By Luke Whitworth

There is a firm link between strong cultural leadership and sustained excellence.

Those leaders can be athletes, such as England captain Harry Kane, who will lead the Three Lions in their Euro 2024 campaign. Or Breanna Stewart, the New York native who returned home in 2022 and led the Liberty to the 2023 WNBA Finals; bagging the league’s MVP in the process.

Kane and Stewart are the embodiment of local heroes who have done well, particularly if you include Kane’s remarkable spell at Tottenham Hotspur.

Then there are coaches who represent an expression of the systems that enable their programmes to excel. On that front, one can point to Kane’s international manager, Gareth Southgate, who has overseen England’s most successful spell since the mid-1960s.

Cultural leaders, however, need not be so high profile. They operate at all levels of an organisation, independent of job title or seniority. Do you recognise the cultural leaders in your team? What steps can you be a better cultural leader?

Cultural leadership – the super enabler

The link between leadership and sustained success is the centrepiece of a research project run by Edd Vahid, the Head of Football Academy Operations at the Premier League.

In June 2022, the business and leadership consultancy commissioned Vahid to undertake a piece of research to discover the ‘secrets of culture’. Two years later, this project, titled ‘Cultural Hypothesis’, is on the cusp of publication.

Ahead of its release, Vahid is leading a three-part Performance Support Series at the Leaders Performance Institute that seeks to explore the enablers in high performing cultures.

The first session, which took place in early May, was a useful way of testing the importance and relevance of the four enablers highlighted by Vahid in the Cultural Hypothesis: purpose, psychological safety, belonging and cultural leadership.

The second, which took place in early June, homed in on cultural leadership, specifically how leaders might change or sustain a culture. The concept is, as Vahid described, a “super enabler” for your sense of purpose, belonging or even psychological safety.

Culture should be an accelerator and energiser

In the session, Vahid observed that organisations are increasingly deliberate and intentional about culture because they see it as a competitive advantage. It is not a one-time annual event – it’s a regular part of ongoing conversations.

This is lost on some organisations, as Jon R Katzenbach, Illona Steffen and Caroline Kronley wrote in the Harvard Business Review in 2012:

‘All too often, leaders see cultural initiatives as a last resort. By the time they get around to culture, they’re convinced that a comprehensive overhaul of the culture is the only way to overcome the company’s resistance to major change. Culture thus becomes an excuse and a diversion rather than an accelerator and energiser’.

Four ways to get to grips with your culture

To understand culture you need keen observation and data collection. Vahid proposed several useful tools:

1. The OODA Loop Framework.

During the Korean War, John Boyd, an American military strategist and fighter pilot, devised the OODA Loop as a decision-making process designed to emphasise adaptation and agility in four stages:

• Observation: collect data from various sources.
• Orientation: data is filtered, analysed and enriched.
• Decision: selecting actionable insights for the best response.
• Action: action is taken and the loop begins anew.

Organisations can apply the OODA Loop to assess and respond effectively to cultural dynamics.

2. Cultural health checks

Vahid also pointed to other efforts to collect data around culture, such as UK Sport’s ‘cultural health check’ or retail giant Selfridges using data to better understand their most culturally-stressed communities.

3. Critical incident reviews

Vahid also stressed the importance of critical incident reviews to help observe culture during specific moments such as exits, inductions, wins and losses.

4. The Sigmoid Curve

Teams can also find their place on the Sigmoid Curve, a common model for tracking organisational growth and decline. At each stage, expectations can change, which affects what we see, hear and feel.

Five Steps Towards Cultural leadership

Vahid explored five steps that can help a team to develop cultural leaders.

1. Start with acknowledging the connection between leadership and culture: the literature largely points in this direction, with leaders having a fundamental role in supporting the change management process. As Donald and Charles Sull wrote in the MIT Sloane Management Review in 2022: ‘A lack of leadership investment was, by far, the most important obstacle to closing the gap between cultural aspirations and current reality.’
2. Identify aligned leaders: from there is important to ‘identify leaders who align with the target culture’ as Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J Yo-Jud Cheng wrote in the Harvard Business Reviewin 2018.
3. Honour your existing culture: you can too quickly go from point A to point B without taking a moment to understand what the existing culture looks like. Katzenbach, Steffen and Kronley noted that existing cultural strength should be acknowledged.
4. Build a guiding coalition: identify key individuals and consider diversity within your leadership groups. You should build what thought leader John Kotter calls a ‘guiding coalition’.
5. Understand the levels of cultural leadership: Vahid’s research reveals that cultural leadership operates on three levels:

• • Sponsors: senior individuals critical for manifesting the desired culture.
  • Architects: these are responsible for designing cultural initiatives.
  • Guardians: everyone contributes to safeguarding the culture to varying extents.

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Paige Bueckers’ stellar performances at this year’s March Madness proved that her ACL injury is long behind her.

She returned to action in November 2023 after 15 months out and drove UConn all the way to the Final Four of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament.

