We bring you insights, reflections and a range of tips from the Brisbane Lions, San Antonio Spurs, Melbourne Business School and beyond.
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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.
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.
Andrew McDonald, Head Coach, Australia men’s cricket team
Shelley Nitschke, Head Coach, Australia women’s cricket team
Next steps:
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.
Holly Ransom on the notion that we can’t sustain leadership, without leading ourselves first.
Next steps:
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.
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.
Professor Kit Wise, Dean, School of Art, RMIT
Budi Miller, Co-Artistic Director, Theatre of Others
Next steps:
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.
Mike Anthony, High Performance Development Manager, New Zealand Rugby Union
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
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.
Damien Austin, High Performance Manager, Brisbane Lions
Next steps:
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.
Jen Overbeck, Associate Dean, Melbourne Business School
Next steps:
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.
Emily Downes, General Manager – Wellbeing & Leadership, High Performance Sport New Zealand
Sonia Boland, National Wellbeing Manager, Australian Institute of Sport
Next steps:
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.
Helene Wilson, High Performance Sport New Zealand
Tarkyn Lockyer, Australian Football League
Next steps:
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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:
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As the league introduces Hawk-Eye as its new tracking technology, the level of granular detail available to officials is set to grow.
Main Image: Hawk-Eye
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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.
Hyperice Founder and President Anthony Katz brainstormed his products with a little help from some of the league’s most influential players.
Main image courtesy of Hyperice
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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.
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The man who helped save Steph Curry’s ankle explains that there are times when athletes can train their movement patterns in the name of performance.
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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:
John Portch Twitter | LinkedIn
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As part of a multiyear deal beginning in 2023-24, Hawk-Eye will provide the NBA with pose tracking data for the first time.
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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?”
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The human and AI-powered basketball analytics lab is able to provide an array of insights within 15 minutes of the final buzzer.
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Synergy, the human and AI-powered basketball analytics lab that was acquired by Sportradar two years ago, has evolved into such a coaching resource that every D1 men’s and women’s program subscribes to their scouting service just for the sheer nuance and volume of it all.
A breakdown of every possession from every college team all season? That’s available. What plays the team ran on each possession? Available. Who passed the ball to whom and then to whom and then to whom? Available. Who shot the ball and from where? Available. Don’t believe them? They’ll gladly verify it on their proprietary video. Synergy has 1,000 human data collectors… to go with an automated camera tracking system in 250 D1 arenas… to go with their own shot quality algorithms themselves.
They literally monitor 75,000 basketball games a year — from high school to DI to DII to DIII to the G-League to the EuroLeague to the NBA — and estimates it has 50 million tracked shots in its database since its inception in 2004. But when it came specifically to this year’s March Madness, Synergy has logged every game in real-time and then distributed a data-video report 15 minutes after every final buzzer.
Considering teams sometimes have just 30 hours to prepare for an NCAA Tournament opponent, Synergy will also conveniently diagram every opponent’s play calls and supply APIs for more expert level coaching staffs that have their own analytic departments for additional game-planning.
“I don’t have [any stories] for this year’s March Madness, but, [in 2012], we had a 15-seed, Norfolk State, beat a 2-seed, Missouri,” says Mark Silver, EVP, Sports Performance, Sportradar. “And immediately after that game, the [Norfolk State] coach called and thanked us for everything we did and said, ‘The only reason we won was the fact that we had the Synergy scouting report.’”
One of the company’s first coaching clients in 2006, in fact, was a then-relatively unknown Jim Larranaga of George Mason University — who leveraged the platform all the way to a shocking Final Four run that season. Now, Larranaga’s back in the Final Four with Miami and again with Synergy.
The product helps coaches on multiple levels, the first being game prep. Synergy will provide an opponents’ innate tendencies such as which direction a post player tends to spin to the basket — off of his right shoulder or left. Or if a player turns to the baseline from the right block 100% of the time or dribbles first 95% of the time.
Photo courtesy of Synergy
The info is so nuanced, Synergy can tell a coach if an opposing player, or his own player, is superior driving right or left or better shooting off the dribble or off- a-screen or better pulling up or finishing at the rim. There are stats and videotape to support it all. “Advanced scouting,” Silver says.
Another new activation is quantifying the role of every player in this year’s NCAA tournament. Through machine learning, Synergy’s software can determine the positional characteristics of any player, leaning on a database that contains every college player’s shot since 2014. For example, Synergy classified Miami’s 6-foot-7 Norchad Omier as a “Rim-Finishing Big”, Gonzaga’s 6-10 Drew Timme as a “Post-Up Big” and Alabama’s 6-9 Brandon Miller is a “Playmaking Wing.”
By using artificial intelligence to categorize every player, Synergy has perhaps become the technological centerpiece of the transfer portal. Coaches can search the company’s database for “Slashing Wings” or “Spot Up Shooting Wings” or “Scoring Ball Handlers” or “Stretch Bigs,” and the names come spitting out.
