In the recent edition of their Startup Series, SBJ Tech spoke to Bat Around, a company seeking to blend sport and entertainment with potential performance edges for athletes and coaches.
Main Image: Bat Around
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Our Startups series looks at companies and founders who are innovating in the fields of athlete performance, fan engagement, team/league operations and other high-impact areas in sports.
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World’s shortest elevator pitch: “Bat Around is gamifying baseball batting practice.”
Company: Bat Around
Location: New York, N.Y.
Year founded: 2020
Website/App: https://www.letsbataround.com | Apple Store app | Google Play app
Funding round to date: “We are self-funded at this point. Pre-revenue.”
Who are your investors? “The main investor is single-sourced, Steve Zelin of PJT Partners in New York.”
Are you looking for more investment? “Yes.”
Tell us about yourself, CEO Matt Farrell: “I’m a career-long sports marketer with about 30 years working in the sports business. I mainly have worked for leagues and governing bodies – Golf Channel, USA Swimming, the U.S. Olympics and Paralympic Committee, as well as Warner Bros. in the early days of the internet. I started a consulting business in 2020 during the pandemic, and I started out as a contractor working for what is now Bat Around, and that eventually led to this role.”
Who are your co-founders/partners? “Steve Zelin, he’s a partner and the head of restructuring and special situations group at PJT Partners. Ken Byck, he was a co-owner of one of the largest fantasy baseball vacation companies licensed by MLB. Robert Lipps, 20 years of investment banking experience. Clint Hurdle, former manager of the Rockies and Pirates, 1,269 career wins as a manager, National League Manager of the Year in 2013 with the Pirates. He’s really the vision and the soul behind what is Bat Around.”
How does your platform work? “If you think about any type of simulator, most notably in the golf industry, hit the ball and watch the animation take place on the screen – that is essentially what we are for baseball. We’ve created a game out of that. We took a technical player development tool of swing analytics, swing outcome and turned that into a game. We call it “sportainment.” It’s a mixture of sports and entertainment. Hitting the ball with live, on-screen results.”
What problem is your company solving? “When we started this, we saw two things that weren’t necessarily headed in the same path but we thought they could. One is we saw the baseball/softball industry have a lot of really strong player development tools that were very technical, but few that really gamified the experience. That was happening at the same time we certainly saw the explosion of Topgolf, golf simulators generally and, believe it or not, even some activities like axe throwing that were getting people active in something they didn’t really think they could do or they didn’t think the game was available to them. We felt like that was a convergence of where we wanted to be.”
What does your product cost and who is your target customer? “Right now, we’re distributing the product free to batting cages that have a HitTrax system. That’s a product very prevalent in the batting cage world. We’re going to support that with sponsorships and partnerships, but starting this out to grow the user base and get as many people playing this game as possible as we start on this HitTrax platform. We have two target audiences. The first being baseball/softball batting cages with a HitTrax system. The second is more in the entertainment space of baseball stadium concourses, family fun centers or even entertainment locations.”
How are you marketing your product? “It’s a little bit of a combination. We have 12 former MLB players with 29,000 combined hits that are advisors on the project, and they are a great source of introductions, content and giving validation to what the product is all about. We’ve done an on-site activation for two weeks at the College World Series in the summer of 2023. We just finished in (early January) at a baseball conference in Dallas for coaches. We did a demonstration and were invited to be part of the MLB Winter Meetings in a tech innovation expo. We’re really starting to use experiential activations and digital marketing to spread the world about how you can get this in an area near you.”
How do you scale, and what is your targeted level of growth? “The good news about scale with the product being software is it’s really a one-click download to get the product onto your HitTrax system. We came out of our beta mode of three pilot cages in January to release the product. We see starting and building authenticity in the baseball/softball world first, but we really see growth coming in entertainment venues and restaurants. We have signed our first agreement with an MLB team and will be on their concourse as a fan activity starting this season. We will announce the team in the coming weeks.”
Who are your competitors, and what makes you different? “In many ways, we’re at the beginning of this sport and entertainment mixture within baseball and softball. The golf world is very well advanced in this, but baseball/softball has not been as much. Our competitors come in other sources of entertainment for people. Within the baseball world, it’s re-educating people how to take player development tools and turn them into a game. HitTrax is a great example of that. In the future, there are a ton of great player development technology tools in baseball – Diamond Kinetics, Blast Motion, Rapsodo, TrackMan. Really, we just see the universe of gamification in baseball having so much opportunity.”