Behind the scenes, Andrea Hudy, the Director of Sports Performance (Women’s Basketball) at UConn, was critical to Bueckers’ convalescence and is working (while pursuing a PhD) to ensure there are fewer such occurrences in the future.

“My passion is trying to understand why people get hurt or the story behind their injuries and keep them strong and resilient for what’s unexpected or the challenges ahead,” she tells The People Behind the Tech podcast.

Andrea speaks from her own experience of injury as a varsity volleyball player. Indeed, when anyone says she “played without an ACL” for six years – as Andrea told Joe Lemire and John Portch – it makes you sit up and take notice.

In the first episode of this new series, we discuss the questions that still need to be asked about female injury occurrence rates [18:00]. We also touch upon Andrea’s career in college athletics, which took in tenures at Texas and Kansas before she returned to UConn three years ago for her second spell [8:40]. Then, we broach her willingness to experiment with new technologies while concurrently seeking better insights from existing datasets [11:40]. Finally, she tells us why she can occasionally see herself as a modern, real-life Icarus [26:30] and much more besides.

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By Joe Lemire

The WNBA has signed a landmark deal with Genius Sports for use of its Second Spectrum optical tracking cameras, becoming the first women’s pro sports league in the US to have access to 3D player and ball data.

This multi-year, league-wide agreement with Second Spectrum marks the latest milestone in the rapid growth of the WNBA and could signal a new era of personnel decisions, game strategy and sports science for the teams. The NBA’s analytics revolution followed the installation of its first league-wide optical tracking system back in 2013. And such 3D tracking underpins so many modern fan engagement activations — everything from MLB’s 3D Gameday to ESPN’s Big City Greens NHL game and the Toy Story NFL game.

“Our teams are obviously very enthusiastic about this and that the league is making the investment on behalf of the teams,” WNBA Head of League Operations Bethany Donaphin said. “It’s really a statement to the importance of developing our basketball technology capabilities as the league continues to grow and as the game continues to evolve.”

One of the key criteria for the WNBA system was that ability to collect the raw x-y-z tracking data as well as being able to generate an “end-to-end suite of analytics,” added NBA VP Tom Ryan, who oversees technology initiatives. Such second-level metrics include assessing quality of shots and advanced defensive proficiency evaluations.

“Probably the most exciting thing about the deal for us is that this the first time, to our knowledge, that a women’s pro sports league is going to have this level of tracking and analytics,” Second Spectrum Chief Commercial Officer Mike D’Auria said. “We’re going to take the cutting-edge technology, not just from the tracking side, but going through the analytics, data and software that is the cornerstone of NBA workflows. We’re excited to level up the women’s game, which is something we’ve wanted to do for ages.”

This follows a major digital transformation from the WNBA before the 2023 season in which the league rebuilt its app and website following a $75 million infusion of capital. That enabled the W to assemble its own in-house digital team to better serve its fans. That group will now have considerably more data to power leaderboards, highlights and immersive experiences.

Ryan noted the value in finding a partner who will “be able to evolve with the WNBA. It’s at an incredible inflection point as a property. The first phase is really about advancing the game and the core product, but then over time, we’re obviously going to want to innovate the fan experience and add a new media element.”

“What people are starting to discover — hopefully more and more — is how elite our athletes are, how talented they are, how really skilled they are,” Donaphin said, “and I think it’ll be impactful to be able to tell stories around that with data supporting it.

Some of the media tools will need to be negotiated directly with each broadcaster in the coming months. Genius and Second Spectrum have a stable of AR and other visualizations tools that they’ve used in, for example, NFL coverage on CBS and NFL+.

“I really think some of the data information and graphics can really start to accentuate the women’s game in a different way and give a unique look and feel to the game,” D’Auria said, namechecking the potential of analyzing Caitlin Clark’s shooting in a new way.

“The WNBA is growing so much, which means they have a lot of new fans coming to them,” he added. “What we hope is that we can really help that process of driving new fans.”

Second Spectrum was the longtime provider of NBA tracking data until that deal concluded prior to this season, although it remains a provider of basketball analytics and broadcast augmentation for the league. The WNBA first tested tracking data at the inaugural Commissioner’s Cup in 2021 when it leveraged a combination of Kinexon sensors and Hawk-Eye cameras.

Soon after that game, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert shared her vision for tracking data in a keynote conversation with SBJ Tech.

“It’s really important to provide that to teams and players about workload and stuff like that, but it’s important also to integrate some of that data into broadcast to make it very interesting — and then integrate it into a second screen experience,” she said at the time, discussing the value in “finding ways to engage fans differently.”

On Tuesday, she reaffirmed that value proposition in a statement, saying, “Technology continues to fundamentally change the sports landscape. Deploying state-of-the-art optical tracking technology through Genius Sports will deliver rich data to our teams that they can leverage to enhance player performance while informing in-game strategy and enable a new wave of insights and media elements for fans.”

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.

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By John Portch with additional reporting from Luke Whitworth

“A question to reflect on in your teams is the impact of IQ and EQ,” said Holly Ransom.

