Michael Bourne explains how the LTA has built a national performance system by turning strategy into a shared pursuit across British tennis.
“I don’t know what makes people good at strategy,” he told an audience at Leaders Meet: The Art of Strategy, “but I love it.”
“Strategy is a dream with a road built to it and, when I think about strategy, I love the idea of making things possible that aren’t currently possible.”
Bourne is on hand at Lord’s Cricket Ground to discuss the LTA’s ten-year performance strategy, on which the national governing body embarked in 2018.
“I actually joined the LTA in 2020, so I’m telling you a story of how I received the strategy, how I sought to understand it in my team and also where we’ve taken it since that period.”
Michael Bourne, Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association, spoke first and set out the hard truths confronting British Tennis back in the mid-2010s. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
The ‘kernel’ of a good strategy
Bourne has been heavily influenced by Richard Rumelt’s 2011 book Good Strategy, Bad Strategy.
“It’s actually a book I walked past for years in the airport just thinking it was one of these random books that they sell at airports,” he said, “and actually, when I checked by own biases and decided to read the book, I found that it had some of the greatest insights into building a strategy that I’d found anywhere.”
The element of Rumelt’s work that resonated most with Bourne was the idea of a “kernel of a good strategy”. Bourne said: “you can have multiple strategies that will get you from where you are to where you want to get to, but I like the idea that there’s elements you have to master in order for your strategy to be successful. There’s an understanding of where you are at the time and the challenges you’re trying to overcome.”
The LTA arrived at their kernel in the three areas described by Rumelt:
Between November 2016 and February 2017, the LTA conducted a ‘current situation analysis’ of its performance pathway and performance coach development systems and how they stacked up against their foreign counterparts’.
The analysis did not make for pleasant reading. “In essence, we’re talking about a chronic undersupply of junior players and senior professional players,” said Bourne. There was no coherent pathway, no process for identifying and developing talent, and resources spread too thinly.
Yes, Great Britain could point to players such as three-time grand slam winner and double Olympic gold medallist Andy Murray, but the sense was that he came through despite – not because of – the system.
Participation numbers were down too. “It wasn’t a sport that everybody felt welcome to,” added Bourne. “It didn’t feel open and it didn’t feel inclusive.”
The LTA needed a unifying mission. “The performance strategy came from many of the same grounding points as the wider organisational strategy — a feeling like it needed to have more identity, it needed to be more open to people, it needed to find new ways of driving success for the sport.”
The LTA landed upon: ‘make Great Britain one of the most respected nations in the world for player development’.
“The first thing is ‘Great Britain’ – it doesn’t say ‘make the LTA the most respected NGB in the world for player development’. It’s an open scale; and how we think about implementing the strategy has to take into account it’s not just about us in blue jackets; it’s actually about the whole nation and how it’s perceived as a tennis nation.”
The second thing was ‘respect’. “When I inherited this strategy it was the one word I focused on because it was different to any of the strategies I’d worked on before.” In Bourne’s work at UK Sport and the England & Wales Cricket Board, strategies tended to focus on tangible outcomes such as medals and accolades. The sense at the LTA is that titles will follow when people understand the mission.
The LTA had created the space to devise their guiding principles.
Back in 2016, the LTA developed 11 guiding principles. They preceded the full diagnosis but provided the foundations and recommendations on which the LTA’s strategy could be built.
Bourne shared a screenshot of the first draft. The detailed document outlined the LTA’s intention to build a nationwide, integrated development system that identifies talent, creates the right experiences and reduces barriers to entry; but he explained that it had limited utility in and of itself.
“I have colleagues in the room,” said Bourne. “If you ask them if they’ve ever seen this page I suspect the answer would be no. This is not what gets lived. This is what the board use to sign-off on these things [but] we have to live this strategy on a daily basis.”
Bourne holds two beliefs in his approach to guiding policy. “Firstly, you try and make them as simple as possible. We have 64 people in our performance team; we have over 100 partner organisations delivering our strategy; and our senior players, of which we support 45, plus 50 in wheelchair tennis; each will have individual coaches, physios, S&C coaches, therapists etc. That’s a lot of people delivering the strategy on a daily basis. So simplification is important because that’s the message that sticks.”
The LTA alighted on the following:
Secondly, with all these different areas of activity (Bourne calls them “nested strategies”), he explained that one has to “understand that the programmes you put in place, the philosophies, the training camps, the trips, the competition structures are actually making an impact on what it takes to become an elite level tennis player or elite level wheelchair tennis player.”
He added: “we should be able to draw a line from all these activities that we’re doing in our guiding policy back to developing [the required] skills in players over an extended period.
“That takes us to coherent actions.”
Bourne freely admits he loves strategising but, as he said, “strategies don’t deliver outcomes – that’s the reality.”
He continued: “I’ve talked about a strategy that was written in 2018. So the idea of that being accurate to what we have to do today, well, a realism needs to be brought to that. The critical factor in those clear and coherent actions is if you still believe in your basic principles, you’ve got to have rapid review cycles that can tell you what you need to do today against the mission and the vision that we’ve set ourselves.”
These reviews are tracked on a dashboard, which contains 56 metrics that enable the LTA to link their strategy to “the bigger picture, to what everybody’s doing.”
There are still two years left in their strategy and Bourne’s work is not finished. “Our diagnosis is about right; we’ve probably got in place the right guiding policy; we just need to make sure that on a daily basis we’ve never ignored coherent actions to help us move towards that point.”
What to read next
How to Build, Stress-Test, and Execute an Effective Performance Strategy
SwingVision’s app is ideal for tennis players who all rely on speed, being able to manage costs, and often operate with limited connectivity on the courts of the world.
Main Image: SwingVision
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.
