In partnership with

By Luke Whitworth

Leaders Meet: People Development, hosted alongside the Texas Rangers, was our second physical event of the year in North America.

Throughout the day, we engaged in case study sessions, roundtable discussions and skill-based learning centred around the overarching theme of people development for performance.

These are the key afternoon takeaways. (Morning takeaways can be found here.)

Session 3: Elevating Performance Through Psychological Health & Safety

Speaker: Rachel Lutz-Guevara, Vice President of Wellness & Resiliency, TaskUs

• Psychological health: the management of psychological health and risk; promoting wellbeing.
• Opportunity: we don’t think about psychological health and safety as we do physical health and safety. We are more susceptible to psychological injury vs. physical injury within the workplace.
• How do we develop strategies to implement this into the broader framework? Some of the risks could exist could locker room talk, media pressures, lack of cultural humility – these may not seem much of a big deal, they can degrade the skills of high performing and resilient people.
• If we make investments in this space, we can see developments in performance.
• The framework: understand the organisation and its innate risks. What are the needs and expectations of people? What is the scope and scale of the programme? Identify the leaders – it is one thing to delegate, another thing to have modelling and sponsorship from the top down. Create policies and embed them into the operational execution.
• How to do this in practice: prevention strategies.
• Prevention: primordial, primary, secondary, tertiary.
• Think about recruitment: how do you ensure the right people are joining? Integration of wellness-informed questions as part of this process creates an holistic view before someone starts. Are they going to be a good fit?
• Onboarding: in employment, how do you prepare your people? What is the fabric of the organisation?
• Resiliency muscle: the organisation are looking to grow resiliency muscle through experiential learning. TaskUs mandate paid wellness time around skills based training.
• Post employment: how are you supporting those that choose to leave?
• Be explicit: about the work – talking about the spectrum of risks that can occur. We want to be transparent. Provide opportunity to opt-out. Have a holistic approach to get the right people. Services available once they enter the company. Expectation of how employees use those services.
• Research outcomes: with this strategy, TaskUs employees who have gone through this recruitment process is resulting in the organisation retaining staff members 35% longer than counterparts who don’t have this – and they are able to adjust to work quicker.
• Impact of skill acquisition training: KPIs have improved 4% / accuracy 8%. Attrition by 50%. What could that do for the broader organisation? Operating, performing and feeling better – there is a business case to investing in wellbeing and learning.
• Flawed methodology: there is too much focus on reactive techniques. We are seeing many organisations not leaning into the proactive side of things enough.
• Thriving teams: go proactive and leave reactive behind. Are we doing this across the whole organisation and not just for athletes? Why do it – it builds confidence and relationships etc. Having provisions alone isn’t enough, embedding into the structure of a preventative angle is where dividends get paid.
• Keep people well: meet people when they are well and keep them well instead of waiting for decline and then intervening.
• Flawed methodology: many rely on company culture and motivation. We assume that if we are supplying something new and shiny, it will drive engagement. Structure, discipline, consistency and availability of resources allow us to arrive at culture and motivation.
• How to start the framework: ‘I’m willing to make myself feel uncomfortable for the good of the team. Sometimes good things come from being uncomfortable’.
• Identify and engage an executive leader: they serve as an advocate so that there are no barriers to execution.
• Build a business case: most organisations are running a business that is performance-driven and see wellness as part of the broader business wellness ecosystem. This is going to help a wellbeing programme flourish.
• Hiring an expert: ensure you have deep technical knowledge and expertise. Have evidence-based practices that are effective.
• Start with vulnerability.
• Think about how you show up, how you want to be seen.

Session 4: Translating Values into Development

Speaker: Dayton Moore, Senior Advisor, Texas Rangers

• Values in the journey: two things learnt from the journey: 1) Forgive every single day. 2) You can’t quit.
• Keeping energy and focus: human beings are motivated by praise and defeated by criticism. It’s important to have people around you who are energy givers, problem-solvers and positive by nature.
• Reflect on your youth: never stop looking at the game from the eyes of your youth.
• Being self-aware: Dayton shared that he always wanted to have ‘numbers’ people around him – there was a deficiency in knowledge so ‘layering on’ was important to help further support his decision making.
• Experiences are vital: all experiences are vital – the biggest challenge is to utilise and align together. In leadership whatever values you think are important, if you want togetherness and unity, how are you creating pathways for relationships to thrive?
• Five areas when recruiting a player: scouting evaluation / character evaluation / medical evaluation / financial evaluation / R&D evaluation. All must come together to acquire a player.
• Identifying talent: three things you can always look at and tap into – where are their playgrounds / who are their playmates / what are their ‘play toys’ (spending their money on).

Session 5: Skills Development – Building Our Personal Impact

Speaker: Tim Cox, Managing Director, Management Futures

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”​ Maya Angelou

• Status: building credibility through the confidence we convey.
• Status: low and high status.
• Low: speaking softly​. Speaking quickly and disjointedly​. Using low status language – “it’s nothing major, but…”. Cocking your head to one side​. Difficulty maintaining eye contact. Fidgeting while speaking​. Not occupying space with ease​. Tentative ‘errs’ which invite interruption​.
• High: Speaking with passion/Purpose​. Maintaining eye contact​. Adopting confident body language – still, upright, strong gestures​. Speaking slowly and clearly​. Tone conveys importance of message​. Speaking at a volume that is heard.