The renowned leadership consultant was onstage at the Leaders Sport Performance Summit at Melbourne’s Glasshouse speaking about her book The Leading Edge, in which she proposes a framework for leadership based on notion that when we are able to lead ourselves we are better equipped to steward others through periods of change and development.

An audience of more than 200 Leaders Performance Institute members sat with rapt attention as Ransom joined coaches and leaders from organisations including the Brisbane Lions, San Antonio Spurs and Melbourne Business School, all of whom laid out how they are working to ensure their people can navigate the shifting sands of high performance in years to come.

“Research suggests some of the most in-demand skills by 2030 will be how we work together, connect, and build empathy,” Ransom continued.

Here, in light of those skills, we explore eight ways those who took to the stage are working to future-proof their teams.

1. Winning strategies are co-created, not imposed top-down

The recent renaissance in Australian cricket – the men’s and women’s teams are reigning world champions across four different formats – has not been a happy accident. Andrew McDonald and Shelley Nitschke, the head coaches of the men’s and women’s teams respectively, stressed the need for thorough performance planning, skilful execution and finding the space to pick up lessons along the way.

‘What is high performance? It’s the ability to move quickly and make good decisions.’

Andrew McDonald, Head Coach, Australia men’s cricket team

‘A large focus for us has been trying to create a welcoming and open environment.’

Shelley Nitschke, Head Coach, Australia women’s cricket team

Next steps:

• Bring your athletes onboard by giving them the agency to help shape your performance plan. McDonald sought to do this by shifting the discourse from talk of ‘culture’ to one of ‘environment’ so that players, particularly when on the road, can fashion for themselves safe spaces to share ideas. Whether it’s tactics or using data, Australia’s players are now empowered to make critical in-game decisions.
• Success may not be instant and outcomes may be erratic at first. Use low-consequence preparation matches to trial new tactics and strategies; then re-frame what winning means in those moments.

2. Role-model good leadership

Burnout is a universal problem, with New Zealand and Australia suffering some of the highest rates in the world, according to leadership consultant Holly Ransom. She argues that while stress is inevitable, and can be abated, burnout can be entirely avoided. In her view, the conditions necessary for eradicating burnout stem from empathetic leadership and, when a leader adapts their habits, it gives permission for others to do the same.

‘If we want to see it, we have to be it.’

Holly Ransom on the notion that we can’t sustain leadership, without leading ourselves first.

Next steps:

• Spend time reflecting on whether the habits you’re living by and leading with are still serving you well. Are they supporting you using your energy on the tasks that matter most? Are you getting a return on that energy?
• Ransom suggested three steps for deactivating the nervous system and returning to a state of calm and relaxation:

1) Complete an energy audit – when are our natural highs and lows in a day, and how are we using them?

2) Establish your building blocks – do the little things that help you build momentum.

3) Set your micro-breaks – take time to get mini hits of new energy.

3. Do you promote safe risk taking in the pursuit of innovation?

Kit Wise of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology [RMIT] and Budi Miller of the Theatre of Others, an innovative performing arts company, were invited onstage to share their approaches to fostering creativity and risk-taking in their environments.

‘Our philosophy is centred around inspiration, aspiration and expectation. Inspiration is liberating, fun, and what gives us desire. Aspiration – the why and our values and purpose. Expectation – have fun and think deeply about what you do so we can hold one another to account.’

Professor Kit Wise, Dean, School of Art, RMIT

‘We talk a lot about play and playfulness in our philosophy. It is a sense of freedom where play and risk exist together. Play and playfulness elevate the speed of curiosity and problem solving.’

Budi Miller, Co-Artistic Director, Theatre of Others

Next steps:

• Risk-taking can be brave. Find ways to build trust and empathy within your team.
• Encourage risk-taking and rule-breaking in the pursuit of innovation. They are fundamental to innovation, not merely in-the-moment flashes.

4. Learning and development is easier when people feel connected and a sense of purpose

The New Zealand All Blacks and San Antonio Spurs are worlds apart in sporting terms but share numerous commonalities when it comes to bringing to life and sustaining a winning culture. Beyond results, both are renowned for creating environments where people and innovation flourish, as the All Blacks’ Mike Anthony and Spurs’ Phil Cullen explained.

‘We want to have teams that you never want to leave. The environment has to be special to keep people there.’

Mike Anthony, High Performance Development Manager, New Zealand Rugby Union

‘When we were planning our new training facility, Coach [Gregg] Popovic had only two requests: take care of the people and take care of the culture.’

Phil Cullen, Senior Director of Basketball Operations and Organizational Development, San Antonio Spurs

Next steps:

New Zealand Rugby have identified five factors that enable their group to flourish:

1) Connection – players take pride in serving their community.

2) Balance – the group looks for learning, stimulation and edge.

3) Fun – a big part of balance.

4) Learning – athletes learn by doing; so what environment will facilitate the best learning?

5) Family – the organisation has worked to bring families in while also helping them to understand the expectations of an athlete in high performance sport.

The Spurs have their three core values:

1) Character, which is based on values.

2) Selflessness, which is culture-focused.