We bring you five factors to consider as discussed at Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy this year by guests including Michael Bourne of the Lawn Tennis Association, Olympic gold medallist Tabby Stoecker and the UK Ministry of Defence’s Aneaka Reay-Kemp.
Main Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
“In order to build the right bridge, you need to understand those two things.”
Bourne, the Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA], was the first to speak at Leaders Meet: the Art of Strategy, which took place at Lord’s Cricket Ground in London in late March.
Members of the Leaders Performance Institute travelled from far and wide for a day that challenged assumptions and provoked some of the sharpest minds in the sports industry to rethink how strategies emerge in high-performance environments.
Bourne was joined on the bill by Milano Cortina mixed skeleton gold medallist, Tabby Stoecker, and speakers from organisations including the Football Association, luxury retailer Selfridges, and the UK Ministry of Defence. Together, they explored how strategies are built, stress-tested and executed by the best in the business.
Below is a snapshot of the day’s proceedings; five fresh insights to help strengthen your own planning and execution.
1. A strategy starts with a brutally honest discussion
Bourne joined the LTA in 2018, when they were two years into their ten-year performance strategy designed to tackle the lack of players coming through the British tennis system.
Yes, Andy Murray had won three majors in recent memory, but the sense was that this was “despite the system, not because of it”.
“In essence, between 2016 and 2017, the organisation undertook a diagnosis of the situation,” said Bourne, “and they came up with a number of different issues”.
This diagnosis, which included a lack of coherent pathways, limited programmes for talent ID, and resources spread too thinly, enabled the LTA to have a long, hard look at itself without pointing fingers at individuals. It lowered stakeholder defensiveness and provided the foundations for what they needed to do next.
Bourne was not present for the diagnosis, but he was recruited shortly after to ensure the LTA adopted the right approach and a coordinated set of actions. But they could not jump ahead. As he said:
I believe that you have to have that first element of the diagnosis and your guiding policy right first.
Michael Bourne, Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association, spoke first and set out the hard truths confronting British Tennis back in the mid-2010s. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
2. Your strategy must be co-created
At luxury retailer Selfridges, Head of DEI, Recruitment & Onboarding, Sharlene John, faced the challenge of trying to tie her work to commercial outcomes while challenging the idea that DEI is “fluffy” and irrelevant.
The result was Selfridges’ award-winning DEI and culture strategy Open to the World. On John’s watch (she joined Selfridges in 2021), female leadership within the organisation has grown from 32% to almost 70%; Selfridges is also an industry leader in ethnic representation.
Open to the World flourished because of John’s efforts to ensure it was a co-created initiative from the start. She said:
Before we even put pen to paper, it was going out and speaking to my teams, but also my leaders, to understand what does DEI or culture mean to you? And where there was that missing voice, it was bringing people into the room. So not just relying on those senior leaders where we don’t have representation, it was ‘OK, we’ll go down a layer’… I was talking to people across our business with a headcount of around three and a half thousand… We’ve got stores in Manchester, Birmingham, a tech suite in Leicester, and then the flagship in London. I went to every site speaking to people from grade 2, which is our junior role, up to our grade 7, which is exec positions, to understand what Open to the World actually means to them.
Sharlene John, the Head of DEI, Recruitment & Onboarding at Selfridges, describes her organisation’s award-winning Open to the World inclusion programme, which was built by a plurality of stakeholders. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
3. Evaluation (and re-evaluation) is continuous
“If you don’t get it right when you’re there in the moment, doing a review process at the end is worthless.”
So said Paul Ford, the former Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association [BOA] who recently joined English Championship side Norwich City as Performance Director. He spoke alongside Tabby Stoecker, the mixed team skeleton gold medallist at the Milano Cortina Games alongside her teammate Matt Weston.
When it comes to in-the-moment tweaks, Ford has a point. The BOA must work with national governing bodies, coaches and athletes continuously throughout a four-year cycle. “It’s making sure that we are doing it hand in hand with our sports as frequently as possible,” Ford added.
A macro ‘plan-do-review’ alone is not adequate. Of competition time itself, he said:
It’s on a daily cycle during delivery mode at a Games. [We ask] what are you planning for this day? What are we doing this day? How has this day gone? Because if you don’t make the most of that experience in the moment, it’s not going to happen for another four years.
Stoecker benefited from this approach, as demonstrated by her success. She said:
There wasn’t just the review of that specific race, but also ‘what are you taking from this that you’re going to change or carry forward for three years’ time, two years’ time, six months’ time?’… you can get quite swept up in what you’re doing and you have these extreme highs and lows. So I think staying focused, and when you’re then doing that and being so process-driven, the results just come.
British Olympic gold medallist Tabby Stoecker is deep in conversation with Paul Ford, the former Head of Sport at the British Olympic Association, as they discuss Team GB’s strategic approach to Olympic cycles and, more specifically, Stoecker’s path to gold in the mixed skeleton at the Milano Cortina Games. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
4. Be ready to act on incomplete information
You and your team may enjoy clarity and alignment of purpose, but optimal operating conditions are likely to be elusive whatever your efforts.
With this in mind, Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence, told the audience how British military operations are primed to perform when personnel do not have even 60% of the desired information. They are trained, as she said, to be “comfortable being uncomfortable”.
Rank, she argued, has limited bearing. In fact, the British military has taken steps to reduce the influence of its own hierarchies in moments of uncertainty. She said:
It doesn’t matter what’s on that person’s chest, it doesn’t matter their background, they still bring value no matter how junior they are. So for me, I find that when you’re operating in an environment where you don’t have all the information, understanding your people, understanding their capability, what they bring to the party can help save someone’s life.
Aneaka Reay-Kemp, the Lead Military Intelligence Specialist at the UK Ministry of Defence (centre), in conversation with moderator Iain Brunnschweiler (left) and Football Association Head of Strategic Development & Operations, Paul Cleal (right) as she explained what it takes for military personnel to act with incomplete information. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
5. What are you ready to discard?
New initiatives, new processes and new ways of thinking are great, but what are you prepared to discard?