What’s the unfair advantage that separates your company? “What we think is the special sauce to our game is we’ve created our own specific metric that actually measures your success of the game, it’s called your Bat Around Metric or your BAM Score. Obviously, baseball is a very statistics-driven sport. What we’ve done is taken different strategic hitting skills, strategy of the game, hitting a line drive, moving the ball around the field, moving runners and we’ve taken your overall success rate of all of these different hitting skills, not just hitting the ball hard, which is an over-focused area right now of just exit velocity and how hard you can hit the ball. What we’ve done is taken all of these hitting skills and rolled them into one successful number, where you’re a power hitter and I’m a singles hitter, we can actually score well in this game and maybe just perform well on different skills, roll that up into your BAM, which I describe as a decathlon of hitting. From there, just the other soft advantages are first mover in the gamification space, the advisors we have on the project, like Clint Hurdle, and being that early adopter in the space.”
What milestone have you recently hit or will soon hit? “We just came out of our Beta mode and we are now in 18 cages and adding new ones each day. Our major milestone, our coming-out party as a product, was really this past College World Series in Omaha. Having the feather in the cap of being invited by MLB to display at the Winter Meetings was huge for us as a young company. Another is this MLB team concourse.”
What are the values that are core to your brand? “We have a mission and our guiding principles of the game. Our mission statement is connect with the ball and others, meaning we want you to hit but we want it to be a social activity. That’s the simplicity of our mission, connect with the ball and others. Then, we have three guiding principles. One is everybody hits, which essentially means making the game, swinging a bat, accessible for anyone and everyone. The second guiding principle is what we call baseball with more BAM, which means there’s a fun element to this and also a scoring element that can actually help us – think of a handicap in golf – that can allow us to play different skills with each other. The third, really inspired by Clint Hurdle, is innovation built on tradition. We want to take old school hitting strategy and elements of the game of baseball but have it be packaged with modern technology, and in many ways trick people into learning the strategy of the game and strategy of hitting, versus just trying to hit bombs all day.”
What does success ultimately look like for your company? “It’s making the game of baseball and softball more accessible than ever before. Many people, such as myself, the game retired us. The game retired me at 19-years-old. Outside of adult leagues, I didn’t really feel as if there was much of an outlet for me to play. Now, we’re trying to re-open the door. We want to give the game back to people to enjoy, no matter what their skill level is. I feel like going back to our mission of making that a connected experience of the ball and with others, whether it be a restaurant or a professional stadium concourse or being able to play the game in your garage if you want – make the game more accessible again.”
What should investors or customers know about you — the person, your life experiences — that shows they can believe in you? “The depth and breadth of my experience working in sports and sports business, but not just that, but I’ve always worked for challenger brands in sports. It’s one thing to be a marketer and promote some of the biggest NFL, NBA, MLB teams. My career has been about building brands with Olympic sports, non-traditional golf events. It’s really the love of sports and sports business with being, of knowing the grind of building a brand and especially a challenger brand.”
How much does adding the gaming element of this more appealing across different sects of baseball fans? “In this case, I will make a loose connection to Topgolf and our game. What I love about both is if I stood out on a golf course or stood at home plate and hit a ball, the massive amount of real estate that is comes into reality really quick. When I can be in a more confined setting, then see the animation play out on the screen and see the defenders play my ball, score points, even if I hit a weak ground ball I’m still scoring some experiential points and there’s the phenomenon of seeing some numbers tally, whether they’re small or large, there’s a rush to that. And seeing some success. The same way in Topgolf, if I shank a shot, I can still hit a target and there’s some fun in it. It’s not the same in Bat Around, but we’re showing you constant feedback of you earned 50 experiential points for this hit, you earned 300 points for that hit, so we can give you instant feedback and keep the integrity of competing with someone but have some small wins along the way.”
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Dr David Fletcher explains how the training environment can be manipulated to promote resilience.
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“It’s the same for all of us in our day-to-day lives with stressors and strains that we experience,” he continues. “It might be that a major life event occurs and as a consequence that’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back and we struggle as a consequence. It may be day-to-day stressors in the environment that build up over time.
“Psychologists call this ‘allostatic load’ and it’s where it can lead to burnout or, in a sporting context, overtraining.”
