserved

You have to cultivate relationships – they are way more important than the X’s and O’s, tactics or data. As well-known American football coach Herman Edwards once said: YYP – Know Your Personnel. A leader must know how to access them even if it isn’t the leader directly. Maybe it’s an assistant coach or a practitioner on your staff who has built a trusting relationship with the player. Again, lean into that. There is a certain truth to the idea that the physio knows everything that’s going on. I’m a big believer in authenticity and people will reveal themselves to you if your environment is one of support, warmth and truth.

4. Find opportunities to learn… then teach people!

Do you celebrate cultural milestones and holidays? You should, because they represent an opportunity to teach people from other cultures about that culture. For example, if there is a Muslim player in your mostly non-Muslim team, and you’re playing during Ramadan, there is an opportunity to educate your other players and coaching staff on what that means for that player and their faith. A crucial point to make: before even reaching that point of cultural exchange you yourself as a coach or executive are going to need to get stuck in and commit to proper research for yourself – you cannot teach that which you yourself do not know. Manage this process well – within an environment of support, warmth and truth – and you’ve brought your team closer together.

By John Portch with Henry Breckenridge

• Champion teams act and think like champions before they lift the trophy or wear the ring – and they do it 24/7.

• Team values need collective input and meaning or they’re just ‘words on a wall’.

• Success doesn’t ‘root out the weeds’ on its own – culture needs constant renewal.

Culture often precedes results

The Texas Rangers’ transformation under General Manager Chris Young and Manager Bruce Bochy saw them go from 102 losses during the 2021 Major League Baseball season to the World Series just two years later. Bochy, for one, could not have enjoyed a more successful first campaign in Arlington.

It is tempting to attribute part of the turnaround to the organization’s increased focus on personal development, particularly when Ben Baroody was promoted to Director of Leadership & Organizational Development, Player Enrichment Programs, and Mental Performance in November 2021. But the truth, as he told us himself, is that the groundwork had been laid for years by the staff, coaches and players independently of on-field results.

“I’ve been here nine seasons and there have always been a lot of positive elements to our culture,” Baroody told the Leaders Performance Podcast in January.

The team did, however, revisit their values in light of that 2021 season. Baroody continued: “It came down to refining our core values – who we are and what we represent, how we live out those values – and [establishing] a belief in what we can accomplish together when everyone has a clear picture of what those priority values are. [Then] it’s easier to embody them and be held accountable to them. We know what matters most and what we are working towards.”

The Rangers values include “be a good teammate”, “compete with passion” and “dominate the fundamentals”. “On the surface they seem over-simplified but they mean a lot and can be applicable in a lot of different ways.”

Your values need to be reinforced daily

Too often teams fall prey to the words they stick on the clubhouse wall and the Rangers were no different in the past. “We’ve been victims of that,” said Baroody. “I think that every organization is.” One solution, he added, is continuous reinforcement “through meetings, through presentations, through discussions – they aren’t just on a wall somewhere – they are truly part of how we operate, they are included as we constantly evaluate our decision making and in our evaluation of personnel, both players and staff. They are the main component of our performance reviews from a staff standpoint.”

Values, when they are perceived as meaningful, can be applied by people on a 24/7 basis. “You can boil them down to the most obvious application, but when you think through how you’re structuring your day, how you’re structuring your week, your season, your lifestyle. They can be applied 24 hours a day and we’ve tried to really live them out and not be selective in when we embody them,” Baroody said.

They should resonate beyond your sport or competition

The Rangers’ values are defined by all domains of the organization. “We all have clarity into what they mean for us personally in our different sub-departments,” said Baroody. The same goes for staff and players. In fact, it is a fundamental development exercise for young players at the Rangers’ minor league affiliates. “We’ve put it to them to speak amongst themselves, have collaborative discussions, to create the definitions around those [values] and to set forth the behaviors that exemplify those values.”

At a staff level, “it comes down to simplicity and clarity in having values that are applicable to everyone in the organization whether you’re a player, whether you’re a scout, whether you’re a coach, whether you’re an analyst – you know what it means to the organization as a whole.”

Even if you’re a non-playing member of staff you’re still “leading with a competitiveness. The communication and collaboration and care you have for others – that’s how you’re exemplifying being that good teammate.”

It doesn’t end with winning

The process did not end with the Rangers’ World Series victory in November. “It reinforced we’re on the right track with culture,” said Baroody. However, “as soon as you think you have it figured out, you’re close to being humbled.” The word ‘culture’, as he explained, has its roots in agricultural cultivation. “[Your culture] has to be cultivated so you’re always going to have to pull some weeds and tend to things, and give it water and give it sunlight. It can’t be stagnant.”

Therefore, he does not perceive a hunger issue as the team prepares for Spring Training. “There’s pride, there’s accomplishment, there have been celebrations, but there’s definitely not been contentment and our focus is on building on 2023 with a competitive focus on 2024 and beyond. And I think that in itself is a good insight into who we are and who we aim to be and what we try to represent.”

Listen to the full interview with the Texas Rangers’ Ben Baroody:

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