“One of the things about strategy is making choices,” says Paul Cleal, who spoke alongside Reay-Kemp in his capacity as Head of Strategic Development & Operations at the Football Association. “If you’re trying to change something, it almost always involves stopping doing something else.”
However, as he has experienced, this is often easier said than done. “If things involve stopping doing something for the new thing you need, a lot of organisations struggle with that.”
Evidence, he explained, is critical in making those choices:
When I walked in three years ago, my job was not to throw things in the bin and do them differently. It was to ask: is what we’re doing now meeting the strategic aims and to what extent do we need to get closer to our strategic aims and what is it we can change?
Paul Cleal, the Head of Strategic Development & Operations at the Football Association, explains why it’s important to discard programmes and processes when they no longer serve the collective. Image: Robert Obreja / Leaders Performance Institute
See you at the Sport Performance Summit in New York?
The former US tennis star made the unconventional move of moving into venture capitalism.
Main Photo: Getty Images
At age 15, she was the No. 1 junior tennis player in the world. By four months after her 18th birthday, she’d climbed as high as 35 in the WTA rankings and reached two (of an eventual three) Grand Slam singles third rounds.
But after injuries forced her to retire in 2021, Bellis is now showing similar precociousness in a new endeavor — venture capital.
In mid-2023, Bellis launched an eponymous sports technology investment firm called Cartan Capital (her full name is Catherine Cartan). It has raised two funds — the first a $10 million pledge fund sourced from 15 investors, the second a larger fund that is nearly closed and deploying capital — and made eight investments.
“I grew up in Silicon Valley, so I felt like I was around venture from a young age,” said Bellis, 26, and an Atherton, California, native. “I grew up solely focused on tennis. … But school was always a big part of my life and something that my parents instilled in me — how important education is — from a young age. … I knew that I wanted to always have a backup plan.”
Catherine Bellis took the first set from Victoria Azarenka at Wimbledon in 2017. (Photo by Lindsey Parnaby/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Bellis initially committed to Stanford, her dream school, but after cracking the WTA top 100 as a teenager, decided to go all-in on tennis. While playing, she pursued an undergraduate degree in business administration from Indiana University through a scholarship program facilitated by the WTA — eventually giving the commencement address for her graduating class in 2022 — then got her MBA at the University of Miami.
Her first professional break came through an internship with Orlando-based Tavistock Development Co., which she parlayed into another internship — and eventual promotion to investment analyst — with leAD Sports & Health Tech Partners.
Longtime venture investor Martin Mann, now a Cartan Capital partner and the largest backer of the firm’s first fund, met Bellis through his work on the board of the USTA Foundation, but remembers being “over-the-top impressed” by her straight-shooting answers to due diligence questions after she brought him in to meet with leAD during her time there.
“When she left to start Cartan, she called me and asked me if I would be an adviser. I thought it was a little shocking that she was jumping off after only a few years in venture capital,” Mann said. “But there are some people — and they are few and far between that I’ve seen — that are just more extraordinary than humans should be.”
Cartan Capital focuses primarily on participating in Series A or later-stage seed rounds, led by other firms, across sports, technology, health and wellness. Its portfolio consists of several startups that have made waves through partnerships with major leagues and media properties, including audio innovation company Edge Sound Research, AI-powered musculature analysis platform Springbok Analytics, interactive hologram maker Proto Hologram and TGL creator TMRW Sports.
Bellis’ reputation with her portfolio companies is that of an attentive, hands-on and well-sourced partner adept at facilitating connections — whether in business development or hiring — and providing an athlete’s perspective.
“She has a determination to support all their portfolio companies,” said Edge Sound Research CEO Valtteri Salomaki. “That’s rare with a smaller fund like hers, because usually — I mean, X amount of resources, X amount of time. … For her to not only source and understand companies, but then also from there be able to support those companies, her personality is clearly [that] she cares.”
CiCi Bellis, center, attends the Break The Love and Tory Sport private celebration in honor of Women’s History Month and The Miami Open in March 2022. Also pictured (L-r): Trisha Goyal, Marissa E. Hill, Taylor Townsend, Jessica Pegula, Christina McHale and Bethanie Mattek-Sands. (Photo by Desiree Navarro/Getty Images)
Bellis also began a two-year term as a director-at-large (elite athlete) on the USTA’s board this year, where, as has become custom, she is the youngest in the room. She has distinguished herself there by serving on several committees, including the USTA Investment Committee, USTA Ventures Committee and two athlete committees.
Bill McGugin, USTA Ventures chairman and fellow board member, said Bellis has made a particular impact in deal sourcing and analysis for the organization’s venture arm, which has made three investments since launching two years ago.
“Though she’s relatively young, you feel like you’re talking to someone that’s been in the profession for 20 years,” McGugin said of Bellis. “Her awareness of the market, her awareness of financial structuring, her connections to other investment firms and opportunities. … [Working with her has] been very positive.”
Bellis said the discipline she developed as an athlete has aided her transition to her next phase.
“My work ethic and dedication that I brought from my day-in, day-out tennis career and all the hours that it takes to be a pro athlete — I was able to catch on really quickly based on the work that I did outside of work, making sure I was up to speed on everything going on and learning about venture,” she said. “Just being scrappy.”
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 one clear theme across most sports is that human officials should be supplemented, not replaced, by AI.
Main Photo: Getty Images
There were also 20 4K optical tracking cameras triangulating motion from the players and ball. A few infrared cameras operated lightly in the background. The NBA is building a new R&D lab at the G League home of the Salt Lake City Stars. The lab will feature multiple tracking systems, connected basketballs and more to test a variety of on-court technology “with the top priority being officiating,” said NBA Senior Vice President Tom Ryan.