There is more to it than just teaching psychological skills or qualities. “That’s the starting point.”
Fletcher is talking to the Leaders Performance Institute for a series that looks at better understanding psychological resilience, how it can be developed, as well as any other considerations for coaches in sport.
In the third part of our interview, Fletcher discusses how the environment in which someone operates influences their resilience, which has implications for coaching practice.
Why is it important to balance challenge and support in developing resilience?
DF: Challenge is all about providing developmental feedback. It’s feedback telling you how you are going to develop over the next 12 months and the challenge is for you to be able to step up your game in this respect. And, of course, there could be physical goals, certain technical goals, nutritional goals, lifestyle goals, psychological skills training goals. There’s a whole raft of different things that go into challenging people; and in sport and high performance we tend to be quite good at that. The area that sometimes gets neglected is the idea of supporting people in order to meet those challenges and those demands. ‘So if you’re going to progress by this much in the next week or the next month towards this goal, what do we need to put in place to support you in order to do this?’
What can coaches be doing better?
DF: This is all about encouraging people; providing them with confidence and motivation. I mentioned developmental feedback, but the feedback we need here is motivational feedback. Instead of looking forwards, we’re saying ‘12 months ago, you were here now you here look at how you’ve progressed and here are the reasons why you’ve progressed over the last twelve months you did this better. You did this better. You perform well in this situation, in this context’. So it’s about bolstering people, bolstering their self-esteem, their confidence and motivation. It’s also about providing them with support around what they’ve done better and how they’re doing things better on different fronts.
Is there a role for other staff too?
DF: Absolutely. This is where you need to try and draw in your sports science and medicine team so that the sport support they get is bespoke to them as individuals particularly at elite levels of competition. So what are the fine-grained areas that you can work on that are bespoke and specific to you? It’s an area that can get neglected, particularly at the higher levels. The optimal development of resilience is very much contingent upon balancing challenge and support, the fluctuations between the two, and trying to get that balance right; and some of the research that we’ve done suggests the best coaches intuitively and instinctively have a really good feel not only on how to balance the two for an individual but how to balance challenge and support for all of the individuals in the team. So you can imagine, if you’ve got a squad of 20-30 players they’re coming in and out of training, they’ve got all sorts of things going on in their lives. It’s not just the stressors and demands associated with the sport. It’s things outside of the sport. So no psychologists in the world could monitor all of those stresses and demands on all of those different athletes and then modify and tweak an intervention. The best coaches have got that real instinctive sense of when to back off somebody, dial down the challenge, dial up the support and put the arm around them. Or maybe an individual is getting a bit complacent and they need to dial up the challenge in different ways.
Are there any specific types of training for resilience that involve manipulating the environment?
DF: It’s really extending this idea around challenge and support and looking at specific contexts. What are the specific types of stresses and strains that people need to perform under? The principles are the same whatever the sport. We’re still looking at how can we place individuals under or challenge them to perform under more pressure. The key to that is what can we do to support them to do that? So you’re asking more of the athletes but you’re also saying ‘in order to meet this demand here’s my advice, here’s some of the things that you can do to step up and meet that demand’; and that’s crucial for coaches to do. You don’t just throw them into a pressurised situation that that, first of all, is too pressurised and too extreme. We’ve seen some cases of that in the past over the last couple of decades where people have wildly misjudged that and what people are capable of. I might add to that as well situations when the pressure is completely irrelevant or unrealistic, such as in a boot camp. The stresses and the pressures can be completely irrelevant to what your athletes will face in competition. The environment has got to be progressively challenging and it’s got to be realistic to meet these demands, but also, as I emphasised before, you’ve got to support players and athletes in order to achieve this. So what are you underpinning this with in terms of psychological skills training around imagery, around preparation around planning, around nutritional development? All the things that can help them meet these demands within the context that they’re working.
Read our interview in full:
Part II – Psychological Resilience: Everyone Has a Trainability Bandwidth
Ben Baroody, of the World Series-winning Texas Rangers delves into the franchise’s holistic approach to player development, which prioritizes well-being.
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“It means a lot to us,” he tells Henry Breckenridge and John Portch on the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you today by our Main Partners Keiser.