Effective behaviours

There are push and pull behaviours.

Responsive:

• Explorative questioning​.
• Authentic Listening​. Staying open​.
• Summarising & acknowledging.

Assertive:

• Sharing our perspective​.
• Clear on what we want​.
• Evidence-based persuasion​.
• Giving effective feedback.

Ineffective Behaviours

Passive:

• Giving in too soon​.
• Feeling ‘unworthy’​.
• Low status​.
• Not challenging.

Aggressive:

• Aggression.
• Attacking​.
• Arguing​.
• Refusing to listen.​

Questions to consider around your personal impact:

• What do people say about you?
• How does that differ from your own perception?
• What specifically can you do to bridge the gap?

The key morning takeaways are available here.

In partnership with

By Luke Whitworth

Leaders Meet: People Development, hosted alongside the Texas Rangers, was our second physical event of the year in North America.

Throughout the day, we engaged in case study sessions, roundtable discussions and skill-based learning centred around the overarching theme of people development for performance.

These are the key morning takeaways. (Afternoon takeaways can be found here.)

Women’s Sport Breakfast: Development Experiences

Speakers:

Hannah Huesman, Mental Performance Coordinator, Texas Rangers

Shelby Baron, Coordinator of Player & Coach Services, United States Tennis Association

Michaelene Courtis, Senior Director of Baseball Operations, Texas Rangers

• Life is a people game. When you prioritise others and yourself with respect, you are going to continue to grow.
• Find ways to connect with people who are not like you. With all walks of life, we tend to look for and find commonalities with people. Have an appreciation that we can learn from everyone.
• In order to lead, you have to go and do it. Going out and doing the work is the best development you can have.
• Reciprocal mentorship: Shelby shared the power of the concept of reciprocal mentorship. It elevates collaboration between two people and provides more opportunity for quality learning.
• Dealing with an athlete – sport psych experiences. Red light vs. green light.
• Don’t take responsibility lightly as someone responsible for developing others. We want to be there based on the experiences we have engaged in.
• For women working in elite sport environments, your mentor or mentors don’t just need to just be women. Who are those that are going to help you grow, develop and challenge your thinking? Encouragement to seek out allies. Understanding you don’t have to have someone who looks like you.
• Developing others: in a player context, look to be proactive in developing relationships through mental skills. Look to equip them with skills they need before things can turn. In all development, it’s important to focus on performance strengths before performance weaknesses.
• Person before performer: this is an important sentiment to withhold. Have vulnerability in knowing them as a person through showing genuine interest in them as a person.
• Growth: Hannah shared that one of the most valuable growth opportunities was being the middle person. It challenges you to think about how to connect with people, collate information and deliver it to others.
• Engage in relationship mapping: everyone in the discussion shared the importance of relationship mapping. Building these relationships creates an impact in the environment that makes a difference to performance.

Session 1: Developing a Learning Culture

Speakers:

Chris Young, General Manager, Texas Rangers

Nico Harrison, General Manager, Dallas Mavericks

• Instilling a learning culture: it’s a simple set of thought processes – if you are not learning you are not advancing and innovating. Nico shared that when he joined the Mavs, he was super intentional in not bringing in close colleagues who had already been part of his journey, as to not create a gap between his personal philosophy and where the team was at with the talent already in the environment. There was a feeling of wanting to feel uncomfortable and to learn on the job at a faster rate.
• What can you hear & see in a learning culture: it always starts around people who ask questions and listen. Chris shared that he looks at this when evaluating – how open are you? How much time do you spend talking or listening? Are they curious?
• Be willing to fail: thinking about fail can be a difficult notion when working with athletes at the highest level. Look at this more from a recalibration point of view to help you move forward. Being empowered to not be scared to fail.
• Retain focus when pressure comes on: the idea of an environment with a learning culture is that it is open and results don’t matter – the reality is that there is an expectation to win. It’s good to say that we are open-minded. It leads to improvement, but if we are not succeeding with that mindset, we need to recalibrate and shift. One of the core values of the Texas Rangers is to dominate the fundamentals, whilst having an appreciation that we can’t be great at everything, but what are the most important aspects to be as successful as possible? These may evolve and shift which are part of a true learning culture.
• Servant leader: Nico shared that the development of the team is a focus. We want an environment where everyone can develop, but it’s important to invest in the high potential talent in the environment and help to accelerate their potential – if you don’t do that, it is hard to maintain.
• Philosophy: every decision made or interaction made, think about the players and how they will react or think – what the impact could that be on them as a human being? Everything can carry weight and value for them. Operate from a place of care and show them that their best interests are at the heart of your process, but accompanied by high standards that we want to hold them to. Asking people ‘what do you want to achieve for yourself?’ is a great starting point.
• Growing trust: Nico shared that he is still building trust, which can take longer than a couple of years. Turnover has been at a sensible pace, as in his experiences it can only metabolise at a certain rate. Lots of change can stifle growth.
• What does success look like: The Texas Rangers as an organisation has two goals, the second being that every employee has the opportunity to achieve their dreams in the organisation, sport or industry. These correlate to the first goal of seeking to win a championship. The biggest goal set at the start of the season, was being an organisation that overachieves – it is a signal or a sign of a healthy culture as it is bringing the best out of everybody and functioning as a whole. Are we in the conversation? How do you develop the team? How do they feel? Are your people excited driving into work? Do they have a voice? Do they reach their goals? Does what they say matters?
• Assess the project of learning: depends on individual circumstances but ensure you are reviewing whether we are making progress and moving forward. What do we need to amend or alter or do to fill in the blanks? Empower departmental heads to evaluate against the fundamental aspects of what we want to be good at and review against those.
• Five factors critical for developing a learning culture: humble people that are open-minded / curiosity / drive / empowerment / collaboration – people that trust each other.