The NBA has created an automated officiating group within its Basketball Strategy & Growth Department, hiring data scientists and engineers — led by Avinash Bhaskaran, previously of Nvidia and autonomous vehicle company Cruise — to create a new, league-operated technology stack. Its three main purposes are to improve call accuracy and consistency, hasten game flow and enhance transparency and consumer confidence.
“You’re trying to trade off speed versus accuracy versus entertainment.”
Rufus Hack, CEO of Sony’s sports businesses
A recurring refrain from the more than two dozen insiders across sports that Sports Business Journal spoke to was that human officials, referees and umpires are far better at their jobs than fans will ever give them credit for, and few are seeking full automation of officiating; just supplementary aids. But they also have an inherent limitation of using only two eyes from one viewpoint, tracking projectiles that can travel in excess of 100 mph.
“At some point,” said SMT CEO Gerard J Hall, “that technology is more accurate than any human could ever pretend it to be.”
The presence of instant replay is ubiquitous in modern sports, but there’s a newfound emphasis on using technology not to review decisions, but to automate binary calls: ball or strike, in or out, offside or not? Tennis pioneered this practice with its adoption of Hawk-Eye Innovations’ cameras for line calls, first as a challenge system 20 years ago and now often used on every shot.
Automated officiating in baseball and other sports can help bring more accuracy and quicker decisions to games. But there are downsides to removing the human element from decisions. (Photo: Getty Images)
In recent years, that idea has spread downstream — junior tennis tournaments might have an iPhone or two mounted atop chain-link fences to call lines using an app called SwingVision — as well as to other sports. Every NFL stadium now has six Sony-owned, 8K Hawk-Eye cameras to virtually measure first downs and supplant the iconic, but archaic, chain gangs.
The Premier League adopted semi-automated offside technology last spring. MLB is likely to add a new challenge system for calling balls and strikes in 2026. The NHL, X Games, NASCAR and international gymnastics have all begun using or researching automated officiating principles as well.
How, why and even whether to implement such tech is thorny. Sports is approaching a tipping point where it reckons with how much of the human element to preserve, how much technology to deploy and the right balance of the two, putting human and machine in the best positions to succeed.
“All sports are wrestling with the right way to weave technology into the officiating of the game and to get as many calls right without making the game less entertaining and ruining the game’s rhythm and emotion and humanity,” said Morgan Sword, MLB’s Executive Vice president of Baseball Operations. “And it’s tricky. Each of these decisions is fraught with conflicts.”
Protestors decried Wimbledon’s move to fully electronic line calls. (Photo: Getty Images)
Hawk-Eye is not only the trailblazer but also the primary provider of these technologies, with its cameras and algorithms able to track balls within one-fifth of an inch. Rufus Hack, the CEO of Sony’s sports businesses, shares a basic rubric for considering officiating tech.
“You’re trying to trade off speed versus accuracy versus entertainment,” Hack said.
The interplay of those three priorities varies by sport and league. He noted, for example, that accuracy is particularly paramount in short-duration tournaments, such as the FIFA World Cup, but perhaps less critical in the early throes of, say, a 162-game baseball season.
The dynamics and culture of a sport need to be considered and rigorously tested, Hack said. “Its implementation needs to be handled incredibly sensitively, and it needs to be empathetic to the values of the game because obviously people are incredibly passionate about their sport.”
The rigidity of technology’s calls also begs the philosophical question: What actually should be called? Is strict adherence to the rules always best or should there be some contextual subjectivity, such as when a police officer has the discretion to decide how tightly to enforce a speed limit?
The goal — and it’s a hard one — is not to let technology change the framework of a sport. As former NFL officiating boss Dean Blandino, who now holds that position with the UFL, said, “It’s just creating that right balance between ‘let’s get it right in those big moments’ but ‘let’s not distort how we do things for the majority of the game.’”
In the multitrillion-dollar asset class of sports, with athletes earning nine-figure salaries to play games with billions at stake in bets and broadcasts, the integrity of the competition has never been more closely scrutinized.
“The stakes are just too high not to try to solve this.”
Jeremy Bloom, X Games
As X Games CEO Jeremy Bloom, a two-time Olympic skier and NFL kick returner, described the gravity from his own playing days, “It didn’t feel like a medal was on the line. It felt like my life was on the line.” He’s now also Founder and Executive Chairman of Owl AI, an officiating tech spinoff run by the former head of AI at Google.
“The stakes,” Bloom said, “are just too high not to try to solve this.”
Here’s how leagues and tech companies are developing solutions that balance accuracy, speed, entertainment and the futures of their sports.
Accuracy
Paul Hawkins is an enthusiastic sportsman who earned a PhD in artificial intelligence in 1999 before developing a computer vision tracking system as a broadcast enhancement for cricket and tennis. Within a few years of it populating TV screens, the sports world started noticing the disconnect between what officials called and what the technology showed.
A 2004 US Open quarterfinal match in which four clearly incorrect calls went against Serena Williams in her loss to Jennifer Capriati ignited interest in a better system; Hawk-Eye was in use by the USA Network for the match.
Tennis was the first sport to embrace automated officiating. (Photo: Getty Images)
“It became more and more apparent that the umpire essentially had the worst view out of everyone,” Hawkins recalled.
Hawk-Eye was used as an officiating tool for the first time a year later and, by 2006, was adopted at the US Open. At the outset of its first Grand Slam, USTA Tournament Director Jim Curley approached Hawkins and told him, “If I don’t see you over the next two weeks, you’ve done a great job.”
“You either can deliver what you’ve promised and worked very hard to do, or it can go horribly wrong,” Hawkins said.
“You can forgive or you can understand the human making a mistake and you can get over it,” he added, “but if a computer makes a mistake, that’s then suddenly a bigger controversy.”