“The aim and approach of all of our programs, processes, and our building blocks, is based on the foundation of the human psyche, the psychology of healthy minds and lives. And we try to take that evidence-based research and build it into baseball frameworks and development for the rest of the organization.”
As the Texas Rangers’ Director of Leadership & Organizational Development, Player Enrichment Programs & Mental Health says, the goal is to unlock player potential versus extracting performance.
“That’s what we’re striving towards. It’s an aspiration that’s ever-evolving,” he says,
Elsewhere in this episode, we cover:
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Dr Amal Hassan at Harlequins Women explores a much misunderstood aspect of her players’ health and suggests ways in which coaches and practitioners can help.
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“What I’ve learned supporting rugby players,” she began, “is that periods can be a barrier to participation in the first place, a perceived barrier to skill and technical development through a season, can have health implications that really impact their performance, and it possibly keeps players from developing at really crucial points.”
Hassan was speaking as part of a panel discussion on the physiology of the female athlete at September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium. She spoke alongside pelvic health physiotherapist Emma Brockley and Dr Nicola Brown, an Associate Professor in Female Health & Performance at St Mary’s University.
Session moderator Claire-Marie Roberts, who has just been appointed Performance Director at English Championship club Coventry City, homed in on Hassan’s reference to skill acquisition.
“A training season won’t discriminate,” said Hassan in response. “You’ll be needed to train on any given day of your menstrual cycle, if you’re off contraception, for example. So you need to be able to show up the best you can. However, at certain points in certain individuals, it may be that their menstrual cycle fades, where the symptoms or dysfunction they experience may actually be medical and the impact on their ability to train, to show up as the person they want to be to their coaches and the staff they’re working with, and, on game day, you can imagine how that might translate.
“That’s not to say that every day is going to be a different flavour of menstrual cycle dysfunction for an athlete, but there might be really key points in, say, a season or a cycle where they have to be absolutely present and engaged in their training for their skill acquisition to develop at the pace we want it to. If you can imagine not thinking about this component and the effect it has on athletes’ development, we’re just expecting them to be able to cope as long as we control for medical, load and other aspects of sports science, but we don’t consider this other very important aspect that is across the board for all of our female players if they’re off contraception, then we’re missing a trick.
“And what I find interesting is if you ask athletes if they think it’s impacted their skill development, they might say yes and more often than I would expect.”
Hassan noted that it is important to separate menstrual dysfunction and symptoms. “Symptoms could be normal,” she continued. “What we don’t understand fully is what is a normal menstrual cycle for an athlete or not. We’re good at delineating that from their perspective; I can tell you what’s pathology or not according to a certain criteria, but we don’t actually know what’s normal for an athlete. So it could be normal that you do expect symptoms and that’s not dysfunction. That’s just part and parcel of your menstrual cycle.”
In this article, Hassan, who has also worked in ballet, reflects on the support that all teams and organisations can provide for athletes as well as the implications for those female athletes playing collision sports.
Note: Hassan’s responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
The importance of menstrual tracking…
If you’ve got the resources, tracking is important. And that might be tracking done by your sports science team with the consent of the athletes. In the absence of those resources and that expertise in-house, that might look like the athletes receiving some education and taking it upon themselves to track their menstrual cycles. Ultimately, I believe this should be player-led or athlete-led so that an athlete can come to you with any concerns, but what you want to do is you want to pick up any patterns. It’s going to differ between athletes. It might be that you can pick up some really important trends in sleep dysfunction, in cravings, in core recovery, in back pain in certain parts of the cycle, otherwise it can start working proactively against a team, which is there to support an athlete ahead of time so that it doesn’t become a reactive approach. It becomes very proactive and built into a programme.
The gold standard in supporting athletes with their menstrual cycle…
I don’t think we’ve necessarily reached it anywhere and explored the full capabilities. It must span medical and performance because you might pick up some medical issues but it’s very much aligned with your performance programme or your sport. The gold standard within your team will look like setting out everyone’s roles and responsibilities, in a team environment tracking across the team, getting buy-in from individual athletes, collecting as much data as possible so that you can be accurate about your planning. Now, that might be impractical even in some elite settings in women’s sport but where there’s full professionalisation, athletes are full-time, you’ve got the staff resource to do it.