Session 2: Developing Healthier and Stronger Minds – Unlocking Human Potential Through Improved Brain Health & Performance

Speaker: Jennifer Zientz, Center for BrainHealth, The University of Texas at Dallas

• Brain health: it is an emerging field – ‘neck up check ups’. Without brain health, we really don’t have health as it regulates everything we do; 50% of what we do is toxic to our brain health.
• Fast-paced environments: with fast-paced environments, it is critical to have good brain health. We are living far longer, but we don’t know how to keep our brains healthy for the remainder of our lives – the peak is 42-45 years old.
• Neuroplasticity: science is showing the power of neuroplasticity. Your brain is constantly wiring and re-wiring. It is driven by experience and being a passive attendee doesn’t impact it as positively. We need to engage in deeper level thinking to develop neuroplasticity.
• Performance: if we can have improved focus / clarity / change readiness we can influence performance. Our ability to be prepared, adaptable and positioned for change readiness can support success. How we use our brain everyday can influence these factors.
• Information overload: a basic skill that we engage in all the time. It increases cortisol and decreases performance – this is what’s known as maladaptive neuroplasticity.
• Less is more: the less that you are able to have in your environments, the better. With simultaneous inputs, we are not getting at front networks the way we should. These front networks are the CEO of your brain: judgement, reasoning and decision-making.
• The environment: the environment can impact your memory. Every single day in our roles, there are hard conversations and decisions – can you do it without extra and alternate inputs (less is more)? Knowing what you need to pay attention to and focusing on that, not trying to take everything in at one time. This is significant for brain health.
• You will get more done if you do less.
• Superficial learning: how deeply so we think about information? How much time do you spend in superficial learning environments? This type of learning is highly familiar to us, where not a huge amount of brain power is needed to solve problems. We don’t have to put as much elbow grease into brain power.
• Front networks: when we spend too much time in superficial thinking, we are not engaging our front networks. We are relying on overused and overlearned information. We need efficiencies, but you have to be putting some elbow grease into it. Your brain is like your body – like anything, you start somewhere and then have to up your ante.
• Curiosity & motivation: these are the biggest drivers of brain health. Curiosity are the new ways to explore and the motivation is the drive to succeed.
• Deeper level thinking: deep dives into information and issues. How much of your time do you spend in service level thinking – where can you change that? How intentional are you at stopping and thinking how and where can we do things differently? Be prudent to jump in and don’t solely rely on expertise all the time. It will increase dopamine and agility.
• Yourself as an athlete: do you treat yourself as well as the athletes? When in an industry of winning, the greatest asset is the brain. How we are going to get there depends on brain power.
• Possibility thinking: thinking outside the box and having open-mindedness. We have lots of ideas, ultimately it comes down to the possibilities we see for ourselves, team and organisation. We operate in a mindset of just doing better than last time – better doesn’t equate to more. It’s about trying things and a culture of possibility through exploration.
• Changing environments: just because we tried things last year and it failed, doesn’t mean it will fail again. How can we be change ready? What are the possibilities that could exist?
• Be possibility thinkers on behalf of others – in leadership, having the ability to forecast with each individual we work with. Putting in seeds of ideas – possibility thinking increases flexibility in our thinking, provides perspectives and reframes failure.
• How are you calibrating your mental resources? Deploy you greatest thinking skillset where you need it and not expending excess brain power on low level things that impact mental energy.
• The workplace: this is one of the most important places where we shape our brain.
• Seek to do 10% less multitasking.
• Identify the things that you can improve and want to improve – don’t be surface level thinkers. Get to the root of the issue and why it matters. Engage your thinking and get a better level of neuroplasticity.
• What are you doing with the information is what will change your brain. Improve synchronicity of those front networks.
• Do you think about your brain? Usually people don’t unless something happens to it. Your brain is your favourite organ. If you put your brain health into the game it can change so much.
• We each need every ounce of mental advantage to maintain and improve the world around us – it starts with us at an individual level.

The key afternoon takeaways are available here.

ArmCare’s strength sensor measures a pitcher’s arm strength and range of motion, and paired with pitchLogic’s velocity and key metrics, can track arm readiness and fatigue as well as offer pitch design recommendations and custom training plans. (Image courtesy of pitchLogic/ArmCare.com)

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Tom Friend

One app quantifies the pitch, the other app quantifies the arm, and the two have come together for the greater good of elbows and shoulders.

On its own, pitchLogic — a smart baseball embedded with a circuit board full of inertial sensors — can measure velocity, spin rate, backspin, sidespin, riflespin, spin axis, spin direction, horizontal and vertical movement, arm slots and 3D renderings of the ball’s release from a pitcher’s fingers. In real time.