Early adoption followed as a reactive step in response to a controversy — Williams’ Open loss in tennis, a disallowed Frank Lampard goal for England in the 2010 World Cup for soccer — but now leagues are making large investments even for incremental upgrades. The collective-bargaining agreement between MLB and its umpires signed in December 2024 codifies the league’s right to implement ABS.
“The real goal for us has always been in the high-leverage situations when it really matters, to have an outlet where you can get a bad call corrected.”
Rob Manfred, MLB Commissioner
Challenges in MLB spring training this year were overturned 52.2% of the time, up slightly from 50.6% during Class AAA games in 2024. With roughly four challenges per game, that translates to two overturned pitches. That might not seem like much, unless one of those calls is in the ninth inning of a tied game.
“We accepted, when we first went to the instant replay system, that you’re not going to get every call right — that’s an aspiration no matter how much you do,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said. “The real goal for us has always been in the high-leverage situations when it really matters, to have an outlet where you can get a bad call corrected.”
ABS can input any strike zone shape, but finding consensus on what that shape should be is trickier than expected for such a fundamental part of the game. The rulebook defines a 3D shape over home plate. The plane facing the pitcher is a rectangle, but what it’s actually called is an oval. What ABS is programmed to call isn’t the same as either.
“Those are three different zones,” Sword said, acknowledging that “the zone that we actually call is dynamic and a little bit different for each umpire, a little bit different depending on the count, a little bit different depending on the pitch type. One of the challenges that has consumed a lot of time with testing ABS has been finding a static zone that will be the same for all pitches that best replicates what’s now a living, breathing thing.”
For now, ABS will adhere to the rectangle outlined in the rulebook but only call it as a flat zone at the plate’s midpoint, specific to each player’s height.
And automation calls it without bias, no matter the sport or stakes.
“You get the consistency because the AI doesn’t care who the player is, it doesn’t care if the fans are going to get upset, it doesn’t care what the money line is on the game,” Owl AI CEO Josh Gwyther said.
Speed
Goal celebrations in soccer are notoriously elaborate affairs, rituals that engage the fans and provide a natural break in the action. For officials, it’s a chance to review whether the goal should be allowed.
Those celebrations last 54 seconds, on average, according to Genius Chief Product Officer Matt Fleckenstein. “If you can actually get to a decision on whether or not someone was offside on a goal before the celebration has completed and they’re lining back, you’ve now not interrupted the fan experience.”
Expediency often helps retain viewers’ interest. “It is conceivable that a really, really hard, really, really clutch close call could be compelling for two minutes of time, but where it gets bad is when you get something that feels pretty routine, and that takes a long time,” said Phil Orlins, ESPN Vice President of Production, Technology and Innovation. “There is a shelf life on how long it feels tolerable before it becomes tedious.”
There’s a clear direction of travel, according to Bill Squadron, an Elon assistant professor of sports management. He previously led Sportvision, which created the first-and-10 yellow line in football and the K-Zone for baseball.
“Technology is now being applied to this element of the game,” he said. “It’s just being done often in clunky ways, with replays and challenges that slow down the pace and take forever.”
FIFA first used goal-line technology at the 2014 men’s World Cup, VAR at the 2018 tournament and SAOT for the 2022 edition. Enhanced SAOT, which is mostly automated, debuted at the FIFA Club World Cup. (A recent FIFA project developed AI that correctly identified 82.5% of last-touch-out-of-bounds calls, a promising start that still needs considerable refinement.)
“We are implementing technology on the field of play not to remove people, but simply to support people,” said Pierluigi Collina, Chairman of the FIFA referees committee, noting rule interpretations “are not given to artificial intelligence.”
“If we can turn a 60-second review into three seconds, and it’s automatically visualized on the broadcast and in an arena, even better.”
Tom Ryan, NBA senior vice president
The Korean Baseball Organization added full ABS for the 2024 season in part to expedite pace of play, and MLB is mindful of not giving back its dramatic gains from the pitch clock. MLB’s ABS saw an average of 13.8 seconds per challenge during 2025 spring training trials.
The NFL’s switch to a virtual first-down measurement system is said to reduce measurement time from 75 seconds for the human-carried chains to 30 seconds for the technology. The league measures about 12 times per week — fewer than once per game — but it adds up to nine minutes of weekly savings.
“Even though there’s a limited number of the virtual measurements, we are planning for what the future could potentially be,” said Kimberly Fields, NFL Senior Vice President of Football Business and Innovation Strategy, adding that the league is “lots of steps” away from using tech to spot the football. (The UFL is investigating a hybrid solution: Bolt6 tracking cameras and Sportable ball sensors; spotting the ball remains the “holy grail of problems to solve in sports tech,” Bolt6 Chief Commercial Officer James Japhet said.)
The NBA is mindful of its end-of-game pace when the strategic benefit of fouls already slows the last two minutes of a game to about seven minutes of real time. Deliberations over which of the 100 extra-long fingers last grazed a basketball heading out of bounds are tricky.
That’s why the league piloted SportIQ to see if its ball sensor might help automate those decisions. Summer League trials were “very successful,” Ryan said, and will continue in the G League.
Game flow is “very much top of mind for everyone at the league office,” Ryan said. “If we can turn a 60-second review into three seconds, and it’s automatically visualized on the broadcast and in an arena, even better.”
Entertainment
The first public demonstration of ABS took place at the 2019 Atlantic League All-Star Game. The proceedings were remarkably unremarkable. The so-called robot umpire only made one visibly jarring call — a low third strike. The hitter started to argue, only for the umpire to point to his right ear-worn AirPod, signaling it was an ABS call, not his, thereby deflating the player’s budding fury.
“I would love to see John McEnroe play with the machines,” retired tennis star Maria Sharapova recently quipped at a Bloomberg event. “He’d still find a cause for argument.”
