By John Portch

“We’re spending a wonderful amount of time today thinking about cultivating the human, figuring out what it takes to build that capability and execute under pressure,” said Holly Ransom.

The renowned leadership specialist was speaking just moments before she introduced Seth Meyers to the stage at June’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York City.

Meyers, a comedian, broadcaster and producer, instantly built on the theme, with his tales of watching the likes of Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, and Jason Sudeikis produce sketches that died a death during read-through sessions (and all too often live onstage) at Saturday Night Live.

“Watching them succeed is something you can do,” he said, “but watching them fail at the table was the real education.”

Meyers made clear his admiration for the writers and producers of SNL who, as he said, “have seen and heard more sketches than anyone in the history of the world”. “It was a reminder of how hard comedy was,” he added. “To fail at this does not mean you’re not funny.”

Crucially, Meyers and his peers failed in what were ultimately safe spaces. They were all the better – and all the funnier – for it.

And it was not just Meyers’ musings. Across both days, we heard from leaders in high-performance environments as diverse as the US Air Force, Juilliard School and the Brooklyn Nets, who lent us their home for two days. Together they delivered insights on how leaders can cultivate environments in which people fail cheaply, learn quickly and perform sustainably.

Below is a selection of five insights that paint a picture of proceedings.

1. You have to cultivate people, not merely manage performance

The Brooklyn Nets have been on an exciting trajectory since the arrival of Sean Marks as General Manager in 2016. His tenure began with a question: “What are we going to stand for?” Marks believed that the Nets needed an identity that meant more than mere wins or losses and he landed upon ‘Brooklyn grit’ – a system of behaviours that extended beyond one, single individual. “It’s really important that you take the responsibility to drive a culture that everybody can observe,” he said.

Marks and the Nets have continually hired the best people, regardless of their professional background. A quick roll call of their staff would reveal people with experience in fields as diverse as soccer, baseball, finance and, of course, basketball. Each is given the platform to perform. He said:

If you give people the opportunity, you empower them to speak up, you empower them that they do have a voice, they’re motivated far more than a group that isn’t empowered to have a voice.

Brooklyn Nets General Manager Sean Marks in coversation with host Holly Ransom. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

2. The best leaders listen

Across both days, listening emerged as an important performance tool. Whether building an NBA franchise, leading a writers’ room or cultivating future performers, the speakers repeatedly stressed that leaders who genuinely listen create environments where trust, challenge and innovation can flourish.

Marks for one said:

I want a diverse train of thought [and] if I’m going to hang my hat on hiring the very, very best, shame on me if I don’t listen to them.

Similarly, Seth Meyers’ beliefs have been shaped by his time in improvisational comedy as well as his time as a talk show host. He said:

One of the first rules with improvising is you have to be a listener. You can’t build something with a person if you’re just thinking about what you’re saying when you’re talking… and don’t ask questions you’re not actually curious about the answers to.

Seth Meyers on a different New York stage. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

3. Safe experimentation helps to breed resilience

So what actually happened when a sketch died during SNL read-throughs? What would Meyers do? What if the sketch actually died onstage?

“You have to shake it off,” he said. “You can learn lessons from things that don’t go well, but you can’t bring it with you to your next week’s effort.”

As one of the longest-serving head writers in SNL history, Meyers was responsible for managing exceptionally talented people operating under intense deadlines and, if writers carried every disappointment into the next week, their performance would deteriorate. The key was to try ambitious ideas, accept that many would fail, then learn quickly and move on.

Meyers was echoed by Evan Yionoulis, the Director of the Juilliard’s Drama Division. “If we’re worried about fear, we have to foster an environment where you can be brave,” she said. She tells her students:

‘I believe in you, I brought you into the school. You’re going to graduate, and I’m going to take you all the way there, and I’m going to be patient… I’m not judging you, good or bad’. I’m going ‘what’s the next step to take it further? What’s the next step to take it deeper?’

Evan Yianoulis of the Juilliard School. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

4. Replace blame with curiosity

Dr Wendy Walsh is the Chief Learning Officer for the US Air Force, a role in which she oversees education for approximately 700,000 personnel. Her work goes beyond training to the creation of conditions that enable learning across a sprawling, complex system. She argues that high-performance environments are “complex adaptive systems made up of continuously changing people, relationships and influences. She argued that learning starts from observation:

It’s the most important thing that we do is to be present with each other… I might not agree with you, but it’s a requirement for me to understand a different person’s perspective, because that will reveal more possibilities.

Dr Wendy Walsh, the Chief Learning Officer of the US Air Force. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

Walsh was joined onstage by Andrea Tullos, who explained why the US Air Force pivoted from focusing on factors such as strength, endurance and swimming ability in recruitment. Ultimately, they were alarmed by the numbers of recruits dropping out. They shifted the focus to factors such as resilience, learning agility, tolerance for discomfort and motivation. Tullos said:

We need to know who they are before we understand what they can do… [and] it’s not about assigning blame. It’s about understanding how to get up tomorrow to do it all over again as a team and get better.

Andrea Tullos, former lieutenant general in the US Air Force and Founder and CEO of Outperform IQ. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

5. It’s not about medals but building the conditions that make medals possible

Team USA finished second in both the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympic medals table (behind Norway) and Paralympics medals table (behind China). The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee wants to be No 1 in both tables in 2030, which means creating the conditions that make future medals possible.

Jen Bryant, the USOPC’s Senior Director of Olympic and Paralympic Performance, told the audience of her organisation’s continuing efforts towards meeting their target. She said:

We couldn’t just focus on what we were going to do at the Games [Milano Cortina]. We needed to spend time building a team that was capable of going and delivering a podium-level performance… We focused on bringing a broader number of athletes through the pipeline… [we asked also ourselves] How are we keeping athletes in sport and then the opportunities to bring new athletes into Olympic sport?

Jen Bryant, the USOPC’s Senior Director of Olympic and Paralympic Performance. Photo: Leaders Performance Institute / Evan Bernstein

What to read next

Want to Be an Adaptive Leader? You’d Better Prepare

Main Image: Getty Images

By Joe Lemire

Not too long ago, WNBA performance staffs were filled by transient and seasonal practitioners, noted Keith D’Amelio, who joined the New York Liberty as Chief Innovation Officer five years ago with the charge of “reimagining how we actually care for athletes in the W.”

With the backing of Owner Clara Wu Tsai and General Manager Jonathan Kolb, the Liberty – who won the WNBA Commissioner’s Cup in June – have led the way in that growth, tripling performance staff in the first year after D’Amelio’s hire. His background included stints with the Celtics, Raptors, Stanford basketball and Nike, where he was the longtime director of performance, working closely with its contracted athletes such as Ndamukong Suh, who played 13 NFL seasons without missing a game due to injury.

“One of the things Clara and Jonathan both expressed is they wanted to set the standard for the WNBA as an organization and force everybody else to try and keep up to raise the floor for how players are cared for and how organizations operate in the WNBA,” D’Amelio said.

D’Amelio has stayed close with Suh, who played for five NFL teams, was named to five All-Pro teams and won a Super Bowl with the Buccaneers. Suh, an active investor in the space, spoke at SBJ Tech Week in 2025. He and D’Amelio recently offered SBJ their insights from their varied team experiences on how modern organizations should operate.

Communicate with and empower players

When it comes to training plans and athlete monitoring tech, D’Amelio said teams most often fail when they are perceived as imposing it on the players. “Make it a two-way conversation as opposed to a one-way conversation,” he said.

Anytime data will be collected, it’s incumbent on the coach to explain the rationale behind it and the way it will be used so that athletes are comfortable.

“My job is always to make the athletes, teams, companies — whoever I’m working with — better consumers of information,” D’Amelio said.

Many top athletes also have a private fitness coach in addition to support from the team. D’Amelio has done both — worked for teams and served as the outside guru for Suh and others — and emphasizes that collaboration is best.

Differentiate

Sports is often a copycat industry, but the innovators are the ones who tend to rise to the top. “A lot of teams are afraid to be different — lean into that,” Suh said. “When folks are open to it, they start to unlock the great things about their organization.”

Teams too often worry about keeping up with the Joneses, D’Amelio added. Trying to mimic what works for another club often falls short because the other roster has players with different skills, and that staff has likely put a lot of thought and planning into the system. He also cautioned against overvaluing any one particular tactic.

“You can’t just go replicate what they’re doing,” D’Amelio said. “It’s impossible. It’s another pet peeve of mine in the sport world when people are like, ‘Oh, it’s our secret sauce.’ No, stop. Your secret sauce is management, the thought process, the coaching staff implementation and players’ skill sets, but also it’s the uniqueness of that organization that makes things successful, not just the idea.”