On its own, ArmCare.com — by pairing a dynamometer with an inertial sensor— can calculate a pitcher’s pinch grip, internal and external rotation, scapular strength, fatigue, recovery and an all-important metric known as Strength Velocity Ratio. In real time.

But until their announced partnership in February, pitchLogic wasn’t in the wellbeing business, and ArmCare.com wasn’t in the release point business. Under this joint arrangement, pitchers now have intertwined tech-centric apps that work in concert to improve performance and arm health all at once.

“We’re working together because we have the same customer,” says Jeff Ackerman, pitchLogic CEO. “What we’re saying to each other’s client base is, ‘Look, this is something that we recommend. We think that you should not just have pitchLogic, you should also have ArmCare.’ And then for ArmCare people, ‘You shouldn’t just have ArmCare, you should have pitchLogic so we can measure your progress.’ And then everybody still uses their separate equipment and goes to the separate websites to buy each thing, but rely on both.”

The gains and overlaps in baseball technology are beginning to accelerate these types of vital integrations. The pitchLogic app has already been adopted by the pitch design platform Driveline Baseball, particularly for remote training purposes, and the partnership between pitchLogic and ArmCare is the next obvious progression.

The goal of both companies is to be must-haves in the duffle bag of every pitcher. For instance, pitchLogic is a transient option to its competitors Rapsodo and TrackMan, which aren’t nearly as portable or affordable. As for ArmCare.com, the system was perfected in part by a former Angels pitching coach Jordan Oseguera and a former Angels director of performance integration Dr Ryan Crotin — both of whom believe their product can pinpoint whether a pitcher’s injury risk is lack of strength or pitiable biomechanics.

ArmCare.com, in particular, took a winding and scientific road to get here. A decade ago, a long-term Colorado Rockies arm study showed that spring training weaknesses in a pitcher’s external rotators and supraspinatus were precursors to regular-season throwing injuries. Accompanying research also confirmed that imbalanced throwing shoulders — meaning an unproportional ratio between external rotation and internal rotation — also increased odds of a crippling arm injury.

From a distance, the founder of a rotator cuff and scapular strengthening platform called Crossover Symmetry dug into the hypothesis. His name is Duggan Moran, and he enlisted his father Jim Moran, a physical therapist, to begin prohibitively testing throwing shoulders — just to confirm whether their exercises were targeting the right arm muscles.

Using a basic dynamometer, or muscular strength tester, they found promising results before shifting their strength testing to teenage prodigies at Perfect Game baseball tournaments. Alarmed at how weak and predisposed to injury the young players were, Duggan Moran took the technological steps needed to develop what is now the ArmCare.com app.

By using a new “research grade” digital dynamometer to measure pinch grip, combined with an Inertial Measurement Unit sensor chip to quantify range of motion, Moran’s company built proprietary software that ultimately democratized strength testing.

Image courtesy of pitchLogic/ArmCare.com.

Developed further by the pair of ex-Angels pitching specialists Crotin and Oseguera, the app began to pinpoint the most crucial metrics to empower pitching arms such as pinch grip and the ratio of strength to velocity (SRV), The platform ascended from there. They could state confidently that spin rate could only be improved through increased pinch grip strength, that simply altering a grip to create spin rate was fallacy. They could state confidently that talented and flexible teenage athletes could throw hard without proper strength, but those were also the very ones most likely to snap a ligament.

“Until you have this data at your fingertips, you can’t properly train these guys,” Moran says. “You can’t know whether you’re overtraining or undertraining unless you understand the fatigue and recovery of these athletes. And in less than five minutes, we can gather that data, and you don’t need a clinician. You don’t need expensive equipment to do it. You do it remotely. The app guides players through the exam with audio-visual graphics and then delivers customized exercises based on the results, as well as feedback.”

As a result, there are now players from all 30 MLB teams and most every D1 baseball program using the app — purportedly 15,000 youth, high school, college and pro players total — and Crotin claims the total number of ArmCare clients who’ve needed arm surgery is exactly…one.

Which is where pitchLogic comes in. Crotin and Co. know that an ever-changing arm slot can be a red flag for arm weakness, something their app does not ascertain. But pitchLogic’s smart baseball — utilized by all MLB teams, including Yankees closer Clay Holmes — contains the accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetic sensors and Bluetooth radio to produce a 3D clock that shows precise arm slot, not to mention any irregularities in velocity and spin. From there, ArmCare can determine whether any arm slot inconsistency is from weakness, fatigue or simply biomechanics.

But if it is weakness — and a pitcher’s about to blow out an elbow or shoulder — pitchLogic and ArmCare.com can together sound the siren.

And go from one surgery… to none.

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.

A Data & Innovation podcast brought to you in collaboration with

“My staff is, by far, way more educated, smarter than me. They all have these niches that they’re really good at,” says Brandon McDaniel.

“When I need to be able to understand something, when I need to be able to communicate something, when I need to be able to have that conversation with our front office or coaching staff, whoever that might be, they’re the ones that I’m going to in order to get that information.”

McDaniel is the Vice President of Player Performance at the LA Dodgers and the first guest on the People Behind the Tech Podcast series, a new collaboration between SBJ Tech and the Leaders Performance Institute.