Such argumentative theatrics are entertaining to some, but disrespectful to others. And they get trumped by what really matters.
“We are in the storytelling and drama business,” ESPN’s Orlins said. “Historically, there are elements of debate and argument over calls that are interesting, but at its core, I think the fans demand the best possible accuracy and, from a broadcast standpoint, we want transparency for the viewers as best we can. We want speed and precision.”
“I would love to see John McEnroe play with the machines. He’d still find a cause for argument.”
Maria Sharapova, retired tennis star
Technology, meanwhile, can generate a different kind of engaging presentation. Tennis fans clap in unison at the sight of a replay, cheering or booing the result. What’s shown on the video board is a conclusive 3D recreation of the ball’s landing. Hawkins explained that a tennis ball can skid along the ground for 8-to-10 centimeters, which is why the animation shows an oval, not a circle. Any single video frame will inherently be incomplete, and it’s the triangulation among several cameras that compounds the accuracy.
“It is very difficult to get video that is definitive,” Hawkins said. “The computer has made the decision, and any presentation is just there to sell the decision the computers made.”
The NBA created a similar graphic for goaltending, which is decided by a series of three discrete events — whether the ball is descending, whether it is over the rim and whether it has touched the backboard — that can be visualized.
Engendering fan support requires some transparency in the process. “You don’t want a black box,” SMT’s Hall said. ”You want to make sure it’s formulaic and it’s algorithmic, and it’s repeatable and explainable as to why this outcome was arrived at.”
The NFL replaced the chain gang with virtual first-down measurements this year, saving time during the game. (Photo: Getty Images)
One of the models underpinning Owl AI’s officiating provides a written explanation for its scoring. An evaluation of snowboarder Yuto Totsuka on the halfpipe mentioned his rotations and vertical height, while also describing his “DARING and powerful approach, all while being exceptionally SMOOTH.”
“The really tricky part was teaching the model what good style was,” Bloom said. “There’s a lot of inputs, of course, but the predominant one is what we describe as good economy of motion.”
While artistic merit would seem subjective, Owl deconstructs components of each trick. That piecemeal approach helps the AI conjure a score even for brand-new tricks — complete with a script saying why.
“We can take the collective input of the actual athletes,” Gwyther noted. “So it’s almost like they’re being judged by their peers versus an individual that has a specific thought process.”
As Hawk-Eye first proliferated sports and met with officials, Hawkins recalled those as “fairly frosty initial meetings” that felt “very much ‘us versus them.’” In time, the contentious dynamic faded, and recently he said, “I think they do see us as all a part of the same team.”
Officials’ early fear of being shown up by technology has, in many cases, evolved into appreciation for the cover. Getting overturned can spare them public criticism.
“One of their biggest problems is the pipeline of referees,” Bloom said. “The people who want to be refs, these guys are getting death threats because there’s so much money in sports betting. Their families are getting harassed.”
Recruitment and retention of officials is already difficult. The National Federation of High Schools has described the shortage as having reached a “crisis level.” When Wimbledon eliminated its line judges, one researcher wondered if it might disincentivize those seeking to reach a Grand Slam.
“That’s no longer an option for those line judges,” said Tom Webb, a Coventry University associate professor and the founder of the Referee and Sports Official Research Network. “What does that mean in terms of enticing people into the sport, in terms of performance and development below that level?”
Technology is typically more aid than replacement. Removing objective calls from the workload of referees could help them focus more on subjective decisions.
While most hockey penalties are judgment calls, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said there’s a place for tech: “Something like offsides and high sticking, in terms of where the puck was touched — those are things that we may be able to do better with using, not just the Apple Watch or the Hawk-Eye system, but even using artificial intelligence in terms of recreating situations.”
Players are not permitted to lift their sticks above an opponent’s shoulder to strike the puck to a teammate. Tracking cameras can assess stick height, so the on-ice official only needs to see who gains possession.
Owl AI’s officiating models create commentary about the action, enabling rare transparency in sports judged by scoring. (Photo courtesy of Owl AI)
“You only have one decision to make instead of two,” said Stephen Walkom, NHL Executive Vice President of Officiating, earlier this year. “Anything that is seamless and serves the game is always best.”
While an enterprise system like Hawk-Eye’s can cost nearly $100,000 for a single tennis court, some products are leaner and more easily democratized. Owl AI runs entirely as a software layer applied to video. It used a single camera for the X Games halfpipe, with the algorithms correctly predicting first, second and third place.
The same concept could be applied to other judged sports. “The goal would be that you get that certified by an Olympic committee, and now all these nonprofessional events — like your kids’ gymnastics — can now have a professional judge behind just a webcam,” Gwyther said.
Tennis is rife with line-call issues at the lower levels, with “hooking” — i.e. deliberate cheating — so rampant it has been cited as the No. 1 reason young players quit. Now, systems such as PlaySight and the USTA-backed PlayReplay are providing results with light installations, while SwingVision operates using only iPhones.
Paul Hawkins, shown at the Australian Open in 2005, founded Hawk-Eye, a camera tracking tech provider for the MLB, NBA, NFL, NHL, FIFA and tennis. (Photo: Getty Images)
SwingVision, financially backed by Tennis Australia, started calling lines at five USTA junior tournaments last summer. “There was one parent we talked to, and he said, ‘This is the first tournament where I was talking to the opponent’s parent, and we were just talking about life and we weren’t arguing about anything,’” CEO Swupnil Sahai said. “He was shocked. He’s like, ‘This is so transformational.’”
By and large, Squadron said, the reluctance to embrace more technology is less about its accuracy and more about people’s attachment to tradition.
“The human element is about the athletes, the unpredictability, the excitement about whether somebody can perform in an incredible, pressured situation,” he said. “Those unexpected errors that are so devastating — that is [part of] sports. The fact that an official doing his or her best misses a call and costs a team that’s trained, worked, performed for a championship? To me, that’s not part of the game.”