Ndamukong Suh, who played 13 seasons in the NFL without missing a game due to injury, remains an active investor in athlete performance tech. Photo: Getty Images

Incubate

Take time for R&D, ideally formalizing an innovation program like an accelerator for startups, akin to what the Dodgers and Thunder have.

“There’s so much technology that’s coming out there,” Suh said. “So why not build an incubator where you can have this band of people or advisers that sit in the middle between experts in sports and in technology?”

That can be especially powerful in multiteam ownership groups, where the sample size of adoption is higher — even if, hypothetically, it’s a group like Kroenke Sports & Entertainment that has teams across multiple sports. D’Amelio says that interdisciplinary approach can be very beneficial.

“It really boils down to, how fast can we accelerate our organization’s ability to learn?” he said.

Bifurcate daily and focus on long-term planning

When D’Amelio joined the Liberty, the team put in a five-year plan to implement change over time rather than all at once, he said, so it wouldn’t be overwhelming for the players and the organization.

That tiered and structured approach should be overseen by someone removed from the grind of preparing the athletes for each practice and game; that staff typically doesn’t have the bandwidth to think on a five-year plan.

D’Amelio likened the separation to the dichotomy described in the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”

“You have to [balance] what are some things that we can do to address immediate problems, innovate and problem-solve in the moment, but also having that long-term view,” he said. “It’s sometimes hard to do when you are in it on a day-to-day basis. This is the role that I serve with the Liberty, who’s not really in the weeds on a day-to-day basis because when you are, you’re just putting out the fire of today to try and get to tomorrow.”

By Paul Downes PhD

The National teams of Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) assemble periodically across a calendar year for qualification windows or pinnacle events as set out in the FIBA schedule.

In senior 5×5 teams, athletes are commonly not selected from within domestic systems given the time of year for FIBA competitions. Instead, they are selected whilst under contract within professional (and semi-professional) environments across various global leagues. Athletes for FIBA 5×5 age-grade tournaments (Under-15 to Under-19) are typically selected from performances across school, Association and National camp assembly periods.

Supporting the selected athletes are coaches and management that also are operate in decentralised, time‑limited contexts. No role holders are employed full-time and, as such, are operating without the contractual levers that traditional high‑performance (HP) models assume. Across the 5×5 HP pathways, BBNZ runs six age‑group national teams (male and female), plus select teams that provide ‘best vs best’ exposure to support development (on and off court) and prepare for FIBA tournaments.

Within this reality, management team members are asked to balance a number of competing demands. Examples include: short‑term competitiveness versus long‑term system sustainability, respect for professional autonomy versus national‑team standards, and redefining ‘success’ in an international sport increasingly dominated by wealthy, highly resourced nations. These challenges, among others, sit outside of being simply tactical or financial rather the most complex challenges that present are systemic and relational. Therefore, a crucial leadership question what presents itself to the BBNZ HP team is no longer whether leadership is required, but instead what kind of leadership actually works when authority is limited and commitment is discretionary.

The purpose of this article is to apply the research pertaining to Leadership Climate and Followership to the context of the 5×5 National Teams of BBNZ and demonstrate the opportunities that the constraints presented offer HP leaders for generating elevated levels of engagement and commitment to the HP strategy.

What is Leadership Climate and why does it matter?

The National teams of BBNZ can be considered to have compromised formal authority outside of assembled periods due the nature of management composition and contractual status. Without the ability for HP leaders to rely on extrinsic levers such as significant salaries, full-time contracts and formal hierarchies there could be supposed to be high risk regarding team culture and operational effectiveness. Powerful research from Goleman into Leadership Climate (1, 2) supports organisations such as BBNZ to succeed and maximise the opportunities that come from such constrained circumstances.

Goleman (1, 2) describes Leadership Climate as the emotional tone of the working environment created by leaders’ behaviours, which in turn shapes motivation, engagement, wellbeing, and performance outcomes. When HP leaders cannot rely on extrinsic motivation levers or formal hierarchy the notion of Leadership Climate becomes the primary lever for sustaining commitment and discretionary effort.

Unpacking climate further

To make Leadership Climate assessable and actionable, JCA Global (3) developed the Leadership Climate Indicator (LCI) as a behavioural measure of how it feels to be led within a given system. The LCI translates leadership behaviour into four distinct climate quadrants made up of twelve observable scales:

Green climates: the Inspiring and Including quadrants represent green climates – those that build clarity, trust, energy, and commitment through behaviours such as visioning, encouragement, collaboration, reliability, and appreciation.

Red climates: by contrast, the Controlling and Withdrawing quadrants represent red climates which, while sometimes effective in short‑term crises, erode trust and engagement when used habitually through behaviours such as micromanagement, aggression, avoidance, or rigidity.

In decentralised, tour‑assembled environments like BBNZ’s National teams, this framework provides a practical lens for understanding why some campaigns generate ownership, voice, and discretionary effort, while others default to compliance, silence, or disengagement under pressure. In these teams leadership climate can be considered to be the felt experience of being led by the HP team. This spans the experience one has at the recruitment stage, their subsequent onboarding, the connections leading into a camp/tour, tours themselves and the review period after each assembly. They are the conditions created by leaders’ behaviours during both stable and complex, high-pressure context and govern whether people think, speak up, and commit fully, or retreat into compliance and self‑protection.

Defining and contextualising Followership

Contemporary leadership research is explicit that leadership is not delivered one way from leaders to followers but is instead co‑produced through the active judgement, engagement, and agency of followers within relational and contextual systems (4,  5, 6). Within this literature, ‘Followership’ is defined as the behaviours, decisions, and choices individuals make in how they support, challenge, and contribute to collective goals – not simply their positional role or willingness to comply. It is an active function requiring judgement, commitment, and moral courage.

Kelley’s foundational work (6, 7) was pivotal in reframing organisational performance as being driven disproportionately by effective followers. These being followers who think independently and engage actively rather than by compliance‑based execution alone. This reframing shifts attention away from what leaders do to people, and toward the conditions leaders create with others.

Figure 1. Kelley’s Followership Model (1988)

Figure 1 and Table 1 provide a summary of the five types of followers and what these mean in the context of BBNZ’s HP management teams. For Kelley, the ideal follower was a critical thinking contributor, termed the ‘exemplary follower’. Kelley argues that most leaders prefer ‘conformist followers’ because they are easy to control. ‘Alienated followers’ are critical but do not contribute; and ‘passive followers’ have little to no value other than bring present. A critical thinking follower who is alienated is far more likely to be a negative team member.

Table 1. A summary of Kelley’s five followership types

A clear understanding of Followership theory and the interaction of critical thinking with active contribution is valuable for organisations like BBNZ, where management teams operate in periodic, decentralised, and contractor‑heavy environments. Once national teams assemble for FIBA events, organisational charts flatten quickly, formal authority as a national sporting organisation (NSO) reduces, and the HP system functions largely through trust, clarity, and discretionary effort. In these contexts, the quality of followership becomes visible in what people do when conditions are uncertain, pressured, or imperfectly resourced.

In tour‑assembled environments, followership quality is a strong determinant of whether standards are sustained, problems are surfaced early, and judgement is exercised when it matters most. Kelley’s insight remains deliberately uncomfortable. Leaders often gravitate toward conformists because they feel easier to manage, yet doing so suppresses the independent thinking and ownership that complex, time‑bound campaigns depend upon.

How Leadership Climate and Followship exist across BBNZ’s national teams

An example of system logic is provided in Figure 2.

Figure 2. A system logic view of BBNZ HP Strategy spanning the NSO’s Strategic Statement of Intent (SSI) to HP Strategy (HP Plan 2028+) into HP Team Plan that support HP team member’s individual plans that inform how HP constructs and operationalises Campaign Plans and Roles and Responsibilities across various National teams.

In this example, clarity is treated as a primary leadership behaviour. Through making purpose, expectations, roles, and decision rights explicit HP leaders are able to reduce anxiety and guesswork in management teams and create the conditions for Inspiring and Including climates. These favourable climates elevate the quality of followership the HP system produces. Across the HP team’s ways of working there is a deliberate emphasis on a clear, shared purpose, psychological safety, empowerment with accountability, and inclusion.

These act as necessary prerequisites for ‘exemplary followership’ which are characterised by independent thinking and active engagement. Examples of how this is achieved are engaging in collaborative approaches to define ‘What It Takes To Win’ (WITTW), clarifying campaign roles early in a cycle, and making HP expectations visible through Team Charters to allow management and athletes to exercise judgement rather than wait for instruction. When management are recruited and onboarding takes place there is a priority to build early senses of belonging and clarify the conditions for constructive candour and continuous learning. With reference to Leadership Climate terminology, such conditions actively strengthen Visioning, Trusted, Collaborative, and Encouraging behaviours while reducing the likelihood that pressure induces Controlling or Withdrawing patterns.