Steps that all teams can take…
It’s important to recognise where you don’t necessarily have the expertise in-house. So some sports may have doctors as part of their teams, they might be full-time, they might not be, they might be junior doctors in their training, or they may be consultants, they may be consultants in orthopaedics but have no medical training in terms of gyno health or endocrinology. So it’s really important to understand where you’re at and that if you don’t have that expertise in-house you have onward referral pathways in place for any pathology that you pick up. In the middle, you’ve got the option, for example to use a platform like Fittr Coach and be able to access that with the resources that you have; your performance medicine team might be able to do the tracking, involve the athletes in collecting the data, and you can try to pick up any patterns there. At the other end of the spectrum, athletes can use a free app to track their periods, check their cycles are regular, keep a diary of any issues, any symptoms, try and relate that to training, to any recovery, nutrition, their psychology. It can get quite complicated but if you just have a structure around it and you do it every day it becomes simple. You will then want to signpost to that individual’s GP if there are any issues. Obviously a GP is not going to be experienced or qualified at discussing performance but there are quite a few resources available for athletes to read or podcasts to listen to. It’s not going to do any harm for them to consider that the menstrual cycle might be a component in planning their training or their recovery.
The ethical considerations…
If you’re encouraging a practice, there’s got to be a structure around it. So who’s leading on that? Who’s driving the education? Who’s the go-to person for questions and answers? I think you have to be really intentional in the rollout of teamwide services or strategies like this. Everything needs to really be in place so that you don’t come across issues by surprise. I think you could have this problem even within an environment that has a great structure. Ultimately, the big one is supplements. A lot of athletes will think about particular supplements that might help them with symptoms, with recovery, and they just need to make sure they’re not breaching anti-doping guidelines; and that you are encouraging across the board, you’ve got nutritionists, doctors, etc. open communication about anything they want to try. We do want to empower athletes to be the best they can be but just within the realms of safety.
On athletes approaching pregnancy and birth…
This is a space that’s continuing to develop and that development should aid and increase the confidence within the performance medical team and within athletes in approaching training through pregnancy, continuing to be part of your sport during your pregnancy and then return, post-natal, post-partum. If you think about it from a framework perspective, it’s really important that pillars that include HR and contractual factors, the players’ wishes, their psychology during pregnancy, the skillset and experience within your team managing that athlete, your protocols, your emergency action plans from a medical perspective, your forward planning and programming from a rehabilitative perspective towards return-to-play and the facilitation of preparing for birth and the early post-natal phase, which is a really crucial period of time in any woman’s life, are proactively managed. It can seem really overwhelming if you’ve never done it before and I would encourage any institution who has never done it before to not wait until it does happen; to be proactive in building policies and protocols ahead of time and developing the skillset you have in-house, so that you are ready when it does happen, because it eventually will. If you think of the period of life where an athlete’s fertility is peaking, it’s merging with the performance time in their careers generally.
The impact of a collision sport on menstrual dysfunction and symptoms…
What we tend to see in sports that are typically endurance sports or aesthetic disciplines like ballet is that greater maturation is at risk of being delayed because of the energy demands and the chasing of an aesthetic goal from a physique perspective. So in those sports you might see there is a delay that might impact bone health, they might go on to be at risk of stress fractures, broadly speaking. In rugby, what you have to consider is the load, the impact of stress on the endocrine system, and then you’ll swing more towards menstrual dysfunction and symptoms and poor under-recovery impacting their endocrine system. What you also tend to see, and this is really anecdotal from my perspective, having worked in ballet and having worked in rugby, what we see in ballet is a lack of periods and amenorrhea as a risk. What we see in rugby is you’re more likely to be struggling with something like PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome]. With PCOS, you see higher androgen levels, that will translate into some sport-enhancing metrics in terms of how strong you are potentially. And this is not proven, this is just anecdotal, with that what you get is more menstrual symptoms relating to the hormonal imbalance. So I think it’s down to really understanding our sport. We don’t have that data, we need to understand across the board what the typical issues girls and then women playing senior rugby are struggling with and I guess it’s a call to action for research. I can just rely on my own anecdotal experience at my club. It needs more effort across the board.
The sports scientist behind recent British and Irish Lions tours discusses the real value of finding the right tech and the balance between domain expertise and leadership.
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The question is posed by Brian Cunniffe of the UK Sports Institute [UKSI], who is Joe Lemire and John Portch’s first guest on The People Behind the Tech podcast for 2024.