3) ‘Pound the Rock’. A metaphor inspired by 19th Century Danish-American social reformer Jacob Riis. His Stonecutter’s Credo perfectly captures the Spurs’ drive for championships:

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

The Stonecutter’s Credo, Jacob Riis

5. Empower athletes in their learning

The Brisbane Lions men’s team, under the stewardship of Senior Coach Chris Fagan, have in recent years returned to prominence for the first time in a generation. Amongst the factors responsible for their rise is their ability to out-learn their opponents, as High Performance Manager Damien Austin explained.

‘Do we do what makes us comfortable or do we do what the athlete needs to do or learn?’

Damien Austin, High Performance Manager, Brisbane Lions

Next steps:

• You have to educate the ‘why’ for athletes and encourage them to take responsibility. Start by gathering their input when shaping your habits and standards. And remember: no one is above the basics, no mater how good they are.
• Consider: what are your athletes taking away from training? Did they retain the requisite knowledge? Are they enjoying your training environment? Do they have any fears or concerns? Find out and iterate. Be sure to check for misunderstanding and guide them in their learning.

6. Dare or challenge your people to change

Models for change are all good and well – change is inevitable, so perhaps they are entirely necessary – but what are some of the so-called ‘soft’ factors that enable a leader to influence change? Professor Jen Overbeck was on hand in Melbourne to dispense some tips for explaining and justifying change to others.

‘We can make people change, or we can persuade them to change. We should choose deliberately, and be clear about what makes them listen to us.’

Jen Overbeck, Associate Dean, Melbourne Business School

Next steps:

• Your capacity to influence – built by your credibility in the eyes of others – must be established well before you need to rely upon it. What gives you credibility and lets you influence others? If you get it right: they will admire, like and trust you. They’ll think they’re in good hands, that you bring success, or access to good things. They’ll think you got to where you are in the right way.
• A leader has to balance their social capital (their membership of ‘the tribe’) and their intellectual capital (their competence). Sometimes you have to simply be part of the tribe. At other times, you can simply demonstrate that you support the values and core identity of the tribe, and that you’re willing to fit in with them instead of challenging or resisting them.

7. No sustained performance without wellbeing

Wellbeing and performance are indivisible, yet there is more we can all be doing to ensure our people can flourish. At the Glasshouse, Emily Downes of High Performance Sport New Zealand and Sonia Boland from the Australian Institute of Sport provided an insight into their work helping people to thrive amidst the challenges presented by high performance sport.

‘A lot of conversations around wellbeing have centred around the duty of care but not touched upon its direct impact on performance. We are now observing a shift and evolution in the system where there is a readiness to have conversations around the benefits of wellbeing.’

Emily Downes, General Manager – Wellbeing & Leadership, High Performance Sport New Zealand

‘We are striving for sustained and repeated performance outcomes. Wellbeing is a performance enabler and opportunity.’

Sonia Boland, National Wellbeing Manager, Australian Institute of Sport

Next steps:

• Language is so important. It is becoming evident that we are all talking about different things when we discuss wellbeing. Find terms that makes sense and have meaning to your people.
• Resource alone is not enough. None of it means anything if those above and below are compounding the problem – it requires integration at an organisational or system level to have a true impact.

8. Better athlete and coach development for women and girls

As women’s sport continues to evolve, the system will need the athletes and the coaches to fill the spaces created. Given the hitherto piecemeal approach to developing women’s sport, and the often misunderstood differences between men and women athletes, this is far from a given. Helene Wilson of High Performance Sport New Zealand and Tarkyn Lockyer of the AFL are two individuals meeting this challenge head on.

‘Athletes aren’t as exposed to women coaching. Could this actually bring a point of difference?’

Helene Wilson, High Performance Sport New Zealand

‘The easy way would be for women and girls’ pathways to mirror the boys and men’s. In terms of resourcing, it is the same. However, feedback collated from the clubs and players shows that girls and women want more education around high performance and knowledge of preparation and recovery. Boys and men prefer more competition and game time. The needs are different so the curriculum needs to match that.’

Tarkyn Lockyer, Australian Football League

Next steps:

• Given the speed of growth in women’s sport, the focus needs to be on creating adaptable and malleable athletes. To do this, focus on the fundamental skills in a high challenge, high support environment.
• For the development of both women coaches and athletes, it’s not just about providing opportunity. We need to wrap support around them as we set them up to be successful.

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Joe Rogowski has seen the NBA from all sides.

He spent two years as an S&C at the Orlando Magic, a further six years as Director of Science & Research at the Houston Rockets, before spending almost nine years at the National Basketball Players Association [NBPA].

Since 2022, he has served as Chief Medical Director of the National Basketball Retired Players Association [NBRPA], a non-profit organization comprised of former professional basketball players of the NBA, ABA, Harlem Globetrotters, and WNBA.

Rogowski was at the NBPA in 2015, the year the league introduced its wearables committee and his views were informed by his time in Orlando and Houston.

As he tells Joe Lemire and John Portch, he worked with players wary of wearables as well as those mor willing “guinea pigs”, as they refers to them, such as retired Magic point guard Jameer Nelson.