In the realities of global FIBA tournaments existing in dynamic, uncertain, complex conditions the benefits of positive team climates and exemplary followship are experienced. By making purpose, boundaries, and expectations explicit before and during campaigns, BBNZ increases the probability that touring parties will act as capable followers. Ones who can think ahead, raise issues early, hold standards without being policed, and sustaining discretionary effort under fatigue. The latter is imperative with international travel and compressed recovery windows between competition. In this sense, the HP frameworks developed and communicated are not just management tools, they are deliberate climate interventions that enables leadership and followership to be co‑produced in conditions where formal control is neither realistic nor effective.

At age‑grade level, clarity is what allows people to coach and support with judgement rather than hesitation. When purpose, roles, and decision‑making boundaries are clear early in the cycle, staff don’t wait for permission—they act in the best interests of the athletes. That creates trust, encourages honest challenge, and allows learning to happen quickly. In high‑pressure tournaments, those conditions matter because we need people thinking and contributing together, not just executing instructions.

Mel Bennett (Head Coach of U15-U17 Women and Assistant Coach of 2Degrees Tall Ferns)

From a medical and recovery perspective, clarity changes everything. When roles, decision rights, and expectations are explicit, I don’t have to guess whether to escalate an issue or wait—and neither do the players. It allows us to act early, manage load properly, and hold standards without friction. In the middle of a FIBA campaign, that clarity creates trust, reduces stress, and lets everyone contribute their judgement rather than just follow instructions.

Mikayla Rosieur (2degrees Tall Ferns and U17 Men’s Physiotherapist)

To help better illustrate the interactions of Leadership Climate, the types of climate conditions and Followership, Table 2 maps the JCA Climate Types to Followership Behaviours in the form of ‘touring realities’.

Table 2. The JCA Climate Types mapped to Followership Behaviours in the form of ‘touring realities’.

Recently the BBNZ HP team has constructed Team Charters as an initiative to elevate leadership climate and followership by replacing hierarchy with shared clarity. These charters make purpose, expectations, and behavioural norms explicit so that independent thinking, early voice, and accountable contribution become safe and expected, even under pressure. Through the removal of ambiguity (the primary trigger for anxiety, silence, and defensive followership) the Charters serve to stabilise the emotional climate whilst actively strengthening Inspiring (Visioning, Stretching) and Including (Trusted, Collaborative, Appreciative) climates by ensuring people know what matters, how decisions will be made, and how they are expected to contribute.

Concluding remarks

In decentralised, time‑limited national‑team environments, the decisive leadership task is not to demand compliance but to design the conditions for exemplary followership. That begins with making the why unmistakable for all parties. There needs to be a clear purpose, realistic success markers, and alignment surrounding how each role contributes. These conditions enable the setting of mutual expectations about standards, decision rights, and escalation pathways to hold teams steady under pressure. There is a requirement to create permission for feedback and insights by rewarding early problem‑raising, building trust through reliable follow‑through and predictable communication. HP leaders need to recognise the contributions that sustain standards, energy, and learning throughout campaigns. Create conditions, not compliance because international performance is built on the effort you cannot mandate.

References

1. Goleman, D. (2000). “Leadership That Gets Results.” Harvard Business Review, March–April.
2. Goleman, D., Boyatzis, R., & McKee, A. (2002). Primal leadership: Realizing the power of emotional intelligence. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
3. JCA Global. (2016). Leadership Climate Indicator (LCI): Survey Group Sample Report. JCA Global Ltd. Available at: https://www.jcaglobal.com/pdf/sample/JCA-LCI-Survey-Group-Sample-Report.pdf
4. Uhl‑Bien, M. (2006). Relational leadership theory: Exploring the social processes of leadership and organizing. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(6), 654–676.
5. Uhl-Bien, M., Riggio, R. E., Lowe, K. B., & Carsten, M. K. (2014). Followership theory: A review and research agenda. The Leadership Quarterly, 25(1), 83–104. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2013.11.007
6. Kelley, R. E. (1988). In praise of followers. Harvard Business Review, 66(6), 142–148.
7. Kelley, R.  (1992). The Power of Followership. New York: Doubleday.

Main Image: Basketball New Zealand

By Paul Downes PhD

Change in high‑performance (HP) sport is rarely resisted because people are opposed to improvement.

More often, it is resisted because proposed change is perceived as threatening what people care most deeply about: identity, legacy, fairness, and standards.

This article uses the evolution of the 3×3 Tall Blacks programme as a case study in applied change leadership, exploring how innovation can be mobilised without destroying trust or fragmenting a system.

Specifically, the article examines how 3×3 Basketball shifted within Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) from being viewed as a peripheral or competing format to a legitimate, strategically prioritised pathway for international success. Drawing on innovation and change management research, it demonstrates how leadership decisions around pace, protection, communication, and culture shaped the programme’s trajectory. Central to this case is a simple but often neglected principle: organisations can only move at the speed of their people.

What is 3×3 basketball?

3×3 Basketball was formalised by the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) in the late 2000s as a condensed, high‑tempo version of the game designed for urban environments, broadcast appeal, and global accessibility. Played with three athletes per team on a half court, a 12‑second shot clock, and first‑to‑21 scoring, the format demands rapid decision‑making, tactical clarity, athletic versatility, and exceptional individual skill under pressure.

Since its inclusion as an Olympic discipline at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, 3×3 has moved decisively from an alternative format to a mainstream high‑performance sport. It now operates with its own world rankings, qualification pathways, professional circuits, and national team competitions governed by FIBA. Crucially, success in 3×3 is not achieved by lightly adapting 5×5 systems; it requires distinct preparation models, athlete archetypes, and tactical identities.

Who are the 3×3 Tall Blacks?

New Zealand competes in 3×3 Basketball through a clearly defined international competition pathway. The men’s senior programme, known as the 3×3 Tall Blacks and, known on the FIBA circuit since 2025 as #2PointNation, contests major national team events including the FIBA 3×3 Asia Cup, the FIBA 3×3 World Cup, and, where applicable, Olympic or Commonwealth Games qualification tournaments. Athletes may also compete in FIBA‑sanctioned professional events such as World Tour Challengers, World Tour Masters, and selected Pro circuits, which contribute to global ranking points and qualification status.

These competitive realities require BBNZ’s 3×3 programme, across U21, U23, and senior team, to be innovative by necessity. With constrained resources and limited margins for error, the Men’s (and Women’s) programme has had to identify where competitive advantage is possible, how learning can be accelerated, and how athletes can be developed into genuine 3×3 specialists rather than part‑time participants (through also prioritising 5×5).

3×3 as a strategic opportunity, not a threat

Within the New Zealand basketball landscape, historical emphasis has understandably sat with the Tall Blacks (men’s 5×5) and Tall Ferns (women’s 5×5) programmes. These teams carry deep cultural significance, reinforced by landmark performances such as the Tall Blacks’ fourth‑place finish at the 2002 FIBA World Cup and the Tall Ferns’ participation at the 2004 Olympic Games. However, podium finishes at pinnacle 5×5 events, and consistent Olympic qualification, have become increasingly difficult in a global ecosystem shaped by professional leagues, deep talent pools, and significant financial asymmetry.

Within this context, 3×3 has emerged not as a replacement for 5×5, but as a distinct strategic opportunity: a format in which New Zealand can plausibly compete for medals through deliberately creating an identity, strategy and specialisation by targeted coaches and athletes. Yet recognising opportunity was not sufficient. Elevating 3×3 within a 5×5‑dominant system required leaders to manage legitimate fears that resources, attention, or cultural value would be diverted.

As 3×3 Tall Blacks Head Coach Piet Van Hasselt said:

Resistance to 3×3 didn’t mean disloyalty. It often meant people cared deeply about 5×5 and felt responsible for protecting it. 3×3 is still the new kid on the block in basketball terms and is very different to 5×5.

This framing was critical. Resistance was interpreted not as obstruction, but as a signal of attachment and responsibility. That distinction shaped how change was approached: not through mandate, but through dialogue, clarity, and deliberate pacing.

Three roles that support successful innovation in HP environments

Across HP sport and other expert systems, innovation research converges on the importance of leaders occupying multiple complementary roles rather than relying on individual charisma or isolated expertise (1,2,3). Three roles are consistently evident in successful innovation initiatives.