Brian, a performance lead at the UKSI who works primarily in canoeing and who also served as the British and Irish Lions’ sports scientist on tours of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, is discussing the power in gamifying training, particularly for younger athletes.
“There’s a slight irony in there but how do we bring it back to the stuff that matters, not just for players but for staff as well?” he continues.
“How do we help coaches on a journey to understand not just the stuff that players have completed but maybe some of the decisions that we need to take on a journey and learn from that so that we’re not replicating or duplicating and can be more efficient with our time?”
Elsewhere, Brian delves into:
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Dr Nicola Brown of St Mary’s University explores an unregulated market where anything can be labelled as a sports bra.
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“We know that half of schoolgirls drop out of sport because of their breasts,” she added. “One in three adults see the breasts as a barrier to participation. Then we also have that performance aspect. We know that if we change breast support, because the breasts will move during activity, that it will change how an athlete moves, it will influence their confidence, it can change their breathing, it can change their muscle activity.”
In September 2023, Brown was speaking as part of a panel discussion on the physiology of the female athlete at Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium. She spoke alongside pelvic health physiotherapist Emma Brockwell and Dr Amal Hassan, who serves as Women’s Team Doctor at rugby club Harlequins.
“We know that the majority of women wear the incorrect size bra, and you can have a great sports bra, but if it doesn’t fit properly then it’s not going to be effective.”
In this article, Brown reflects on the sports bra market and the importance of athlete education when it comes to breast health.
Note: Brown’s responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Sports bras: a confusing marketplace…
The sports bra market has massively increased, which is a fantastic thing, but it does then make it a very confusing marketplace for women. It may be very difficult to find the right sports bra. There’s no such thing as the best sports bra. What might be the best sports bra for me might be very different to someone else and we know that key issues around sports bras are knowledge of the types of sports bra that might be suitable for small breasts versus large breasts; and also the fit of the bra.
Why athletes should not rely on official apparel suppliers alone…
If there’s a very limited choice of products, particularly if you’re working with a team of athletes, it’s unlikely that those products will cater for the entire team. I think we need to be careful about mandating some kind of product that is actually having a negative health implication on an athlete. Anything can market itself as a sports bra. There’s no kind of criteria the bra has to meet. That’s another thing that makes it quite challenging to find the right breast support.
There are three types of sports bra on the market…
Firstly, a compression bra, which is kind of like the crop top that goes over your head with an elastic bottom. They tend to be better for smaller-breasted women. Larger-breasted women will probably be more suited to an encapsulation bra, which encapsulates each breast separately. The third type is a combination or a hybrid bra, which combines elements of the compression and the encapsulation bra. So you have the separate pockets for each breast and then with a compressive layer of material over the top. You might make the assumption that if we combine both types of bra we’ll get the best one but that’s not necessarily the case. It is again about that individual fit or the person.
Why compression bras are so popular…
Depending on the sport they are playing and the activity that they’re doing, an athlete may choose different sports bras for different types of activity, but the key feedback that we get, particularly from athletes working at the very top level, is that they often use a bra that is compressive because they are trying to look as if they don’t have breasts. They want to compress their breast tissue as much as possible because they’re concerned about what they look like and how people will comment on social media or in the crowd, and they want to be able to focus on the game and not be concerned about their appearance, so they will try and make their breasts look as small as possible.
The importance of education and empowerment…
There’s always that fashion aspect that comes into play but I think the most important thing is education about what a good sports bra can do. If we can try to promote the benefits that will come from that then we’ll hopefully have athletes making more informed choices. I think it’s also important not to assume that an athlete will recognise that it’s a problem. It wasn’t until 2015 that it was reported that the breasts are a barrier to activity – and I don’t think something happened in 2015 that meant breasts became a problem – it’s just the first time that anybody asked women. And so a lot of women will just assume that the issues they experience are just part and parcel of what they have to deal with. But if we can raise awareness of the fact that there is a potential solution in the form of well-fitting appropriate breast support then it just opens up their opportunities to try and reduce those negative consequences of the breast function.