Photo courtesy of Synergy
“We undoubtedly play a huge role in the transformation of the transfer portal because you can go into our system,” Silver says. “And if you’re looking for a type of player or a player in a certain class, whether they’re playing in JUCO or D1 or D2 or D3 — or if you already know about the player — you can easily go and find every game that player has played. Since high school, most likely.
“Or if you just need to fill a spot, you can actually look and query the system to try to find a player that’s most fitting what you’re looking for. So recruiting, scouting, transfers: that’s one of the big ones for us.”
The Synergy Automated Camera system is another high-tech advantage, considering its camera vision tracks shot quality and team/player tendencies while also providing coach’s film and video confirmation. Hawk-Eye’s cameras handle that for the NBA. But when it comes to the college level, Synergy is more or less holding down the tracking landscape.
With all of these NCAA coaches bought in, the company has to try to stay neutral — which may be a little tricky at this weekend’s Final Four.
Especially when Larranaga starts winking at them.
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.
The Zone is designed to integrate with a team’s wellness initiatives to improve the access and options available to users.
The Zone’s platform is an innovative and proactive approach to student-athlete wellbeing. (Main image: The Zone)
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Those social repercussions persist, as do new pressures related to name, image and likeness (NIL) opportunities — and all the other stressors that come with being a college student and competing in a sport at a high level.
The Zone, a mental wellness app catered toward the specific demands of college athletes, has gained traction and today announced its largest deal yet, a multi-year, conference-wide deal with the Big East. The app will roll out slowly to start, with 100 student-athletes at Georgetown and Marquette onboarding this spring, before a similar number of app licenses will become available to all other Big East schools thereafter.
“Our student-athletes have reported some of the most significant challenges center around the pressures of being a Division I student-athlete and the need to make your life seem perfect on social media,” Big East Senior Associate Commissioner Katie Willett wrote in an email. “Additionally, student-athletes have struggled with the reintegration following Covid and successfully managing academics, athletics and community service.”
The Zone encourages users to complete regular check-ins in the app, answering questions about mood and academic and athletic updates in a gamified way. Through machine learning, the app offers advice, connections to on-campus resources, suggested activities like meditation and even the ability to book appointments with a counselor or therapist.
The Zone makes reaching out for mental health support easier for student athletes through the platform’s accessible and streamlined process (Image: The Zone)
“Performance anxiety is the biggest trigger we’ve seen over the last two years,” said The Zone Co-Founder/CEO Ivan Tchatchouwo, a former Division II basketball player whose own experiences with mental health challenges informed the founding of the app. “And it shows up in different ways. It’s not just performing on the court, right? It’s performing through the anxiety of being a first-generation college person on campus. Your parents pressure on you, or fans, friends and family. NIL pressure is causing performance anxiety because now it’s like, ‘I want to get paid just like a teammate.’
“Time management is another huge one that’s causing a lot of stress and anxiety for young people. And then also, lack of community. They’re in teams, but those two years have taken them away from knowing how to communicate correctly.”
Lehigh, Seton Hall University and St Francis-Brooklyn are all early adopters of The Zone; Memphis and Stony Brook previously used it as well. Former America East Commissioner Amy Huchthausen became such a strong supporter that she joined the company’s board of advisors. The Zone first connected with Big East leadership when hosting its fourth annual Student-Athlete Well-Being Forum at the University of Connecticut in June 2022.
Tchatchouwo says about 4,000 student-athletes are enrolled in the app, of which 2,800 remain active. Monthly participation is almost 25% whereas recent peer-reviewed research estimated that industry average for digital mental health apps is 3%.
“We spent the whole last year testing what works, what’s sticky, what doesn’t work. We’ve added a whole new content strategy,” Tchatchouwo said.
“That experience has to consistently be fresh for them, to want to go through it,” he added. “It also gets daunting to just see all the time, the same kind of inundating stuff. We’re getting creative on how we push that up. Machine learning is a big thing that we’re jumping bigger into and really understanding what it is that your data is saying. What is your storyline? What are your trends? And how do you the trends play out the life? And then what are the next steps for you?”
Tchatchouwo is quick to emphasize that The Zone is not a replacement to existing mental health services or professionals but rather a complement to or conduit for those options.
“The Zone is a state-of-the-art mental wellness platform that integrates perfectly into our institutions’ wellness programs,” Willett wrote. “It will make our services more effective by enabling a culture that prioritizes mental wellness, an important topic this day and age for our student-athletes. Our goals are to provide our student-athletes with a safe space and easily accessible resources to complement the amazing services being provided by our institutions when it comes to mental wellness.”
Other universities might try to buttress students by hiring additional psychologists to counsel student-athletes, but Tchatchouwo said that approach can suffer from inefficiency. Often the ratio of students-to-psychologists remains overwhelmingly high. Even then, the students need help discovering and accessing those resources. It’s important to have layers of defense, and The Zone seeks to drive awareness through content and to make specific referrals within the app to help maximize the use of what’s already available.
“You still need to educate the people that are on the forefront of what it looks like for their athletes,” Tchatchouwo said. “So we want to launch that education series for the coaches and the staff and administration, so they’re also educated, which makes the mental health investment even that much better.”
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.