1. The System Architect

The ‘System Architect’ role is grounded in organisational ambidexterity and strategic leadership research. Scholars such as Tushman and O’Reilly (1, 2) demonstrate that breakthrough innovation depends on senior leaders designing separate but integrated systems, protecting exploratory work from short‑term performance pressures while integrating it at the top through strategy, resourcing, and authority. Mintzberg’s work on “designing the organisation” (3) reinforces this view in that effective leaders shape structures, decision rights, and power flows rather than running experiments themselves.

In HP sport terms, the architect decides where innovation sits, how it is protected, and how it is judged. Without this role, innovation becomes personality‑dependent and fragile; with it, innovation becomes institutional.

2. The Technical Champion

The ‘Technical Champion’ is one of the most empirically supported roles in innovation literature. Research by Howell and Higgins (4, 5) shows that innovations outperform when championed by credible insiders who persist under resistance, mobilise informal networks, and translate abstract ideas into legitimate practice. Subsequent work clarifies an important dependency: champions burn out or are marginalised (6) without organisational protection from architects.

In HP sport, champions are domain‑credible leaders for example coaches, senior athletes, or tactically fluent specialists who are willing and able to absorb resistance on behalf of others while legitimising change through performance.

3. The Cultural (Learning) Enabler

The third role of ‘Cultural’ or ‘Learning Enabler’ is supported by Amy Edmondson’s (7) research on psychological safety. Innovation fails less often due to lack of ideas than due to fear. Leaders who frame their strategic initiatives as learning problems, without lowering standards, create environments where experimentation, respectful conflict, and early failure are informational rather than punitive. This role ensures innovation does not collapse into compliance or defensive behaviour, particularly in high‑stakes environments such as elite sport.

The blended roles within BBNZ 3×3

Within the BBNZ 3×3 system, Nikolay Mikhalchuk (High Performance Manager, 3×3 – hereafter HPM) and Piet Van Hasselt (Head Coach, 3×3 Tall Blacks) can be viewed as functioning as deliberate amalgamations of all three innovation roles, in part due to the realities of scale and resource constraint.

Architectural leadership

As system architects, Mikhalchuk and Van Hasselt emphasise structural protection and integration, explicitly designing daily training environments and pathways for learning rather than forcing premature exposure. Mikhalchuk explains:

Decisions are made to take a step back, spend more time… align yourself, the coaching staff, and then prepare, rather than throwing athletes in the deep end before they understand the system and role expectations.

This reflects programme ambidexterity through protecting exploration (learning the 3×3 system) while gradually integrating it into the national pathway across U21, U23, and senior programmes.

Champion and cultural leadership

As technical champions and cultural enablers, both leaders are able to translate strategy into daily training behaviours while safeguarding learning. Van Hasselt captures this when he notes:

We’re trying to find a gap we can exploit based on our strengths… We have forged an identity, with clarity, and our players have bought into it.

He further explains how culture and learning interacted:

Great leadership and athlete ownership has meant we’ve been able to build through younger players, and now these players are becoming specialists.

Through deliberate ‘test and learn’ cycles, particularly in the Under-21 and Under-23 Nations League exposure and targeted senior competition, 3×3 specialists have emerged organically rather than being imposed.

Managing change in a 5×5-dominant culture

At a technical level, the transition from 5×5 to 3×3 can present genuine challenges. Mikhalchuk notes:

There are a lot of nuances and rules around 3×3 which would drive 5×5 players mad… The transition from a 5×5 star to the 3×3 court is close to impossible.

Yet once athletes choose to engage, the experience is often transformative. Van Hasselt observes:

Every time a 5×5 player comes in they absolutely love it… We have found players who are courageous and ready to take a leap of faith to this exciting new challenge.

These insights reinforced a core leadership lesson that people cannot be rushed through change they have not yet made sense of. Progress depended on aligning belief, understanding, and competence. Indeed, moving at the speed of people, not planning cycles.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by 3×3 Basketball | FIBA3x3 (@fiba3x3)

Applying Kotter’s 8‑Step Change Model

Recognising the complexity of this transition, BBNZ have applied Kotter’s 8‑Step Change Model (8) to structure and evaluate progress. A central insight of Kotter’s model is that sustainable change is built deliberately, sequentially, and with reinforcement. This model, and its contextual application is summarised here:

Concluding remarks

Within the global FIBA 3×3 landscape, the 3×3 Tall Blacks’ #2PointNation identity signals strategic clarity and a commitment to playing to New Zealand’s strengths rather than mimicking others. The Men’s programme accelerated once 3×3 was framed, and accepted, not as a format that could rely on occasional 5×5 participation, but as “our game, our way.”

An aligned approach to innovation, grounded in organisational values and supported by deliberate change management, has enabled the programme to become a respected and emerging force internationally. As Van Hasselt reflects:

Our programme and players strong commitment to improvement has helped us perform better game by game.   The commentators tell us we can beat anyone in the world… they like us because we’re different.

Mikhalchuk adds:

We’re quick, we’re strong, we’re consistent and tough… We feel we can build those twos, and when opponents adjust, we can drive and create uncontested shots.

Ultimately, what gets funded gets celebrated. With increased High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ) investment toward the 2028 quadrennial, the Men’s 3×3 programme has moved from experimentation to embedded strategy. As Van Hasselt summarises the ambition:

We’d love to medal at LA 2028… We are continuing our exciting journey and improving every game and event as a team.

The broader lesson is clear. Successful innovation is not a hero story. It is a role system, paced deliberately, anchored culturally, and led with respect for how people actually change.

References

1) Tushman, M. L., & O’Reilly, C. A. (1996). Ambidextrous organizations: Managing evolutionary and revolutionary change. California Management Review, 38(4), 8–29.

2) O’Reilly, C. A., & Tushman, M. L. (2004). The ambidextrous organization. Harvard Business Review, 82(4), 74–81.

3) Mintzberg, H. (1983). Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall

4) Howell, J. M., & Higgins, C. A. (1990). Champions of technological innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35(2), 317–341. [jstor.org]

5) Howell, J. M., Shea, C. M., & Higgins, C. A. (2005). Champions of product innovations: Defining, developing, and validating a measure of champion behavior. Journal of Business Venturing, 20(5), 641–661. [researchgate.net]

6) Shea, C. M. (2021). A conceptual model to guide research on the activities and effects of innovation champions. Implementation Research and Practice, 2, 1–13.

7) Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383

8) Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press

What to read next

You Don’t Arrive Strategic: How Leaders Grow Into their Role

Main Image: Basketball New Zealand

By Paul Downes PhD

In a recent Leaders Performance Institute article, Áine MacNamara outlined ten characteristics of effective performance pathways, emphasising environmental intent over time and the deliberate design required to support athletes through uncertainty (1).

What I took most from it was the challenge to move beyond static talent identification models and build environments that can respond to developmental reality as it unfolds. In my day-to-day work as a General Manager of High Performance (HP), that distinction matters as we cannot just select ‘talent’ and hope the system does the rest. We have to shape the conditions that help young athletes keep progressing.

In this article, I build on MacNamara’s recent discussion through the lens of the Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) 5×5 HP pathway. Drawing on my experience in the role, I describe how we currently operationalise talent identification and development decisions in a decentralised, resource‑constrained national system. I will discuss how those decisions collide with ethical responsibility, developmental uncertainty, and the lived reality of athletes and families in the Under 15–19 space.

To clarify, I am not presenting a model to be replicated. Instead, I want to be transparent about the trade‑offs, risks, and responsibilities that sit underneath age‑grade selection and programme design within BBNZ. My aim is to contribute honestly to the HP conversation about what great can look like when resources, time, and certainty are limited – and when decisions still need to stand up to scrutiny.

Framing the context: the BBNZ 5×5 age‑grade HP pathway

The BBNZ age‑grade HP pathway (Under 15–19) operates within a decentralised system that relies heavily on secondary schools and regional associations as the primary environments for daily training, competition, and athlete support. Unlike many international systems, New Zealand does not have a centralised academy structure or fully funded national talent development programme for basketball. Instead, development occurs across a distributed network of environments, each with varying levels of resourcing, expertise, and capacity.

A defining constraint within this system is that the BBNZ age‑grade HP pathway has historically been ‘user-pays’. Families of selected athletes contribute financially to participation in national camps and international FIBA tournaments. While basketball can be considered relatively accessible at an entry level, requiring little more than a ball and a hoop, progression into HP pathways requires regular access to facilities, specialist coaching, competition, and international travel. For many families, this represents a significant financial commitment.

Within a low‑resource, user‑pays environment, BBNZ’s ethical obligation is therefore not to over‑promise outcomes, but to ensure families clearly understand pathway intent, selection meaning, and developmental trade‑offs before engaging. In this way, transparency becomes a safeguard.