During the course of the episode, he also talks to SBJ’s Joe Lemire and Leaders’ John Portch about topics, including:

• The tech he uses in his own life [1:00];
• How he seeks to test, trial and implement tech in a team environment [10:00];
• Exploiting ‘windows of opportunity’ in athlete monitoring [16:00];
• How analytics departments can play a role in scouting and development [29:00].

Joe Lemire Twitter | LinkedIn

John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn

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

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Tom Friend

Baseball’s grab-and-go technology has flooded the market with enough analytics to make a brainiac’s head spin. Between Pocket Radar, Stalker, TrackMan, Rapsodo, Blast Motion, Diamond Kinetics and Yakkertech, pitchers and hitters have access to more data points than a nuclear physicist.

If only the numbers could all be aggregated onto one simple video.

Then again, that’s the goal of AWRE (pronounced Aware) Sports, a startup that relies on camera vision, cloud technology, skeletal tracking and streaming to create automated film clips that can be overlayed with any baseball player’s wide swath of personal metrics.

The company is currently deploying its hardware and software at the Division I level with the University of Maryland, at the DII level with Erskine College, at the DIII level with Keystone College, at the JuCo level with Eastern Oklahoma State College, at the prep level with IMG Academy and, yes, even at the youth level with Brick Little League in New Jersey.

The result is an application that serves as part recruiting platform, part training platform, part game-stream platform and, down the road in an absolute dream scenario, as perhaps a competitor of the scoring app and automated highlight company GameChanger.

“Obviously, GameChanger’s literally everywhere – that is a monster,” says Ken Spangenberg, AWRE’s chief sales officer and older brother of the St. Louis Cardinals’ Cory Spangenberg. “But I think there are differences that kind of separate us from anyone else. One, the fact we’re trying to capture everything, not just games. Hopefully, people are ultimately going to choose: ‘Do I want to watch on GameChanger or do I want to put it on AWRE?’”

If nothing else, AWRE has a vision…as well as computer vision. It doesn’t intend to be the scoring app that GameChanger is, although it does stream games. Instead, it wants to elevate its streams to another stratosphere with radar and sensor integrations.

The company’s roots are in golf. CEO and co-founder Chris Clark, a former college baseball player at DI Wofford, is married to the former Vanderbilt golf coach Holly Clark and saw his wife struggle trying to organize the team’s data, scorecards and spreadsheets. Circa 2012, he developed software that allowed her players to store all of their vital golf analytics on their iPhones, giving birth to a company he called, “Birdie Fire.’’

But his passion remained baseball, and he went on to develop a predictive spray chart model that appealed to most of the college programs that demoed it. One of those schools, Oregon State, went on to win the 2018 College World Series, claiming Clark’s spray chart predictor helped them position their defense and strategize pitch location during their title run. From there, Clark had no choice but to expand.

“I’ve got this [Oregon State] coach wanting to give me a testimonial,” Clark remembers. “I’m like, ‘Hell, now I’ve got to figure this out. It may never get better than this. How do I leverage turning this into a business in the baseball space?’”

He ended up having a purposeful conversation with his Wofford college roommate, Steve Johnson, who ran a New Jersey baseball training academy named Invictus with business partner Rob Corsi. The discussion turned to the smorgasbord of baseball technology out there: the Pocket Radars, Stalkers, TrackMans, Blasts and so on. Johnson mentioned how his facility’s travel ball players needed those sorts of data points to be recruited but often had no way to afford or gain access to such high-end tech.

Clark then talked about how college programs could afford all those devices but could barely aggregate it. He mentioned how graduate assistants were always tasked with writing down launch angle, exit velocity, spin rate, bat speed — arduous and imperfect tasks.

The outgrowth of those discussions became the genesis of AWRE. Clark and Johnson — with the help of a chief technology officer Dave Johansen, COO Corsi and later Spangenberg — debuted the company in their comfort zone: college baseball. Due to their connections from their days at Wofford, Clark and Johnson made a decision to reach out to universities large and small to trial their hardware and software.

The hardware involved the installation of six cameras at each college’s baseball field: a centerfield camera, a camera above home plate and two more cameras on each dugout so both a hitter and pitcher could be filmed from their open and closed sides. Meanwhile, the software involved camera vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence that enabled each pitch or swing to become an automated video clip.

Next was adding the video overlay. Integrating with Pocket Radar, for instance, started with a pitch speed being uploaded to the Pocket Radar cloud, where it would then be synced with the AWRE cloud. With other apps, such as the Stalker radar gun, the overlay vehicle may be Bluetooth instead of a cloud, according to Johansen. He says for the TrackMan V3 ball flight tracking, there is a listening device that marries the data with the video. With Blast Motion, the data is overlayed through separate downloads and uploads, and the same with Yakkertech.

“We started to sell it to colleges,” Spangenberg says. “The reason for that is it’s the cleanest target. You know what the fields are going to be, you know they’re going to pay their invoices on time, you know they’re going to be receptive to the technology. And we’re full. So at this point, we have a waiting list.”

In other words, anyone streaming a Maryland Terrapins baseball game this season through AWRE will be able to toggle between the six cameras, but also see the metrics of each pitch and swing on company’s game center. But streaming games isn’t the platform’s long term goal: streaming analytics is.