Rogowski would ask himself of the latest devices: “Is it practical? Is it something that you can wear in a practice? Is this something that I can consistently do? Or is this a one-time thing and you collect the data and move on?

“I had plenty of those devices that actually changed how I think about training these guys or how I’d help them with recovery. But it is a sale because, with the players, you only have so many asks.”

Rogowski recalls those moments working with players as well as:

• The holistic management of load in the NBA [13:30];
• Knowing what to say – and what not to say – to players [21:20];
• His interest in cardiology and its importance for athletes, both current and retired [27:00];
• His role at the Sports Tech Research Network [31:20]

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By John Portch

What is the true purpose of KPIs?

“They’re about people,” says Mark Jarram. “Sport is a relationship business and everything should be people-focused. It’s about a person over performer, whilst there will always be an element of perform-on-demand in sport. The purpose of KPIs is to keep people informed, keep them involved, interested and inspired.”

Jarram, the Head of Coaching & Performance Development for Sport at Loughborough University, is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute about the benefits of performance planning and how KPIs feed into the systemisation of performance.

“Things that get systemised get done,” he continues. “In the world of coaching and sport, there’s so much going on and there’s so many things to do and achieve. If you can find ways to systemise and automate certain things or certain interventions it means it will actually get done.”

In the first part of our interview, we discuss five benefits of taking the time to systemise a performance programme, from the performance planning of a head coach to the daily work of a practitioner.

1. You won’t miss out on feedback opportunities

“A lot of us in sport sometimes fall short of systematising the things that matter most,” says Jarram. “If you do a good job of keeping the main thing the main thing, it lends itself to achieving consistency.” Reviewing and closing feedback loops, or even the art of effective feedback is commonly the one thing that is not done or, wrongfully, often the first thing to leave out. Consistency is essential in the act of performance planning and, as Jarram explains, when there is a strategy in place, you can create the framework – the system – for your feedback interventions. “You’ll know that the intervention gets made rather than sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it’s not relevant to have a feedback intervention but if you don’t systemise something then it’s less likely to be done and you may miss an opportunity for really good feedback.” Ultimately, “you’ve got to have something that’s manageable and repeatable otherwise there is no chance of it being effective. It’s got to add value.”

2. You can readily see if you’re actually making a difference

Jarram uses the example of an S&C coach to outline the benefits for coaches and practitioners alike. “What’s the S&C systemising?” he asks. “What are they tracking and what are their metrics? Is that systemised and automated? I guess it’s the same for all disciplines. What are they doing to create a form of measurement that can determine if they are making a difference. Systemisation can help to determine if we’re focusing on the right things and can create the opportunities for collaborative conversations.”

3. You’re less likely to be caught off guard

“Systemisation should prevent you from going astray and it should help make your workflows easier and bring efficiency,” says Jarram, with performance planning firmly in mind. “It allows – but doesn’t guarantee – the opportunity for complete clarity and building alignment amongst staff teams. Some of the best organisations and people I’ve been around hold clarity paramount. It contributes to the power of your purpose in that it promotes buy-in and supports your vision and mission. It allows the opportunity to ask ‘how can I contribute? What are my deliverables?’ and therefore lets you hold people accountable.” There is, he says, also an opportunity to establish what it takes to win. “There’s elements of that. Systemising helps us to confront brutal facts,” he adds. “There’s also an element of avoiding assumptions. Fewer assumptions will be made as you won’t be navigating blindly or be caught off guard. As humans, we hate being caught off guard – coaches, practitioners and athletes all do. How can we systemise something so that everyone is like ‘we know this is important and we know it’s coming’.”

4. It must be managed by a high quality leader

Does a systemised approach to performance work better for bigger or smaller organisations? “It can be effective in both depending on the quality of the leader, quality of the conversations, quality of that aforementioned clarity,” says Jarram. A huge anchor for Jarram is “the quality of a conversation is determined by the quality of the question,” adding, “are we asking the right questions at the right times to complement performance, encourage development and provide collaboration, with the athletes at the forefront?”  Even a programme with 60-plus athletes and those with a more intimate 10-plus can function efficiently if it is lead effectively. The experience of the coaches and practitioners is also significant. At Loughborough, which provides 64 sports, including 20 high performance programmes, there are sports with all full-time staff, others with part-time staff, some with placement students and a number with volunteers. “They all come with different expertise, they’re all at a different age and different stage of their journeys, so the maturity factor is real,” says Jarram. “We hear a lot about coaches wanting practitioners to know their sport really well. Do you have to be an expert in that sport to be an effective practitioner? Not necessarily as long as the practitioner is managed and led really well.”