For New Zealand athletes, participation in FIBA Under 15–19 events serves a dual purpose. While these tournaments are legitimate international competitions, they also function as the primary global shop window through which US college programmes can assess New Zealand talent. They offer verified age‑grade competition, standardised rules, and direct comparison against major basketball nations which serve as reference points that NCAA recruiters rely on heavily given limited exposure to the New Zealand domestic school and association systems. This reality means that BBNZ age‑grade teams competing in FIBA tournaments are both development environments and exposure platforms that ultimately are significantly influencers regarding almost every strategic decision regarding the HP pathways.

Jackson Ball is a significant example of impact the 5×5 Men’s Pathway is having. Jackson’s pathway illustrates a progressive transition through BBNZ’s age‑grade system, representing New Zealand at U17 and U19 World Cups (2024 and 2025 respectively) before earning Tall Blacks selection as a 16-year-old and consolidating his development through ANBL competition in Australia.

Of his journey, Jackson says:

The NZ age-group pathway was huge for my development. It offered me elite coaching, international experience, the chance to compete against top players, and gave me the exposure required to earn college opportunities. Being part of the Hawks (Hawkes Bay) also showed me the level of physicality and toughness needed to compete at the professional level, and taught me how to balance basketball, school, and other commitments. Both opportunities sharpened my focus and showed me what it would take to continue on this path.

Developing self‑sufficient, coachable athletes

Across BBNZ HP pathway programmes, there is strong alignment with MacNamara’s emphasis on developing psycho‑behavioural skills that enable athletes to cope with the inevitable volatility of development (1). In the New Zealand context, this focus is not optional – it is essential.

In the absence of a fully professional domestic league and given the opportunities currently afforded by US collegiate scholarships, the vast majority of high‑performing youth athletes aspire to secure places in offshore environments. It is currently believed that success in these environments depends as much on self‑regulation and adaptability as on basketball ability.

To this end, BBNZ HP pathway programmes prioritise the development of self‑regulation, goal‑setting and reflective practice through progressive ownership of an Individual Performance Plan (IPP). These competencies are embedded through a combination of remotely, in assembled camps and during performance campaigns. Through conversations with NCAA, and professional coaches, there is a consistent emphasis that international athletes must manage training load, academics, recovery, and behaviour with minimal supervision if they are to thrive. Preparing athletes to meet these expectations is, therefore, a deliberate development outcome, not a by‑product.

Similarly, in preparing athletes to be coached across cultures, playing styles, and evolving on‑court roles, BBNZ places high value on coachability, responsiveness to feedback, and tactical learning capacity. Within both coach recruitment and athlete selection processes, values alignment is considered foundational. Learning behaviours such as; active listening, feedback integration, curiosity, and self‑direction are explicitly discussed, developed and ultimately rewarded.

This emphasis aligns with MacNamara’s advocacy for athlete agency (1) and is reinforced through multiple mechanisms for athlete voice. These mechanisms are not tokenistic; they actively inform IPPs, strengthen connections, and improve decision‑making quality across HP programmes.

Gender specific considerations

Male 5×5 programmes

A uniquely influential accelerator within the New Zealand male pathway is the Sal’s NZNBL and Rapid League. Running from February to August, these semi‑professional environments provide male youth athletes (sometimes as young as 15) with elevated learning opportunities. Examples include; daily exposure to senior level competition, experienced coaching, international imports regarding professional habits, and current Tall Blacks to share top down cultural learnings. Coupled with schools and associations, male athletes are being exposed to multiple coaching voices and styles.

Across these environments, a consistent observation that is emerging is that athletes who integrate performance and behavioural feedback openly, without defensiveness, tend to progress faster and attract greater interest. This is both domestically and offshore.

Female 5×5 programmes

In contrast to the men’s semi‑professional league, the equivalent for the women’s pathway in New Zealand is between October and December and falls after the FIBA tournament windows. An absence of genuine ‘best vs best’ training and competition year round is a constraint for female youth development. As a NSO, BBNZ must continually redesign development and identification processes for young women and cannot simply translate the male templates and processes. Regional ‘hotspots’ have emerged where the majority of selections currently come from however this dilutes the depth of possible talent that is FIBA capable and consequently reduces the number of female athletes capable of progressing through the pathway beyond school.

Some key strategic considerations moving forward include cross‑sport monitoring where BBNZ has the opportunity to engage female athletes currently participating in other sports. Typical sports include netball and volleyball domestically. A cross sport approach would include a perspective shift from output spotting to capacity sensing. Expanding on this there would be a requirement for coaches in the pathway to be able to identify and prioritise indicators of adaptability when looking for potential athletes. These may include; learning speed, response to adversity, competitive curiosity, and self‑regulation as well as direct screening days to observe and measure basketball potential in a variety of positions.

One athlete cited the transferable skills from netball to basketball:

Netball helped me develop decision‑making, competitiveness, and confidence in contact. I wasn’t a natural basketball athlete at first, but the coaches gave me confidence to try and helped me to quickly learned and adapt.

Present challenges

The decentralised model in New Zealand offers reach and diversity of experience but also presents enduring challenges. Some of the most prominent being: inequitable access driven by cost, variable regional quality and capacity, limited national contact time, and tension between long‑term development intent and short‑term performance expectations. Without a central academy, progress depends on alignment, trust, and shared standards across schools, associations, families, and national programmes which makes clarity, transparency, and consistency critical.

Designing selection criteria that withstand scrutiny

BBNZ age‑grade selection criteria for both male and female programmes are deliberately co‑designed across coaching staff spanning the full pathway (Under 15 through to the Tall Blacks and Tall Ferns). This breadth of input ensures decisions are not made in isolation from senior performance realities.

The criteria explicitly balance current performance contribution (“ability to impact a FIBA tournament now”) and projected long‑term potential (“future senior international capability”). This balance guards against over‑reliance on early output alone. BBNZ HP age grade selection decisions draw on multiple evidence streams, including: projected future roles, quality of daily training environment, positional needs and “international superpowers” and a clearly defined set of BBNZ HP character attributes (coachability, preparation, recovery behaviours, competitiveness, and clarity of purpose). The intention is to assess athletes holistically rather than through a single performance lens.

A part of the BBNZ system, transparency is critical. Criteria are communicated early to families, expectations are clearly articulated, and mechanisms exist to sense‑check or challenge alignment before processes are too far progressed. This is essential in a system where selection meaning can easily be misinterpreted as long‑term endorsement. BBNZ is acutely aware that age‑grade selections attract parental scrutiny, media interest, and retrospective evaluation. Robust criteria are therefore designed not to prove decisions “right”, but to ensure they are defensible, consistent, and ethically sound under uncertainty.

Navigating FIBA cycles, maturation, and performance horizons

A unique complexity within youth basketball is the three‑year FIBA competition cycle. Year one requires a top‑two Oceania finish to qualify for the Asia Cup in year two (which requires a top‑four finish to qualify) and in the final third year is the possibility of a World Cup.

When analysed through evidence‑informed What It Takes To Win frameworks, the performance requirements of year‑one competitions are significantly lower than those of Asia Cup and World Cup phases. Without multi‑horizon awareness, the BBNZ HP system would risk rewarding early maturation, or tolerating sub‑optimal psycho‑behavioural behaviours in athletes who initially dominate early levels of training and competition. Current research supports such caution. Mikołajec et al. (2) demonstrates that performance differences among U15–U16 national‑level basketball athletes are heavily influenced by biological maturation, underscoring the need for flexible selection horizons and avoidance of fixed judgements. Similarly, a recent systematic review of youth development manuals from leading FIBA nations (USA, Spain, Australia, Canada, Argentina) found consistent emphasis on long‑term development, technical‑tactical foundations, and diverse experiences over early specialisation (3).

BBNZ HP therefore frames its selection decisions around clarity of pathway position at a point in time, rather than prediction of ultimate success. Athletes and families are supported to understand where an athlete is now and what it will take next. This approach helps manage expectations and protects against the conflation of age‑grade selection with permanent endorsement.

Ethical responsibility in a user‑pays system

Ethics in talent pathways are rarely about perfect solutions. They are about honest framing.

In a user‑pays, low‑resource environment, ethical failure most often occurs when systems promise certainty they cannot deliver. BBNZ’s responsibility is therefore to ensure clarity of intent, informed consent, and realistic understanding of probabilities and trade‑offs.

One family of a former pathway athlete was able to reinforce this perspective, stating:

What we appreciated most was the honesty. No one promised that this pathway guaranteed selection or a future contract, but they were clear about what our child would learn, what the experience would involve, and the probabilities involved. That clarity helped us make a decision we were comfortable with—even knowing there were no certainties.

Another added:

Looking back, the value wasn’t whether our child was selected. It was the development they received while they were in the system. If that quality hadn’t been there, selection alone would have meant very little.