The company will soon trial a platform on smart phones that will enable parents or fans to log in, start streaming any game through the AWRE app and immediately have automated clips of every pitch or swing that can be found on player profiles. If the fan or parent can bring a Pocket Radar or Stalker or Blast with them, or if the venue is equipped with AWRE software, the metrics can be overlayed onto every clip – turning every swing or pitch into a video that can be sent to a college or shared over social media with verified analytics.

GameChanger has begun to do the same during games, but AWRE’s hardware and software can be deployed in batting cages or bullpens for just as valuable training data.

“We’re democratizing recruiting,” says Spangenberg, a former head baseball coach at DIII Arcadia University. “The one-percenters have the high-end platforms like like Yakkertech or Track Man. It’s the Power 5 schools. But I think what we’ve built and why it’s interesting is it can also service an 8U team. So we’re not looking at 1 percent of the market, we’re looking at the entire market.”

AWRE’s longer term goal is to eventually use its skeletal tracking — which is currently part of its machine learning — to measure metrics like pitching velo and exit velo on its own…without integrating all the grab-and-go technology.

“Then our app can give people feedback on their swing mechanics or pitch mechanics in real-time,” Johansen says. “Our product can say ‘Your swing is most like Mike Trout. Or Aaron Judge.’ How cool would that be?”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

The Baltimore Orioles and their medical provider, MedStar Health, have partnered in developing a state-of-the-art pitching lab, replete with devices to measure biomechanics and ball flight.

Housed on MedStar’s campus in Bel Air, Maryland — around the corner from the franchise’s High A minor league affiliate in Aberdeen, only 30 miles northeast of Camden Yards and about an hour’s drive from the Double A team in Bowie — the tech-laden lab will help the club assess and monitor their pitchers for delivery efficiency and injury prevention using 10 Qualisys markerless motion-capture cameras, TrackMan’s optically enhanced radar and three force plates embedded in the mound.

The Orioles’ pitching lab uses 10 high-speed cameras, force plates in the mound and advanced ball tracking technology.

“It’s something that any modern, cutting-edge player development system needs. It’s sort of a baseline requirement at this point,” says Orioles Director of Player Development Matt Blood. He adds, “The competitive advantage lies in how you actually use the information that the labs produce because I think just about every team is acquiring this information, but then it’s what do you do with it from there to help the players get better?”

Since the new executive team took over in November 2018, led by GM Mike Elias and AGM Sig Mejdal, the Orioles have built out a robust group of coaches and analysts to modernize the franchise’s then-lagging baseball operations. Now, they’ve assembled a management team can interpret and apply such data sources, rather than contracting out some of that work to biomechanics consultancies such as provided by Reboot Motion or Driveline Baseball.

“Fully in-house. We’ve hired the people that we feel are necessary to process the data at every step of the way,” Blood says. “And then we’ve got coaches who are hungry for that information and will put that into play on both the pitching coach side and the strength and conditioning side.”

The cameras and TrackMan are portable, enabling most of this set up to be moved around, including to the Orioles’ player development complex at their spring training facility in Sarasota. Only the force plates are fixed in place, but Blood says a second sensor-laden mound is slated for construction there. One force plate is placed at the rubber to capture a pitcher pushing off to start his delivery, and then two more are installed side by side down the mound to evaluate the landing force of righty and lefty pitchers.

The idea, he says, is for pitchers to get a spring training baseline and then receive follow-up assessments every four-to-eight weeks. In a video interview shared by the team, Orioles starter Jordan Lyles discussed throwing one of his between-start bullpens at the lab, which opened to the team in July, while seeking better efficiency with this throwing motion.

The pitching lab will serve as an evaluation destination for Orioles pitchers at every level.

“We feel like we have gone about this in a responsible and organic way,” Blood says. “Instead of just rushing to acquire the data, we rushed to acquire the people who could help us and build out the proper system and process and technologies that were most practical and productive to use.”

Previously, the Orioles sent players to the Wake Forest Pitching Lab, owing to a good working relationship they have with both lab director Kristen Nicholson and baseball coach Tom Walter. The Wake lab is identical to what the Orioles built — 10 Qualisys markerless motion capture cameras, TrackMan, three force plates — and is open to the university’s baseball programs as well as the public.

“I have a particular interest in creating 3D simulations to enhance performance in both sports and medical rehabilitation and then also to figure out and define pitching efficiency,” Nicholson said. “We want to limit throwing arm stress and avoid injury without sacrificing velocity, and that becomes the real core of our lab and what’s driving our research in player development.”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A Human Performance article brought to you by our Main Partners

By John Portch

At the Pac-12 Conference Media Day in the summer of 2021, UCLA football Head Coach Chip Kelly revealed his phrase: TBU – ‘true but useless’.

“If it’s true but useless,” he told the gathered media. “I don’t really share that with our team.”

The Leaders Performance Institute cites that moment when speaking to Brandon Stone, the Sports Science Coordinator at the Toronto Blue Jays. Coach Kelly was referring to a game that took place two years earlier – but could ‘true but useless’ apply to the application of sports science as a team?

“If you walk into a room as a sports scientist and you feel that you have to say ‘the rate of force development is at the 50 millisecond epoch’ or ‘you’ve got to start an assessment with the upper quarter YBT’ – if you always have to be that technical and you can’t generalize it or apply it– to me that isn’t science,” says Stone, who previously worked in Olympic and Paralympic sports, college sports, and with the military.