Deciding what option is best…
Make sure they try it on before they buy it. The fit is one of the most important things. You can get it professionally fitted in-store, but I think particularly for sports bra fits, there’s no real regulation or training for those fitters, so I’m very much an advocate of empowering the athlete or any individual to know what bra fits them. Then it doesn’t matter what bra they pick, they know what to check and whether it fits them. And when it comes to the sizing, just not assuming that you’re one size and that you’re that size for the rest of your life. I think that’s something that happens. You get fitted with a bra at some stage of your life and then you wear that bra forever more. But different styles of bra, even the different colour of a bra, if you wear a black bra versus a white bra of the same design, just the colour can make that tighter. Your breasts might change size and shape through various stages of life, through stages of a medical cycle, so it’s making sure that you are aware that you need bras that are fitted and that your breasts may change. And more expensive doesn’t always mean better. It’s very much not the case. So it’s finding what works for you. Then, once they put it on, jump around in the changing room, simulate some movements you’d do during that activity, make sure that you feel supported.
The gold standard in breast support services…
At the top level with unlimited resources and expertise to hand, we could do a biomechanical assessment of an athlete’s breast movement doing a sports-specific activity so we can establish the optimal breast support for them and then design a bespoke bra; and then they can exercise in that. We’ve done that with some athletes and they report that they feel more confident in their performance, that they perform better, reduce pain and so on.
Steps that all teams can take…
We should go right down to the lowest level with something as simple as putting a bra fit poster in a changing room or on the back of a toilet door. Some little nudge, that thought about ‘have I checked my bra?’ or ‘have I changed my bra recently?’ ‘Does my bra fit? Something that might spark that conversation to discuss breast health issues more openly. And then in between offering bra fit assessments, if you can get the expertise on hand. Anything from signposting to educational leaflets. There are educational resources and videos and things available to signpost. Obviously we’re not all going to become experts in all of these areas of women’s health overnight and know everything, but we can at least signpost athletes if they do come to us with those issues to the resources they might need.
Where there is more work still to be done…
There’s been a lot of work done on breast support for different population groups and at different life stages, but very limited work done on pregnancy or breast feeding post-partum. So I think work needs to be done in terms of making sure there is the appropriate breast support for athletes to facilitate breast feeding if needed but also to facilitate the return to sport to ensure the breast support they’re wearing is appropriate and to support their needs. And obviously the anatomy of the breasts is going to change substantially during that period. And again, I would promote education about those changes and how team can best support their athletes. Breast injuries: we don’t really know the long-term consequences of breast impacts. That’s another area where we need to be better at collecting that data. We ask athletes about all sorts of other injuries but don’t necessarily ask about breast injuries and they don’t necessarily report it. In rugby, I know there are steps being made within injury surveillance systems to actually start incorporating breast injury data. I think that will be a really important step forward, to try and understand the prevalence, the severity, the mechanisms of those injuries, whether it’s contact with the player, contact with the ball or contact with the ground, but also the consequences of that.
Zendler speaks to Joe Lemire and John Portch about her work with Rimkus and the NBA and NBPA’s Wearables Validation Program.
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The Program Manager of the NBA and NBPA’s Wearables Validation Program is discussing her first steps in the role with Joe and John on the People Behind the Tech podcast.
“Academic-type folks, we don’t like to set thresholds that exist for pass-fail,” she continues, as she explained the process of speaking to players and coaches and taking in all the relevant research.
“We want this to be rigorous, we want the players to have confidence in these devices, we know they’re generally hesitant to wear them and there is pushback.”
Zendler also spoke of balancing the need for commercial viability with real-world application, which chimes with her role as a sports science consultant with Rimkus, a worldwide leader in technical consulting and forensic engineering.
During the course of the conversation, we also discussed:
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Pelvic health physiotherapist Emma Brockwell outlines this ‘hidden health’ discipline that remains largely underserved in elite sport.
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Symptoms of pelvic floor dysfunction in girls and women of all ages can include issues with urinary leakage, urgency and frequency, feelings of incontinence, and vaginal heaviness.
These examples were cited by pelvic health physiotherapist Emma Brockwell onstage at Leaders Meet: Driving Step Change in Female High Performance at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium in September.
“These symptoms often don’t cause a woman pain but they may have a huge impact on their physical and mental health,” said Brockwell, who has worked with athletes at teams including Chelsea Women and Harlequins Women. She also co-hosts the women’s health-focused At Your Cervix podcast with fellow pelvic floor physiotherapist Gráinne Donnelly.