These lived experiences reinforce a central principle that selection without development quality is a false positive.

What are BBNZ HP selecting into?

The previously discussed points raise a critical question for any national system: are we selecting athletes into teams, or into development environments?

If selection confers visibility and pressure but not improved coaching quality, learning support, and behavioural expectations, its value diminishes. Effective pathways must ensure that selection meaningfully enhances development and not merely exposure. Equally important is retrospective evaluation. It is important that HP systems are committed to rigorously examine their processes and at a youth level considerations include; who was missed, who exited and why and who re‑entered later and succeeded. The sentiment of creating continuous learning systems resonates with MacNamara’s (1) recent identification that continuous cycles of reviewing, debriefing and reflection being a characteristic of good pathway environments.

Performance shifts

Over the past two years, the BBNZ HP 5×5 pathways have seen a clear step-change in performance and pathway outcomes across the system. At the performance end, U17 Men delivered back‑to‑back 4th‑place finishes at the 2024 and 2025 FIBA U17 and U19 World Cups, underlining New Zealand’s improved ability to consistently compete with the world’s best in the most demanding age‑group environments. That momentum was reinforced in 2025 with the U17 Men winning New Zealand’s first ever FIBA Oceania Cup gold medal, a significant milestone for the programme.

In parallel, the U17 Women qualified for consecutive FIBA U17 Women’s World Cups (2024 and 2026), reflecting growing depth, continuity, and competitiveness in the female pathway. Equally important, these results are being underpinned by strong off‑court outcomes. The 2025–26 season saw a record number of New Zealand male and female athletes competing in NCAA Division I, demonstrating that the pathway is not only producing teams that compete globally, but individuals trusted to perform and develop in elite daily environments. Taken together, these outcomes point to a system that is converting alignment, selection, development and competition into sustained performance, not one‑off results, and building a broader base of high‑quality athletes capable of succeeding on the world stage.

Concluding reflections

Strong HP pathway systems are not defined by how often they predict perfectly, but by how transparently they operate under uncertainty. Early selection can be complex and require evidence to make the most complete decisions possible. Decisions that influenced by maturation, opportunity, and environment rather than guaranteed trajectory. High‑quality HP systems therefore should prioritise adaptability, multiple pathways, and ethical clarity over certainty.

Consistent with FIBA’s youth strategy, age‑grade international tournaments are best understood as development accelerators, not performance forecasts. In resource‑constrained environments like New Zealand, the real work lies in designing systems that respect developmental variability while maximising opportunity.

That, ultimately, is what it really takes.

References

1. 10 Ways in Which the Best Environments Support their Pathway Athletes – Performance Institute
2. Mikołajec, K., Arede, J. & Gryko, K. Examining physical and technical performance among youth basketball national team development program players: a multidimensional approach. Sci Rep15, 3722 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-87583-7
3. Santos, Jhonatan & Sato dos Santos, Yura & Goi, Cauê & Junior, Eduardo & Godoy, Sergio & Galatti, Larissa. (2024). Training young people in basketball (under-15 to under-19): what are the tactical-technical contents described in the manuals of leading countries in the FIBA ​​ranking? Rectos. 61. 1474-1483. 10.47197/retos.v61.108287.

What to read next

You Don’t Arrive Strategic: How Leaders Grow Into their Role

Main Image: NBA / Theia

By Joe Lemire

The SBJ Tech Sandbox series is where we share our experiences testing products, gear, solutions and more in the sports tech space.

I first dunked a basketball during a JV game on my 16^th birthday. Following a steal and a breakaway, I rather gently placed the ball through the rim, but the varsity team happened to be watching, earning me what was some scarce social currency at that point in my life.

Over the next few years, as I got stronger, my vertical inched up further, and I could dunk with a little bit of style — no one was inviting me to dunk contests or narrating my And1 mix tape, but it was still an epic feeling.

You certainly wouldn’t know it now.

The NBA recently invited me to participate in the same quarterly biomechanics screening that all its athletes started doing this season — the first league-wide program in pro sports. It’s a series of jumps and lateral moves, with some closed-eye, one-legged balancing mixed in.

The video may double as my audition for Blue Man Group — the cyan skeleton is part of the Theia software processing to evaluate joint angles and motion. But it also shows my diminished explosiveness as I move along the aging curve.

Each task has been carefully selected by a collaborative group of NBA and NBPA movement experts to gain insight into individual athlete movement patterns and hopefully build normative standards that can be used to help prevent injuries and improve performance.

One note the league makes clear is that biomechanics usually can’t answer questions in isolation — rather, it’s a notable piece of a larger performance puzzle.

“Biomechanics tells you how someone is moving, but it doesn’t tell you why,” said Courtney Chaaban, NBA Sr Manager of biomechanics and engineering. “So I really like to look at it alongside of lots of other information: how strong they are, what their range of motion is, how they’re moving on the court, what their demand is on the court, what their injury history might be.”

I’ve detailed my injury history in these Sandbox stories before — broken bones in my feet, sprains of muscles and ligaments, etc. — and I’ll share that my knees were oddly sore the day of my evaluation. (Of course I have an excuse ready… )

My single-leg jumps were paltry, just 3.7 inches for my left and 3 inches for my right. My two-legged jumps were a bit better. The countermovement jump (CMJ) — in which I started on the force plates, bent down and then leapt straight up — was 11.8 inches, good for 56^th percentile in the sample of non-NBA players. My drop vertical jump, in which I step down onto the force plates and immediately spring up, was 13.2 inches, at the 49^th percentile.

I was hoping for better. Image: NBA

There were diagrams showing how much I use my ankles, knees and hips to absorb forces as I jump or land. Of particular note was my landing strategy: I know my hip flexors are weak due to a previous Springbok Analytics scan, and my knees were achy that day, so it’s little surprise that my ankles worked overtime to mitigate force.

“It’s not to say it’s good or bad,” Chaaban explained. “Maybe that’s just how you move.”

I didn’t skip all of leg day, just the hip and knee lifts. Image: NBA

While recently chatting with Warriors superstar Stephen Curry about a different topic, we started talking about his recovery routine and the notion of career longevity, when I volunteered that I underwent the NBA’s biomechanics protocol.

“You did all the testing?” Curry asked with a bemused smile. I shared the verdict of my data, which is that I’m very much a suburban dad these days. He laughed and then added, “There’s a lot more data available, but the real art is to figure out how to make that useful, right?”

My testing was done at the Nets’ first-rate facility in Brooklyn, but the experience is intentionally universal and would have been the same in Oklahoma City or Sacramento, too. All the same tech vendors are involved: Qualisys motion capture cameras, Bertec force plates, Theia biomechanics software and Breakaway Data for player and team access to the data.

My primary differential: I received a pdf report (rather than the Breakaway Data dashboard) that largely mirrored what the players get but had a few alterations, mostly because I had no historical data from other assessments. My datapoints were compared not to other NBA players but to a handful of team and league staff who underwent the tests.

The reports convey what each metric represents, which is helpful, such as noting that deceleration during the CMJ is “similar to stopping when coming around a screen.”

That CMJ deceleration was my highest asymmetry: my right side produced 20.5% more force than my left. Asymmetry is generally thought to be a problem and a possible injury risk, but there also need to be some allowances for individuals having their own movement signature.

What Curry also told me about applying such high-tech evaluations is the need to surround himself with “as many experts as possible to understand what the data means and then figure out what that is going to do to impact my routine.”

So, kind readers with advanced degrees and extensive pro sports experience, I ask: Who’s going to help me dunk again?

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

By John Portch

As Tom Kelley once asked, if you blew up all the systems at your organisation, what would you keep and what would you change?

Kelley, a partner at global design firm IDEO, was an inspiration for Lachlan Penfold when he was appointed Head of Performance at the Melbourne Storm in 2017. The team were reigning NRL premiers and keen to build on that success.

“That was a challenge that I put forward to all of our football staff, coaches, performance staff, football ops,” Penfold told the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2024. “If we blew this up, what would we keep and what would we change?”

It was a necessary question because, as he explained, “sometimes when you have a lot of success, you don’t want to change things because you think that there’s only one way to do it.” Instead, he is a firm believer that there is “more than one way to skin a cat”, which is central to Kelley’s argument. “That was a really refreshing approach of how to go about it.”

Penfold’s approach both encouraged collaboration across the Storm’s performance team and harnessed the expertise in the room as the group sought to provide the best possible performance support to their players.

Below, we return to a selection of our most insightful conversations with performance directors to discuss their approach to balancing the need for integration with excellence and pose the reader five questions.

1. Are your team’s efforts coordinated or are you just busy?

Daily meetings are a must, even for those who admit they’re “not a big meetings guy” such as Michael Italiano, the Head of Athletic Performance at the Rajasthan Royals.