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
The International Tennis Integrity Agency’s launch of its new secure messaging service has a range of anti-doping benefits for athletes such as Jannik Sinner and Iga Świątek.
Main Photo: Getty Images
Branded “The Line,” the service will allow players to send anonymous messages — ranging from questions about permissible medications to reporting concerns about potential rule breaches by other players — directly to ITIA officials on WhatsApp. It was developed in partnership with anonymous communication platform RealResponse, whose encryption services are used by pro sports properties including NASCAR, the Kansas City Chiefs and IC360.
“The key bit for us is making it as easy as possible for players and agents and coaches to contact us,” ITIA CEO Karen Moorhouse told SBJ. “They’re people who are on the road, they’re traveling internationally. They don’t want to be looking up an email address or finding a telephone number to call. WhatsApp is where they’re at.”
Previously, the ITIA primarily fielded integrity-related questions and concerns through web forms, email or phone calls. “There was an extra layer that was slightly more cumbersome,” Moorhouse said. “The challenge we set ourselves was, ‘How do we make it as simple as possible for a player to get in touch with us and get the information they need?’”
She added that the recent, high-profile suspensions of Jannik Sinner and Iga Swiatek for anti-doping violations the ITIA found to be unintentional underscored the importance of having a better communication system in place.
“Those cases really shone a spotlight on the tennis anti-doping program, how it’s possible to inadvertently breach the anti-doping rules, and led to a lot of conversations across tennis that perhaps hadn’t previously happened,” Moorhouse said. “It got players really thinking about what steps they needed to take to mitigate their own risk of potentially testing positive for a banned substance — and then, linked to that, the importance of them getting the right information and the right education. Absolutely, some of the things that flowed from those cases strengthened and highlighted the importance of us having a system like this.”
RealResponse CEO David Chadwick said his company’s system enables users to communicate through “commonly used channels” like WhatsApp, while ITIA officials will field messages through an administrative portal. Players will be able to choose whether to enter anonymous or non-anonymous communication channels within WhatsApp depending on the nature of their inquiry (if the latter is chosen, their contact info will be shared with the ITIA on the back end).
“It makes it easier for people to be able to communicate and break down barriers in a system they trust and are familiar with,” Chadwick said. “But secondly, it allows for two-way communication.
“Through our system, the ITIA will be able to respond back to the person to ask further questions, clarify things, gather evidence, point to resources — all the while that person remains anonymous [if they choose]. They’re not having to download an app, they’re not having to call a hotline, fill out a web form, it’s as simple as them sending something via WhatsApp.”
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.
For the first time, all players will access to their data and video within 40 minutes of finishing their match.
Main image: ATP Tour
The tour treats the Next Gen Finals as an experimental ground for innovation, whether that be in competition format or technology. At the last edition that meant expanding access to filterable snippets of points within matches, which can be sorted by factors such as point result; shot type, direction or spin; and score, among others.
Metrics such as Shot Quality, developed by ATP partner TennisViz, are accessible within Tennis IQ in real-time to coaches sitting courtside, and supplementary video is typically available within 40 minutes of matches ending.
“What we’ve looked to do is offer the players an enhanced version of Tennis IQ across those two events (the ATP Finals and ATP Next Gen Finals), which actually is a bit of a glimpse into what we expect the future of Tennis IQ to be,” said ATP Director/ATP Events Adam Hogg. “It’s something that’s not currently available for the players on a week-by-week basis through the Tennis IQ platform, but ultimately something that we as the Tour at our own events wanted to offer as a premium service.”
The ATP is planning to roll out the video feature, along with biometric data derived from approved wearable devices, within Tennis IQ for its full schedule of events sometime in 2025, likely between Q1 and Q2. Tennis IQ launched as a match data platform last September.
To derive the metrics available within that platform, TennisViz applies custom-built machine learning algorithms to ball and player-tracking data provided by the ATP and ATP Media’s joint venture, Tennis Data Innovations (through the tour’s work with vendors like Hawk-Eye). TennisViz has collected data from more than 7 million shots dating back to 2004 and identified more than 60 different shot types, according to Head of Performance/Media and Broadcast Tom Corrie, with a shot’s quality determined by an assessment of ball characteristics, including speed, spin, bounce angle, and a shot’s depth and width on the court.
Relative to that process, the video feature is simple.
“What’s advanced is creating the Steal Score or the Shot Quality,” Corrie said, referencing two of the metrics TennisViz has developed. “We’re just attaching a time-stamping process to the [match] video, which we’ve developed the technology to do.”
TennisViz has a similar partnership with Wimbledon that encompasses video-tagging and has also worked with the USTA’s player development department. Corrie said the company is half-staffed by former coaches and half-staffed by engineers and developers, giving them a unique lens on the sport.
“Our vision was, ‘tennis data is dated,’” Corrie said. “All the other sports, particularly American sports, have moved on massively in the last 10 years in terms of different analytics and different fan-facing metrics. Tennis is still using ‘break points won’ as the number one determination of winning.
“This platform (Tennis IQ) rivals any platform in any other sports now, in terms of the fact that is’ live data. If you take the number of matches, the 24-hour nature of tennis, all those things – it’s now as good as any platform in any sport… We’re (tennis) now not behind. But we were.”
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.
SportAI’s system can be used in conjunction with phone or camera footage to generate overlays that chart swing curves in tennis.
A Data & Innovation article brought to you by
Through the agreement, SportAI’s offerings will be available on the MATCHi TV streaming service, which is underpinned by cameras installed at 2,000 of MATCHi’s tennis and padel courts. The integration lets players access highlights and technical analyses of match footage on their phones. In all, MATCHi has a network of more than 1M users across 2,600 venues and 14,000 courts in 30 countries.