She spoke onstage alongside Harlequins’ Women’s Club Doctor, Amal Hassan, and Dr Nicola Brown, Associate Professor in Women’s Health at St Mary’s University in London, in front of an audience of Leaders Performance Institute members.
“We think pelvic floor issues are likely to be affecting a female athlete’s performance as well,” added Brockwell. “The reality is that female athletes carrying out strenuous activity are probably three times more likely to experience these dysfunctions than someone who is less active of her age.
“So it’s just recognising that these symptoms occur, breaking down the stigma and taboo that exists around this because we’re talking about the pelvis, we’re talking about the vulva, the vagina. These words are still unbelievably taboo, controversial – women don’t like to talk about them, men don’t like to talk about them – but it’s about educating every one of us that we should be using these words and discussing these symptoms and, I guess, normalising the conversation and allowing it to happen.”
In this article, we explore Brockwell’s work with female athletes and the steps all teams can take to support their women and girl athletes.
Note: Brockwell’s responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
On her physiotherapy practice…
A pelvic health physiotherapist is just a sub-specialist of a musculoskeletal physiotherapist. So we still screen a woman as you would through a musculoskeletal screening, we look at the whole body but we would typically offer any female athlete or woman a vaginal examination as well. And through that level of internal and external assessment we determine if there are any pelvic health issues. Pelvic health is kind of a hidden health amongst musculoskeletal physiotherapy. In our training we don’t even have much pelvic health training. It’s a post-grad form of training, but it’s really important to recognise the pelvis, the pelvic floor, integrates into the hip, into the back, into the abdominal wall and therefore perhaps with other musculoskeletal issues that might be lumbar, pelvic pain, hip pain, groin pain. Is it something that’s potentially contributing to some of these musculoskeletal conditions and therefore should we be screening pelvic health just to help eliminate some of the potential differential diagnoses of these musculoskeletal issues? It is about opening our eyes but also using this sort of specialism, a musculoskeletal physio, to hopefully make a difference to female health.
The current ‘gold standard’ in pelvic health physiotherapy…
Pelvic health is still quite misunderstood. People aren’t aware that we exist, that pelvic floor conditions can be treated. Ultimately gold standard has to be education at the moment because a gold standard doesn’t exist at the moment. Education is key, collaboration, talking to other healthcare professionals and coaches within the team [at Harlequins] to let them know what I do; and then screening at the moment is ideal because you don’t know what you don’t know. A lot of the players don’t know what they don’t know; the players are asking these questions. So screening is ultimately key. And then getting a consultant in, like me, to then offer one-to-one treatment, if players want to be treated.
What teams with fewer resources can do to support their athletes’ pelvic floor health…
There are apps and you can absolutely still screen and refer into a GP; and the GP can certainly refer into the pelvic health physio system within the NHS or privately. The resources are there and, if I give you an example, the stats show that 84 percent of women who suffer from stress urinary incontinence, if they see a pelvic health physiotherapist, they will improve. So we are effective, it’s just knowing that we exist. And if you can’t access us for one reason or another then use an app like the Squeezy app, the NHS resources. I quite often signpost people to the AIS [Australian Institute of Sport] resources because they’ve got some great educational tools that you can share with players and you can look at yourself and they offer various videos on how to do pelvic floor exercises, blood screening, bladder diaries. All of these things are really helpful if resources are scarce. But I think the key is collaboration, having discussions; and touching base with me and I can signpost you to pelvic health physios in your areas.
On helping perinatal athletes…
That’s certainly my passion area and that’s where you would recognise a pelvic health physiotherapist coming into their own. But what we should be thinking of is how we prevent pelvic floor issues occurring and we can very much prevent the majority of pelvic floor issues occurring before a woman is pregnant. But even when they do fall pregnant, being able to prepare their system for the inevitable changes that the body is going through in childbirth, and then the post-partum recovery. I don’t want to mythologise [this phase] as an injury because it’s not, but it is important to recognise that it needs as much time, thought, care and preparation as any injury that these female athletes are going to experience. And we’ve seen first-hand, if you prepare a woman during her pregnancy and really educate her about what to expect, it makes their post-partum journey so much more manageable and so much easier. I firmly believe that if we offer women this element of rehabilitation, if you like, I think they can return to their sport really stronger than ever before. I think it’s just about – I keep saying it – collaboration and working with other people and ensuring that you’re bringing in these specialisms to help support their journeys.