5. Dealing with friction in an productive way

Tensions surrounding the head coach are all but inevitable in performance planning. “At Loughborough, we’re trying to encourage coaches to take a needs-based approach – what are the needs of the team and the individual? Are you helping and supporting that rather than merely doing what you’re comfortable with? – that’s where there are frictions. Are they choosing the right style of play and the right systems and strategies to complement what it’s actually going to take to win?” Sometimes coaches can be wrong and sometimes what it takes changes mid-season or mid-cycle. “We’re saying ‘choose and commit to something based on the information you have and pursue it’. There should then be a review process because every sport evolves all the time. Did you misjudge what it takes to win in your league? What’s actually happening? What are other teams doing? Did you think you had a certain type of player in your team in pre-season and they turned out differently? You’ve got to pivot and adjust. It’s very natural to do and by systemising it we hope to shorten that timeline. Okay, let’s make sure we’re doing it when needed rather than later when it’s maybe too late.”

In part two, we will look at how Jarram and Loughborough support coaches in their performance planning.

Main Image: Hawk-Eye

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By Joe Lemire

The future of officiating in basketball may reside in a broadcast trailer, sitting in a parking lot in the baking hot Nevada desert. The unassuming exterior belies the (thankfully air conditioned) interior where Hawk-Eye has set up a pair of workrooms, adorned with desks, monitors, a referee-connected intercom and more monitors.

To the right is the group overseeing the implementation of the Hawk-Eye player and ball tracking system that is set to replace Second Spectrum as the raw data collector and enhance the offering by providing 3D pose data via 29 points on the body, rather than a single center of mass. To the left is the on-premises replay room, a luxury not typically afforded the NBA Summer League.

The Summer League, which took place between July 7 and July 17, was used as an experiment in innovation, as the league conducted a final test of its new tracking provider while also assessing new avenues of reviewing close calls and then communicating those decisions swiftly to the earpiece or wristwatch of an on-court official.

“Number one is just a dry run of the core tracking system because that’s the lifeblood of team front offices and Sportradar, our partner — we want to make sure that is working because that’s the foundation of all this,” said NBA Basketball Strategy VP Tom Ryan, who oversees technology initiatives. “Building on top of that, we are, for the first time, going to see what a fully-integrated, tracking-plus-video replay system looks like. We’ve never used tracking data live in a replay center.”

Image: Joe Lemire

The legacy product of Sony-owned Hawk-Eye is its precision ball tracking used to adjudicate line calls in tennis before an expansion to tracking players, their limbs and balls in other sports, like MLB. Its other primary offering is the Synchronized Multi-Angle Replay Technology (SMART) video replay that’s used by the NFL and others.

Now, the NBA is pairing the two with an eye toward generating supplemental evidence to help referees make decisions on goaltending, the primary point of emphasis this year. Foot-on-the-line and last-touched-out-of-bounds calls will be in R&D all year. In the future, those determinations could be fully automated, though that step would require sign off from the Competition Committee and the National Basketball Referees Association.

“Our top objective here at the Summer League is to showcase how all of our different technologies can come together to create this synergy of solutions to provide the NBA with ultimately what they need to better officiate the game,” said Dan Cash, Hawk-Eye’s Managing Director for North America. “We believe that if you couple that [tracking] with replay, which we’re demonstrating here, you have a really powerful tool to be able to officiate the game efficiently and effectively.”

Hawk-Eye installed its optical tracking system in every NBA arena over the course of two months, January to March, this year. It entails 14 cameras with 4K resolution that are expected to operate at 120 frames per second — double the broadcast standard for sports — and could go even higher, although the requisite processing power necessitates a trade-off with latency. A 15th camera may be deployed at times that’s capable of a whopping 1,000 fps with even greater resolution.

What these cameras provide, first and most obviously, are more angles of the action. A questionable three-pointer in the Summer League’s first few days lacked a conclusive broadcast view, but one of the Hawk-Eye cameras had a better angle to confirm the foot was behind the line.

But the tracking data provides a new dimension of analysis. The NBA flew out its usual Secaucus-based replay operators for a trial. “It’s video plus data, which is a new skill to learn,” Ryan said, adding that “we have a different [replay] partner that we’re really happy with,” referring to EVS. Hawk-Eye’s three prior visits to the Summer League were all for testing in the background; this is its first time used in games.

The cameras collect positional data of the basketball and players’ hands, then apply the rules of goaltending and the laws of physics. On the replay operator’s screen are yes-no indicators for the goaltending criteria.

“Goaltending is relatively easy — if the ball passes its apex, if it’s over the cylinder, if it’s touching the backboard — those are all pretty defined use cases, but if we haven’t collected data for a significant amount of time, you don’t have a historical data set to refer to, to understand where your pain points are,” Hawk-Eye Commercial irector Justin Goltz said.

“Realistically, the technology moves in at a pace that it can do it relatively quickly, but there’s a lot of logistics to get it from this broadcast truck, or from the stadium, down to the court that needs to be hashed out over a season or two.”

The operator also sees a second-screen experience with a replay animation similar in spirit to what Hawk-Eye has made famous in tennis. The NBA is still evaluating the best presentation of information and visuals to, first, help make the correct call and, second, show the fans. “A big part of this initiative is just more transparency,” Ryan said.

Image: Joe Lemire

Following the same adage that content is king but distribution is queen, so too with this enhanced replay format is that accuracy is paramount, but efficiency is critical, too. The league is testing two methods of communication to its referees: both audible messages to an earpiece or haptic and written transmissions to a watch.