“We have to bring the lab to the field and make sure it answers questions that are relevant to the work our coaches do every day. If it can’t be applied, it isn’t useful.  I’m not going to get caught up in a term that would prevent me from connecting with coaches. If they use ‘workload’ and they don’t really mean work in joules, then use another term. It’s the same if they say ‘velocity’ and they mean ‘speed’. Instead of me getting hung up on that for six months I would rather connect with people and meet them where they are as that creates an opportunity to say: ‘when we say speed, then this is how we define it , and here’s  how we’re seeing it’. The faster we speak the same language the quicker we can begin impacting players together.”

Stone is proud of the manner in which the different departments of baseball operations, such as scouting and player development, are willing to collaborate with the sports science department. “I would say that we’re dot-connectors,” he continues. “We understand the ‘benchtop science’ aspects of physiology, neurobiology and biomechanics, but then we also have the ability to apply that in a field setting. I think that’s what the backbone of sports science should be, can be, and is, in certain instances.”

He has also noticed the wider trend towards generalists in sports science. “We need to have a bit of depth in each domain,” he says, which includes a breadth of ‘soft’ skills allied to a deep practitioner knowledge and, here, Stone sets out four factors for sports science practitioners to consider when developing trust in their craft.

1. It’s not what you say but how you say it

Stone argues that sports scientists have, at times, adopted the wrong approach when entering an organization. “We’re often coming into environments that have been there for a long period of time and, for me, it’s more about creating an environment of openness and a willingness to engage on both sides,” he says. “As long as we have a way we’re going to approach something internally that makes sense to everybody in the room – not just the scientists or the coaches – but it has to make sense to everybody and we work really hard with that. We’re going to make sure that the technology and verbiage we use fits that environment so that people don’t feel like they can’t connect and understand, because then they’re going to be unwilling to say anything. We’re going to be two ships passing in the night instead of getting on land together and making sure we’re taking the next step forward.”

2. Trust comes from listening

Meeting the coach where they’re at – and gaining their confidence in your work as a sports scientist means listening. Stone says: “We can fall into this trap where you think you’ve got to come in and prove your value. ‘I will try to show you how smart I am and show you all the gadgets I have.’ But if you’re in the organization they already value you at some level, right? In my opinion, what creates that confidence in our coaches is my ability to just listen. I want to learn from them regardless of their age, their years in the field or the game. What ends up happening is that they’ll say things that I also see or resonate with. We already mentioned the challenge of the verbiage, the language that is unique to that culture. The ability for the practitioner to learn fast is fundamental and the best way to do that is to listen. Just little things. You get a sense for what they’re describing, and you end up saying ‘Oh yeah, I see the same thing’. That common ground can gain confidence and trust can grow from there.”

3. The importance of repeatability and routine

When it comes to building confidence in a dataset, Stone stresses the importance of routine for everyone involved. “You want to have as much rigor as you can in the field, but there’s a razor’s edge of knowing I can’t control everything,” he says. “It’s not going to be a sterile lab environment, but if we can keep the same repeatable things every single day then we have a higher likelihood of that being reliable over time. Simple things – simple but not always easy – like monitoring. We’re going to monitor at the same time or at least in the same time block every day at certain times of the year, knowing that when we have to switch, then we’re not going to compare morning to afternoon data. Research would support it, anecdotal information that we have in-house would support that too. Working in the United States military, working in college athletics, I can’t remember one place where people didn’t like a schedule. So we’ve tried to leverage that so that what we do fits into their day. It’s not an extra thing that they have to do.”

4. What will deliver the most buy-in?

Pick the item that gains you the most buy-in. “That was the thing when we came in,” says Stone. “We picked the one thing that we were already doing that we could improve, and once we had that dialed in the other pieces could fall into place. Some coaches have that model for skill acquisition; ‘I’m going to start with one cue and one thing a day. We’re going to get really good at that and build upon that foundation.’ It’s the same thing with our scientific approach. Yes, it may not be perfect, and someone from an academic environment would come in and say ‘there’s seven things that aren’t right’. I would suggest that if we can fix one thing that helps three of those take care of themselves and I know that one thing can get more buy-in. I may have a lower confidence level on the validity and reliability of that data upfront, but I can also circle back with some key stakeholders and say early on ‘this is going to be a little bit rough but it gets us into our routines to know that these other three or four things are going to happen down the line.’ That’s what gives me more confidence now because those other things have started to snowball in a positive way where we’re getting to control those simple but not necessarily easy things.”

A Data & Innovation article brought to you by

By Joe Lemire

As an assistant baseball coach in a mid-major conference, Tennessee Tech’s Derek Weldon spent time not only instructing and recruiting players but also cutting the grass and chalking the foul lines. That didn’t leave a lot of time for preparing scouting reports, necessitating efficiency in his searches—which just wasn’t possible back in 2017.

“I was jaded on some things, felt like they could be done a lot better,” he says.

Those pain points led to the founding of 6-4-3 Charts, a leading college baseball and softball data analysis and visualization tool. Five years later, 6-4-3 Charts works with 550 college programs, provided statistical support for ESPN’s broadcasts of the men’s and women’s College World Series and recently partnered with Sportradar-owned Synergy Sports on integrating its cloud-based video platform. Synergy already counts 96% of Division I baseball schools as clients, as well as growing numbers of softball programs and smaller school baseball teams. It also supports all 30 MLB organizations.