For all that, he finds the expanse of a cricket field to be ideal for both formal and informal check-ins, as he told the Leaders Performance Institute last year.

“The walk around the ground is just pure gold,” he says of the deep conversations a lap of the ground can inspire. “When you’re at training there’s something about walking and looking out over the ground that brings a sense of openness rather than being across the table from someone, which at times can feel, maybe subconsciously, quite confronting.”

At daily 9:30am meetings, Italiano attempts to read the room. “I’m almost like ‘OK, who do I need to check-in with? Who do I need to bring more energy to? Who do I need to be more curious with? Maybe there was a player who has been off in training the last two days and I need to be more curious with them, their data and wellness scores.” That curiosity is a must because he cannot see everything.

From the IPL to the NBA, where Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers, uses structured check-ins to establish communication loops on athlete priorities.

“We want to try and distil it from one to three points in each of those areas. We then meet as a larger group, all of health and performance, so we can go through each player,” he told the Leaders Performance Podcast in 2025. “What the other clinicians are doing is really important in my view. Whatever issues I’ve seen here it is very rare, almost never, that things get missed.”

2. How do you preserve expertise in an interdisciplinary system?

Shared goals do not mean a dilution of the expertise within a performance team, they merely indicate that specialists are contributors to the holistic performance picture.

As Rice said of the Sixers, “we can have the best strength coaches, the best nutritionist – and that’s really important – we have excellent clinicians, but the context is really what underpins it. It doesn’t really matter how good that rehabilitation plan is if we don’t understand the context”. Once that context is understood, “that allows us to put the pieces around them to support the athlete.”

“I need to think like a football coach,” said Penfold of his work at the Storm. “In my role as a head of performance, often there’s a physical element to what we do but I also need to think like a football coach; how is this going to make them a better football player versus just a fitter, faster, stronger football player?”

It is a shared performance team goal. “Are they prepared to put developing a better football player first and having a growth mindset around that versus just staying in their little bubble and just working on their area?” Penfold continued. “So there’s a lot of parts that that go into making up a successful team or a great team outside of just the wins and losses.”

3. How do you approach trade-offs?

The pursuit of trade-offs is all about balancing competing tensions in performance.

Jack Nayler, for one, is convinced that control has its limits. ‘The more we try to control the system, the more we leave ourselves open to system errors adversely affecting our progress in the long-term,’ the Head of Sport Science at Everton wrote in an article for the Leaders Performance Institute. He added: ‘we cannot with complete accuracy predict what will happen in the future; all decisions are essentially gambles.’

Penfold is of a similar mindset. “If you’ve got 35 players, they’re 35 different players with different responses,” he said. “There’s always a lot of different decisions you’ve got to make and hopefully you get more right than wrong.”

You certainly don’t want to duplicate the work. “If we have three people doing five lots, all of a sudden we’ve got 15 sets instead of five,” said Rice, before outlining his true concern. “It’s very rarely missing things – it’s everyone trying to do the right thing.”

4. Do you and your team have a shared mental model of performance?

Simplification is key to Rice’s approach at the Sixers; and he admitted that the team’s small roster size (15 players) helps.

“It allows us to distil the focus areas which become the priorities in each area for each player; and then we have that in a spreadsheet,” he said. “The flow on from there is reasonably straightforward to see what programmes need to be implemented for this player and who’s going to drive them.”

This is easier with a shared mental model, which is also something Nayler explored. ‘The first thing to know is that in a complex environment, performance emerges from between the components an in inter-dependent manner, and not from the summation of the performance of each component in isolation,’ he wrote.

5. Does your culture enable or inhibit collaboration?

Collaborative structures are critical, but “have you created an environment that encourages people to want to get better, that allows them to thrive?”

The question was posed by Penfold, who described how his department adapted its approach ahead of the 2024 NRL season. “One of the things I believe we did well this year, was to create an environment of joy in which people want to immerse themselves in getting better.”

When there is that level of commitment in a psychologically safe environment, “it becomes the ‘mastery’ environment” that all performance directors crave.

What to read next

You Don’t Arrive Strategic: How Leaders Grow Into their Role

Main Image: Getty Images

By Joe Lemire

The Unrivaled season is a three-month sprint, but the size of its performance staff and tech stack are robust enough for a yearlong schedule — and they are making an impact beyond their own league.

Susan King Borchardt, who has been a fitness consultant to Sue Bird, Kelsey Plum and Breanna Stewart, joined Unrivaled as its Director of Performance and Recovery. Borchardt’s first call was to Lindsey Elizondo, an athletic trainer and physical therapist with the Magic, who joined as Director of Medical.

“We crafted this idea — her coming from the NBA, me working with some of the higher-level individuals privately in the WNBA — and just saying, ‘This should be the standard,’” Borchardt said courtside before the semifinals in Brooklyn. Phantom went on to defeat Mist for the championship 84-70 in Florida on March 4.

Their department has a headcount of about 25 and is supported by an extensive array of technologies, such as Plantiga insole sensors, Kinexon wearables, Springbok Analytics MRI scans and VALD devices for the weight room. Katie Buria, Head Athletic Trainer at the Dream, is Unrivaled’s Director of Sports Science managing the relationships with the tech providers.

“What we’ve seen is that will raise the bar everywhere else that we go,” Elizondo said. “So if we set that bar here, that’s going to feed upward into the W, it’s going to feed into the NWSL, it’s going to feed into all of these other sports and force the hand of this is what it takes to perform at this level.”

The athletes have full ownership of their data and can choose whether to share it with their WNBA teams and personal coaches. Unrivaled didn’t have exact figures available but indicated that the majority of players opted into using the tech, with Borchardt calling it “part of our culture.”

“This is a very player-driven league, and they care about player safety and wellness. The treatment has been top of the line,” said Breeze G Paige Bueckers, praising both the staff and the tech, such as “the data and what we look like on the court with our Plantigas or our [Kinexons] or our chips that measure our asymmetries — little stuff like that goes a long way in basketball.”

Plantiga has made women’s sports a priority, with its CEO Quin Sandler saying of the work with Unrivaled, “Together, we’re not just collecting movement — we’re helping build the future of applied sports science for women.”

Her teammate Cameron Brink, who suffered an ACL tear in June 2024, had her first Springbok scan — which uses AI to turn an MRI into 3D muscle data — while rehabbing with Unrivaled last year and then again before this season.

“Once you have a big injury, you want to learn how to optimize everything, so all these tools really help,” Brink said. “It is really reassuring to get MRIs done like that and just a full body scan. From here you can see how you’ve grown and improved and what areas you still need to work on.”

Elizondo noted the unprecedented position Unrivaled is in by collecting all of this data since the league’s inception. By having access to data for every player, the performance group can identify trends and understand the demands of the elite 3-on-3 game, which are different than 5-on-5. That helps them train the players with more specificity and develop more targeted treatment and recovery protocols.

Tracking longitudinal data enables Unrivaled to share baseline metrics for each player, and for rehabbing players, it helps reinforce the value of the hard work. Borchardt saw it firsthand with one athlete recently.

“For that athlete to have those two visual pictures to be like, ‘Wow, this is actually really working’ — that was so motivating,” she said.

Unrivaled CEO Alex Bazzell emphasized the league’s player-first, development-minded vision as a reason why it has invested so deeply in the personnel and products to make the performance team what it is.

“These players are thinking long term, and the expectation is not just your compensation but resources of off the court,” Bazzell said. “Our staff and who we hire, those are the ones that the players need to trust. You have to build trust in a 10-week period, too. That’s not easy.”

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

By John Portch

In 2019, the San Antonio Spurs’ General Manager, RC Buford, transitioned to a dual role as CEO of the team and President of its parent company, Spurs Sports & Entertainment.

Six years on, he is uniquely placed to discuss the continuing convergence of performance and business in a world of denser competition schedules, rising commercial pressures and heightened performance expectations.

What is his view having seen it from both sides?

“There are no sides,” Buford tells the Leaders Performance Institute on Teams. “We’re all on one side.” He speaks with a conviction that it could never be any other way.

“There are basketball units that are part of a team and there are business units that are part of a team; and if they’re not working together, neither is going to work,” he continues.

“It’s a dynamic that we’ve seen come closer together over the years,” says Phil Cullen, the Spurs’ Senior Director of Organizational Development & Basketball Operations, who joins Buford on the call.

The conversation takes place just weeks after Forbes valued the Spurs franchise at $4.4 billion, which is a 14% increase in just 12 months. According to the Forbes report, the franchise’s revenue in 2025 was $401 million and their operating income was $151 million.