The NBA, for example, introduced a new mechanism for relaying a scoring change from the replay center to the on-court officials last year. If a two-pointer became a three, or vice versa, a blue light would flash at the scorer’s table. The problem: looking in that direction was never part of the usual routine or field of vision. Of about 120 such blue light indicators, only five were organically spotted.

That’s an obvious starting point — and not novel as other sports, such as soccer, have done this for years — but it could lead to other use cases.

“Live communications with the ref is definitely a core component of our strategy because if we’re doing all this work on the automation side,” Ryan said, “you have to be able to communicate that with the ref in real time.”

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

Main image courtesy of Hyperice

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By Tom Friend

Nobody receives more unfettered advertising during an NBA playoff game than Hyperice.

During the NBA Playoffs , TV cameras constantly caught marquee players wearing futuristic massage wraps around their backs and knees. It was not to hold their shorts up.

Hyperice and its latest heat + vibration wellness technology has cornered the NBA market more than ever, even though the relationship goes back to an inspirational conversation with the late Kobe Bryant in 2011. The company’s new Venom 2 product has swept through the league this past season with its reverberating, pliable, granulated copper-like material that generates up to 130-degrees of heat — with a who’s who of all-stars on board.

The Lakers’ LeBron James and Anthony Davis and the Celtics’ Jayson Tatum are investors, but that’s not why their respective teams have faltered — the surging Kentavious Caldwell-Pope of the NBA champion Denver Nuggets wears it, too.

“Well, 130 degrees is the maximum heat allowed in a commercial product,” says Anthony Katz, Hyperice’s Founder and President. “Athletes, they always want to push it. If it’s something hot, they want it hot. Or they want it really cold. And if it’s pressure, they want a lot of pressure. If it’s vibration, they want a lot. They want to push their body.”

Hyperice’s journey to the top only proves that everyone’s an entrepreneur at heart and that Katz is open to any and all suggestions. His products — from an original ice simulator to a novel Hyperice X hybrid device just out of the lab — were in part brainstormed by NBA players.

Back in 2011, in an era when players wore sloppy bags of ice late in games on the bench, Katz had already devised a proprietary Velcro cold wrap for his own balky knees. At the time, he was constantly playing pickup games alongside college players at UC Irvine and inevitably would see guys eye-balling the knee contraption. One of his former high school teammates, who happened to be a UC Irvine assistant coach and was charged with letting Kobe Bryant into the gym for 4 a.m. workouts, had a superlative idea.

Show it to Kobe.

Bryant liked Katz’s concept but made suggestions on how to improve it and — if applied — promised to wear it/flaunt it on the Lakers bench. “Inspired me to start the business,” Katz says. “That gave me the motivation to say… I gotta do this now because if he’s gonna wear it, that will trickle down. And if it’s good enough for him, it’ll be good enough for anybody.”

Soon, it was good enough for Blake Griffin and LeBron James, who showed it to his buddies Dwayne Wade, Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul. Before long, Katz never had to pay for a game ticket again. Griffin and Paul regularly invited him to Clippers games — back when Paul was playing there — and that’s how Katz had his next entrepreneurial moment.

Given access to the Clippers training room, circa 2015, Katz saw how players relied on three modalities: foam rollers, soft tissue massage and vibration. His revelation was to combine them, and he launched the Hyperice Vyper, a product that fitted high amplitude and high frequency vibration into the core of a foam roller. “We went from a company doing not even a million in sales to almost $5 million,” he says.

The next year, in that same Clippers locker room, came his company’s seminal moment. Paul and teammate Matt Barnes told him to think heat, not ice. They said players were now wearing damp hydrocollator pads to stay loose during games, but problem was, they said the pads were “nasty” and would “stink.” They suggested he devise an alternative.

Voila, he developed a vibrating heated pad product, the Venom, that wrapped conveniently around backs, knees and shoulders. The battery, however, would dissipate or detach during games, which was a problem. But Katz was always unafraid to go back to the drawing board. He purchased a company called RecoverX and had engineers incorporate RecoverX’s seamless heating technology into a new completely redesigned vibrating Venom 2.

That product officially launched in August of 2022, in time for this season, ensconcing Hyperice’s role as an official NBA product. During the 2020 Bubble, players were openly using the Hypervolt percussion instrument on the sidelines during games, especially big names such as Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo and James. James was also the most prominent proponent of Hyperice’s Normatec air compression system, a lower torso covering that is essentially a lymphatic circulation pump. Post-game, James commonly wears it at home in an easy chair while sipping a glass of wine.

But it was the power-plated Venom 2 back pad that gained the most steam throughout the 2022-23 NBA season. The combination of heat and vibration helped players loosen up swifter — and stay loose. Nearly the entire New York Knicks team took the court wearing it every night. Stars such as Atlanta’s Trae Young couldn’t function without it, while Tatum, Griffin, James and Davis went one step further: they helped bankroll it.