The 6-4-3 report generating process is on-demand and customizable. Coaches choose the template, stat year, spray chart design and players to include.

“What’s really cool is we’re sharing data between both of our APIs, so we’re not just leveraging Synergy data and video, but they’re also leveraging our data to improve some quality assurance processes and to look at potential ways to make their vlogging process even more efficient,” Weldon says. “And then, on our side, obviously, accessing all their video and data gives us a really unique opportunity to connect data from multiple sources.”

The origins of 6-4-3 Charts were humble, starting with a $12,000 investment and no full-time employees for its first two years. On the long bus ride to Tennessee Tech’s appearance in the ’17 NCAA regional in Tallahassee, Weldon called one of his former players from his time leading the Timberline High program in Lacey, Washington.

Rick Ahlf, who played shortstop for Weldon, was a high school valedictorian and Arizona State engineering graduate who had accepted a job at Boeing in low-speed aerodynamics product development. Ahlf laughs when recalling the experience of playing for Weldon at Timberline—“That was my first 50-hour-a-week job,” he jokes—but was interested in sports analytics and agreed that there was an opportunity to make a better product. (The third co-founder is Tim Kuhn, a CPA by trade who serves as COO at 6-4-3.)

Working out of his parents’ basement in the summer before the Boeing gig started, Ahlf coded the first iteration of the 6-4-3 Charts product. By scraping box scores and play-by-play data, the tool produced in-depth statistics and visualizations. In recent years, they’ve added a feature to sync TrackMan ball flight data as well as several other partnerships, including with SEQNZR and Playsight.

6-4-3 syncs with TrackMan to share ball tracking data visually with coaches and players.

“We started with PDF reports and Dropbox links, and we’ve evolved,” Weldon says. “Five years later, it’s a fully dynamic interface with on-demand reporting, customization, upload visualizations, video tagging, analysis, ball tracking.”

Coaches are the primary users, with some simply downloading basic scouting reports and spray charts and others delving deep into situational data.

“Coaches of all levels will now have the ability to enhance their game prep and film review,” Matt Lawrence, Synergy Sports’ senior director of baseball and softball, writes in an email. He adds, “And, importantly, their program is in-depth and easy to use. As a former D3 coach, I know this partnership is something that would have enhanced my video scouting and game preparation experience.”

Weldon says they are considering development of their own player portal; one of 6-4-3’s other partners, Driveline Baseball, already does with its TRAQ system. One of the 6-4-3 features is customization of a pocket card with info, for players to wear in a wristband during games or coaches to keep in their pockets. (NCAA rules prohibit in-game access to technology.)

In addition to serving its coaching clients, 6-4-3 has begun sharing some of its data in the media, both with ESPN and D1Baseball.com and D1Softball.com.

“We have all this data,” Weldon says, “and it’s like, ‘Well, other people besides coaches would probably be interested in this data. How can we tailor something for media, for example?’”

For the softball College World Series, Weldon was in the ESPN booth alongside the lead stats researcher and with two 6-4-3 team members in the graphics truck. Having seen how the process works, he is now brainstorming a specific TV production app to help broadcasters provide additional context and storylines.

6-4-3 started gaining significant market share by early 2019, when Ahlf left Boeing and dedicated himself full-time with the startup.

“Honestly, I like having control of my own future,” he says. “I’d rather bet on myself and the people that I trust to work with than being part of a large company where things just honestly move slowly. I like having that level of ownership and accountability that, ‘Hey, if I don’t perform properly, then this thing doesn’t go anywhere.’”

Weldon, incidentally, does still coach back in the high school ranks. His Olympia (Washington) High team won the Class 4A state championship last month. And he’s still in charge of the grounds. “Oh, absolutely,” he says, before correcting himself. He recently handed over mowing duty to a volunteer whose son is on the team.

So some things change, even if the spirit remains.

“All I ever say,” says Weldon, “is, ‘Just keep moving. We’re not going to be still. Let’s just keep going.’”

This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.

A podcast brought to you by our Partners Elite Performance Partners

“Folks coming into the organisation, whatever their career aspirations may be or their vision of leadership, we want to help them find that, whatever is genuine and authentic to them.”

Ben Baroody, the Director of Leadership Development & Mental Performance at the Texas Rangers of Major League baseball, is discussing career and leadership development opportunities at the club in this latest edition of the Elite Performance Partners Industry [EPP] Insight Series.

EPP are a performance consultancy and search firm highly regarded across sport and, for this episode, EPP’s Founding Partner Dave Slemen and Managing Partner Anna Edwards posed the questions to Ben, who spoke of the Rangers’ processes and practices that enable the advancement of players and staff alike.

Also on the agenda were:

• How Ben and the Rangers make time for those leadership and career development opportunities [8:30];
• The club’s efforts to set people up to succeed by creating a development space [10:30];
• ‘Soft’ skills and the Rangers’ ability to track the development of players and staff [23:00];
• The renewed emphasis on the mental side of performance in the training environment [29:20].

Dave Slemen Twitter | LinkedIn

Anna Edwards LinkedIn