Financial and duration terms were not disclosed.
Oslo-based SportAI was co-founded by Lauren Pedersen, a New Zealand native who is combining passions for sport and technology to democratize access to swing technique analysis – first in racquet sports but with the aim to eventually expand into the likes of cricket, baseball and beyond.
Image: SportAI
“Technique coaching, specifically, is still very subjective and expensive and unscalable,” Pedersen told SBJ in a recent interview at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, where she spent time during the U.S. Open pitching prospective clients. “If you have a tennis lesson pretty much anywhere, it’s easily going to cost $100 – and you might have a good coach, but if you had three or four good coaches looking at your technique, they would all say something different, and there would be no data to back up what they’re saying.”
SportAI’s system is hardware agnostic; its algorithms can be applied to phone or camera footage and generate overlays that chart swing curves (and compare those curves to professionals), ball strike timing and other statistics like hip or shoulder rotation and swing velocity. The system also provides textual feedback, which as of now is pulled from a matrix of preset options but could in the future tap into a large language model, Pedersen said.
Here, Pedersen demonstrates the technology analyzing her one-handed backhand.
“To get to technique analysis, the computer vision, the platform itself, has to identify the boundaries of the court, identify different players on the court, be able to pick up all the biometric movement,” Pedersen said. “Before we even get to the technique analysis, we’ve got a lot of the technical data, which provides heat maps and statistics as well. We can deliver all that, and then technique analysis or coaching on top of it.”
Pedersen is charting a B2B model for the company, wherein SportAI licenses access to its software to three key segments: racquet sports clubs and coaches, broadcasters, and equipment manufacturers. She did not disclose pricing but noted it is variable based on which analysis modules businesses subscribe to.
As a coaching tool, Pedersen asserts that SportAI can reinforce instruction with empirical data, expand coaches’ influence outside of traditional lesson hours by making swing analyses accessible remotely, and unlock incremental revenue by creating a premium digital offering coaches or clubs can charge members to use.
For broadcast, Pedersen envisions the potential to improve the less objective niches of common tennis analysis and introduce technique comparisons between players or digital twin visualizations.
Integrating with equipment manufacturers, Pedersen added, would bring the opportunity for increased personalization in matching players with the appropriate racquet for their skill level and play style.
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 man responsible for ensuring a pipeline of British talent to the upper echelons of world tennis spoke about his role in delivering a programme based on ‘passion and care’.
The Performance Director of the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA] was a guest on the Leaders Performance Podcast in early July, where he discussed his remit.
“I break it down as if we want to deliver performance, then performance equals the talent that you’ve got multiplied by the exposure you can give that talent to them to develop and grow, minus interference.”
When it comes to high performance, tennis has several traits that separate it from other sports and this is reflected in the LTA’s provisions. For example, the organisation offers full-time multidisciplinary support to players from under-10s through to elite level, but player needs vary from individual to individual. They provide coaching too, at camps and competitions, but players tend to have private coaches.
It is a balance and one that he has been trying to strike during his four years in the role, which began during the first year of the pandemic. “It was a huge learning curve for me,” said Bourne, whose non-tennis background has never held him back.
Here, we reflect on his thoughts about his role.
He has a firm focus on the mission
Bourne, who has worked in sports science for organisations including UK Sport, the UK Sports Institute and the England & Wales Cricket Board, has a clear understanding of what the LTA is trying to achieve and why. “Our mission is to be world-class and respected at player development,” he said. “The slightly longer answer to that is that we create a pathway for our most talented players to go on a journey to becoming elite professional players, whether that’s in the tennis game or wheelchair tennis game.” It requires continuous self-evaluation on both his part and the LTA’s as well as acknowledging how the challenges faced evolve. Bourne emphasised a people-first approach. “However you cut it up, we are a performance-based industry and you have to have great people to do great things.” He spoke of “passion and care”. “We have a team of individuals who deeply care about the journey these players are on”. Passion is one of the LTA’s values and the sight of others in service to players is one Bourne finds “very humbling”.
Michael Bourne, Performance Director at the LTA. (Photo by Shane Anthony Sinclair/Getty Images for LTA)
His role in driving change
In addition to being mission-focused and people-centred, Bourne places a premium on critical thinking. He also believes that having great ideas is one thing, but being able to apply them is quite another. “You can have the greatest thinking and the greatest ideas in the world, but if you can’t drive and implement change, then it’s for naught,” he said. “Ultimately, leadership is about being able to drive and support change.” His team bring their tennnis-specific expertise and Bourne ensures everyone is aligned around the work that needs to be done. “It gets the balance between my background and their backgrounds in the right space.”
He does not assume things will happen on their own
Bourne readily admits his expertise is not rooted in tennis. Nevertheless, the necessary traits and skills are made familiar to him through his staff. He has set up a clear chain of direct reports and basic processes, but it needs constant attention. “Don’t just trust that they’re going to happen all the time – make sure that you’re around enough and verifying whether the communication, the connection that’s supposed to be in place, is actually in place; and if you need to step in and just give the person that support or just give that reminder of what we’re trying to do to prevent those dreaded silos developing people ploughing their own furrow”.
He relishes the daily challenges
Bourne feels that his role is inherently challenging; and that’s alright. “I feel like in these types of jobs, if your job is easy, something is wrong – I don’t think they’re meant to be easy,” he said. “If they’re easy, then you’re missing something or you’re not pushing when you need to push. There’s always more.” It feeds into his attitude towards the challenges faced by the LTA. “It should be unacceptable in a high performance environment to know there is a challenge and to take no steps to do anything about it.” There will often be “brutal facts”, as he put it, “then it’s my job to ensure that we’re all leaning into that and in the right way in a professional way and in a safe way; having the right types of conversations that we need to have.”
Listen to the full interview below:
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