But Denver’s Caldwell-Pope may be the face of the product this June. Or the voice of it. Mic’d up by ABC/ESPN during the NBA Conference Finals, he was on camera wildly exhorting his teammates up and down the sidelines.

Venom coming out of his mouth, Venom 2 wrapped around his back.

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.

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“With technology now, we’re starting to understand movement in a way that we didn’t really understand before,” Keke Lyles tells Joe Lemire and John Portch.

The Director of Performance at Uplift Labs was on the pod to discuss how the company’s AI can reduce injury risk in athletes.

There is no better candidate to delve into injury prevention and mitigation than the man often credited with saving Steph Curry’s ankle.

We made a whistlestop tour of his work at the Minnesota Timberwolves, Atlanta Hawks and, of course, the Golden State Warriors.

Also on the agenda were:

• How the stress of a season can affect movement quality, tissue quality, and range of motion [14:00];
• The often misunderstood elements of load management [17:00];
• Keke’s jump from the world of sport into the tech space [31:20];
• Why he believes the next performance frontier will be in player development [34:30].

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John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn

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By Joe Lemire

The NBA is updating its advanced player and ball tracking data starting next season, switching its raw data provider to Hawk-Eye Innovations while retaining incumbent provider Second Spectrum to serve as an analytics engine and broadcast augmentation tool.

As part of a multiyear deal beginning in 2023-24, Hawk-Eye will provide the NBA with pose tracking data for the first time, capturing 29 points on the body as opposed to a single, center-of-mass datapoint for each player. The league is in the process of installing 12 cameras in all 29 arenas that will shoot at 60 frames per second to generate the 3D dataset that will be new to basketball but similar to what Hawk-Eye has provided MLB via Statcast since 2020. Best known publicly for its tennis line calls, Sony-owned Hawk-Eye will also be used to develop future officiating uses for the NBA. Some examples they have been working on in a proof-of-concept capacity since 2019 include goaltending or out-of-bounds determinations, although specific implementations have not been finalized and may require policy sign-off from the unions for the players and referees.

Track record important: “The reason we felt so strongly that Hawk-Eye was the right partner for that is they have an incredible track record across other sports,” NBA EVP/Basketball Strategy & Analytics Evan Wasch said, adding that the primary focus was build a more robust dataset and have it be accessible in real time. “With those capabilities, that unlocks a whole range of use cases across broadcast, officiating, basketball analytics, fan engagement.” Wasch said that this process began with an RFP a little more than a year ago, noting that Hawk-Eye and Second Spectrum were the two finalists. Because they had different strengths that could work in tandem, he said, “We really tried to capture the best of what both companies offered.”

Second Spectrum still involved: Genius Sports-owned Second Spectrum will continue to support teams with the analysis and visualization of tracking data through its AI and machine learning. It will be an official augmentation provider for NBA League Pass, creating alternate telecasts in the spirit of what the company has done in powering ClipperVision. Second Spectrum is also collaborating with the NBA on its next generation tracking product, Dragon, which seeks to collect so-called “mesh data” — essentially, the entire surface area of a player as opposed to individual points. The NBA also touts the ability to use Hawk-Eye data — along with functionality from sister Sony sports businesses, Beyond Sports and Pulselive — for virtual recreations and other gamification activations, along the lines of how NBA Commissioner Adam Silver recorded Ahmad Rashad in 3D at the NBA Tech Summit and then his avatar was rendered as one of the players in game video. “The NBA is pretty progressive when it comes to engaging fans, and they have a lot of pretty experiential, immersive digital experiences on their platforms and obviously with their partners, too,” said Michael Markovich, CCO of Sony’s sports businesses. “And from that, we hope that some of this data we’re generating can create new fan experiences.”

Working with teams: Second Spectrum’s roots are in the analysis of data more than its collection, having originally used what SportVU captured to power its metrics a decade ago. Continuing to work with teams in that capacity through its AI and machine learning is “one of our big priorities,” Second Spectrum CCO Mike D’Auria said. Wasch added, “Second Spectrum remains the foremost basketball analytics experts in the world, and their ability to take raw tracking data and turn it into basketball insight — which brings tremendous value for the teams, for the league and for our fans — was something that we wanted to maintain.”

Hawk-Eye tested in the summer league: The NBA tested the accuracy and sub-second latency of Hawk-Eye at the Summer League and in six team arenas. Hawk-Eye will work together with the league’s exclusive data distribution provider, Sportradar, to maximize the possible stats. What the 3D Hawk-Eye data will offer is an opportunity to understand key dimensions of the game. Whether a defender has his hand in the face of a shooter, for instance, can certainly affect shot probability but center-of-mass data capture can’t make that distinction. “It’s a stepwise shift in the amount of data, and we’re really excited about all the ways that data can be leveraged to tell more stories about the game and to engage and educate fans about what’s happening on the court,” NBA AVP/Stats Technology Product Development Charlie Rohlf said, adding that the empirical data will help unlock insights “that are so integral to basketball that are seemingly so simple. We’ve never been able to measure before things like, How close was that player to blocking that shot? Or how high did he jump on that incredible dunk or that incredible block?”

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.