While these figures are healthy for a US mid-market franchise, Cullen and his colleagues are perennially aware of the NBA’s debt-capacity rules, which influence investment in basketball operations.

“That debt capacity could impact how you build your roster,” he says before going on to outline how the Spurs’ basketball units can also support their business efforts. “We try to get ahead of things as much as we can.”

They try to capture media requests in the pre-season, which, as Cullen explains, allows the team to focus on their basketball when it matters most. Any other outcome is unthinkable for Buford.

He says: “We’re all one team and it becomes siloed when we differentiate ourselves.”

An aligned overall strategy is a necessity. “For us to be successful, we have to be focused on championship teams, impact in the community, and financial strength,” Buford adds. Each unit at the Spurs will have its own key initiatives, which he calls “big bets”. “We’ve all got to entertain those big bets to find success in our units”.

We spend the next 30 minutes with Buford and Cullen discussing what gives these big bets their greatest chance of success.

One team, one strategy

Of his transition to Spurs CEO, Buford says that while he doesn’t claim to know much about business, “I hope I know a thing or two about building teams”.

“I oversee business and basketball – I don’t oversee just one – and I try to be a resource to the people, the experts in those fields,” he says.

These experts sit in cross-functional teams. “You build collaborative teams that have impact and influence on the operation of the organisation.” When partnership deals are negotiated, for example, the partnership team includes representatives from the brand, impact and basketball units. “Through all the partnerships we’re building, the goal is to include each of these areas in a way that they can all be successful.”

Cullen illustrates the point further by offering the example of technology partners, which are needed by both basketball and business units. He says: “A lot of our conversations have been more inclusive of saying, ‘how can we maximise this opportunity with this partner?’ And part of that is the onboarding piece with those partners. It comes from creating these cross-functional teams to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to have a voice into how to maximise these partnerships.”

“But that doesn’t mean everybody in the whole place has to use a partner,” adds Buford. “It doesn’t mean everybody’s required to use it if it doesn’t fit the form or fashion that people need to do their work.”

Put the right people in place

In 2023, the Spurs hired Kaleb Thornhill as VP of Player Development & Organizational Growth.

“He also sits on the partnership team,” says Cullen of Thornhill, who is tasked with supporting player development away from the court. His role is about “understanding their interests; understanding how they want to show up in the community; the things they want to get behind. That was a strategic hire within the last five years that is probably different than most teams.”

Collectively, the Spurs will facilitate media requests during suitable periods and work with the players to deliver on their community-focused efforts such as visiting schools, community hubs and other public spaces.

Player partnerships are another focus, particularly with a playing cohort that invests time and money in their personal brand in a manner that was an anathema to Spurs players of an earlier generation such as Tim Duncan, who resolutely guarded his privacy.

“I can’t speak to others, but in our group there are people branding themselves differently than they did in the past; and they may want more engagement; but it’s not keeping them from any kind of partner relationship, it’s protecting their time,” says Buford. “You have to have a voice that understands what their time is and they must be engaged in the strategy behind the recruitment of partners.”

Cultivate relationships

The Spurs’ Victory Capital Performance Centre (also known as ‘The Rock at La Cantera’) opened its doors in 2023 as the Spurs’ new practice facility and new home of the team’s basketball operations. (Cullen is also heavily involved in Project Marvel, which will see the Spurs move to a new arena in downtown San Antonio in 2032.)

At The Rock at La Cantera, one of the chief architectural considerations, as Cullen explains, was to design an environment that promoted professional relationships.

“The communication piece has to be built on connection and the casual conversations, casual collisions, that we have throughout our workday, whether it’s at our training facility or down at the arena,” he says.

“It’s really important that you develop that sense of relationship, that others can bounce ideas off you and there’s a good, shared understanding of the starting point.”

While the business and basketball ops units work in different locations (“you don’t want everybody in everybody’s business,” says Buford), all units will come together at various times for strategic planning.

“A lot of sessions happen in August and September for the next season, but our sponsorship renewals are actually happening now,” Cullen adds. “We’ve been brought in on the front office to speak in engagements to get ahead and be included in these conversations and some of those pitches.”

The reasons are obvious. “Get the people in partnerships to understand that just because somebody will pay to be a part of an organisation, it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for player health,” says Buford. “Just because we can sell an energy drink or sell something doesn’t mean we’re going to do it. So it’s getting them to understand by communicating that.”

“Our organisation has put a lot of resources around our players, their wellbeing and their sense of belonging,” says Cullen. “But we’re also being super careful with the people we’re putting around our players as well.”

As the conversation draws to a close, both Buford and Cullen underline the fact that the Spurs have not solved the conundrum of cross-functional alignment.

Nevertheless, they clearly have a lesson or two to deliver of their own. The Leaders Performance Institute asks Buford what leaders seeking to bring together performance and business operations should be asking themselves.

His reply is instant: “How can I be helpful for you to accomplish what you want? Because, ultimately, if you do well, we’ll all do well.”

What to read next

People in Sport Often Roll their Eyes at the Word ‘Strategy’, but I’ve Found that Planning Provides Direction, Connection and Continuity in a Pressured and Volatile World

Main Image: Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment

By Joe Lemire

Larry Bird famously won a three-point contest while still wearing his warmup jacket — after asking in the locker room, “Who’s coming in second?” — so, with the Nets about to play the Celtics, I channeled his confidence and didn’t change out of my hoodie and jeans.

Across the street from Barclays Center, the Nets recently opened the Brooklyn Basketball Training Center where a couple of weeks ago I had been invited to test the Shoot 360 tech its coaches use in training youth players.

Standing in front of one of the baskets outfitted with Noah Basketball’s shot-tracking tech and Shoot 360’s graphical user interface, I awaited the pass, dribbled back across a few lines and confirmed with coach Michael Collins that I was now behind the NBA three-point line. I was. And so I took a shot.

The net swished, and the LED screen lit up green — Shoot 360’s Splash Zone confirmed that my shot’s arc, depth and left-right alignment were just about perfect. Bird would have been proud.

Or at least my fellow ginger sharpshooter, Brian Scalabrine, who looks like family and played for the Celtics and Nets. (My two-time fantasy basketball title team was named Big Scal’s Doppelgängers.)

The Nets have long run free youth basketball programs in the borough, reaching 40,000 kids annually through 235 schools as well as Boys & Girls Clubs and other community centers. But this space now gives them a centralized location to run daily programs, largely targeting children ages 6 to 17. The Shoot 360 tech, Collins noted, offers a range of drills and sills — even passing and dribbling — so kids have a balance of autonomy and structure, so they can “use this technology not only to create a workout, but then also have fun.”

Don’t take just my word for it, but my brother and I brought some of our kids — ages 9, 11 and 14 — to test out the tech. They loved it and didn’t want to leave despite working up a light sweat and pushing close to tip-off an NBA game.

Three stations have responsive, large-screen LEDs that show videos demonstrating technique and then offer interactive exercises. The kids were asked to dribble a certain way and then fire passes at numbered targets. At one point, the screen showed a memory game that also required passing accuracy: players bounced the ball off the card to flip it over.

“One of our main lenses is, how do we help players get better faster?” said Shoot 360 founder/CEO Craig Moody, a former college basketball coach.

The company’s founding story involved Moody seeing his teenage son and his friends prefer to play NBA2K inside rather than go outside and shoot hoops on a sunny day. “If I could build a gym like a video game,” Moody thought to himself, “I’d have it made.”

Just before our family visit, the training center hosted a group of young campers from NBA Brazil, while another international group visited a similar facility operated by the Cleveland Cavaliers. The coaching staffs at the two sites synced up the Shoot 360s at each location and organized a real-time contest — truly the video game ideal Moody had long envisioned.

Marissa Shorenstein, Chief External Affairs Officer at Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, said there’s a dual purpose to the franchise’s investment.

“We do it because we believe in giving back to the community, but we also do it because we know that engaging youth is the best way to engage long-term fandom for the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Liberty,” she said, noting that the Knicks, for example, have decades of inherited fandom whereas the Nets have only been in Brooklyn for 13 years and the Liberty for half that time. “For us, really creating that connective tissue with the community through the youth is what we believe is going to differentiate us long-term to build that generational growth.”

But there’s an appeal for adults, too. Collins said Nets players periodically pop in and shoot on the tech-enabled baskets. Jamal Crawford, Thad Young, Trae Young, Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart are among the former NBA and WNBA players to invest in Shoot 360. And weekend warrior adults (like me) had fun taking shots and getting feedback. It’s akin to what TopGolf, Home Run Dugout and other sport-tainment venues are offering.

“Where you have just the shooting piece, you don’t have to run up and play defense. You’re getting all the competition, you’re getting the social [element],” Moody said, adding, “We want people to play around the world for a lifetime.”

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