Main Image: SwingVision

By Joe Lemire

By mounting their iPhones above the court, tennis players of all levels can use the SwingVision app to collect a trove of data and video from their matches. Add an Apple Watch and competitors can press a button and challenge a line call, receiving an animation on the wrist showing whether the ball landed in or out.

More recently, SwingVision has added a beta feature that yells “Out!” if a shot lands beyond the court boundaries. That audible line call takes a split second for the iPhone to process the image and make its determination, a rapid reaction only possible by the computing power of the chips Apple puts in its smartphones, bypassing the need to transmit to the cloud.

“That’s really only possible on device,” said SwingVision CEO Swupnil Sahai. “Because we’re processing 1080p at 60 frames per second, that’s a lot to process. And if you were to send that to the cloud and then have it process it and then run it back, you definitely can’t do that in half a second. And you certainly can’t do that on any court in the world.”

The proliferation of cloud providers and their processing have transformed sports tech for the better, democratizing access to storage and AI models, but there remain key use cases when the cloud isn’t the answer — when requiring speed, managing costs and operating with limited connectivity.

“This is a bit of a trend in my view, is that you see something that really works well in the cloud, but you need it speedier,” said Mike Davies, Fox Sports EVP of Technical and Field Operations.

Davies shared that observation in the context of his network’s IndyCar coverage. Fox and Indy Motor Sports Productions contracted with Lumen Technologies recently to install 10-gig fiber-optic cables at every track to support on-location servers. That enables faster rendering of data overlays on the driver’s eye camera and the use of a product called XtraMotion, which uses generative AI to turn regular footage into high-frame-rate video.

Sahai was a Tesla engineer before founding SwingVision, and the automotive manufacturer processes its Full Self-Driving cameras entirely with on-car hardware. “So that’s how I’ve always thought about this problem, is it should be done on device,” he said, calling it a philosophical decision.

“We just drew a line in the sand from Day 1: We’re doing this on device, we’re not going to use the cloud at all,” Sahai said, adding, “It just felt like it’d be way too expensive for a consumer app to run it in the cloud.”

Financial transparency can help. Gamecode, a soccer analytics startup, includes an upfront estimated cost for each predictive model run on the cloud.

Striking the right balance

Many sports tech firms offer a hybrid approach. Pixellot, whose AI cameras stream and analyze up to 20,000 games every weekend, is an AWS technology parter. Pixellot CTO Gal Oz once told SBJ that his company couldn’t have scaled without the cloud and “making Amazon do the heavy work. It’s not magic. I like the phrase that ‘there is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer.’”

Even though Pixellot CEO Doron Gerstel recently quipped of AWS, “They love us,” he added that every camera has an on-premises server to reduce the cost and expedite the video feedback for coaches and athletes. By the time the game ends, highlights are waiting.

“Now if you are doing it over there on the cloud, one of the most problematic things is you are on queue — if you want to pass the queue, fine with them, pay more,” Gerstel said. “The question is how much attention I’m losing if you’re not getting it immediately after the game. We are dealing with audience that is all about here and now.”

Gerstel added that he believes cloud computing prices will go down in time, and remaining affordable and timely is critical for the user. (Cloud pricing can be very dynamic based on time of day, volume of data, speed of turnaround, etc.)

GameChanger’s app was used to track more than 8 million baseball and softball games last year and is receiving an upgrade to stream in 1080p HD this year. Its President, Sameer Ahuja, said his group has invested in technical talent to optimize the efficiency of databases to minimize cloud reliance and cost. New innovations around video compression help retain quality while uploading faster.

And Ahuja previously shared that, internally, they often say “a bet on GameChanger is a bet on Apple and Samsung” because the smartphone providers are powering more on-device processing. That echoes a point from Sahai about SwingVision which, to date, is only available on iOS devices, but soon will expand to Android.

“A big reason why we haven’t gone to Android so far is because the compute wasn’t there,” Sahai said, saying it will finally be possible later this year. “We’ve started development for that, but even then, it’s only the very latest Androids, whereas on iPhone, you can go all the way back to iPhone 11.”

SwingVision’s electronic line-calling has been used in some junior tournaments as it applies to the ITF for certification that would enable use at higher levels. The audio alerts are, for now, a consumer feature to replicate the Hawk-Eye Live experience enjoyed by professional tennis players. But emitting that seemingly simple audio alert necessitates a huge behind-the-scenes engineering effort.

“Orchestrating all those different models, getting those to run as fast as possible,” Sahai said, “[required] a lot of experimentation and iteration for us throughout several years, honestly, of basically building our own architectures and getting it to run efficiently.”

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

Main Image: Getty Images

By Joe Lemire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main Image: AFP via Getty Images

By Ethan Joyce

Turns out at least one medal outcome was wrong at the Milan Cortina Olympics, and officiating and scoring startup Owl AI founder Jeremy Bloom says he can prove it.

The women’s snowboard slopestyle finish prompted immediate criticism for the judges who awarded Japan’s Mari Fukada the gold (with a score of 87.83) and New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott (87.48) the silver — with notable reactions from NBC analyst Todd Richards and others.

The frustration focused on the inconsistency of scoring on jumps — specifically Fukada’s high scoring on the 720s (two full rotations) in her routine, while Sadowski-Synnott’s attempted more difficult 1080s (three full rotations) as part of her set. And it hit the exact reason why Bloom founded the tech startup to begin with — and in this case, the difference between silver and gold after a rejudging from Owl.

This graph shows the data sets utilized by Owl AI to determine that the women’s snowboard slopestyle at the Milano Cortina Games should have likely flipped the gold and silver finishes for the event. (Graphic used courtesy of Owl AI.)

“I don’t think much needs to be said about how important these moments are for the athletes,” Bloom told SBJ. “They’ve worked their entire lives to just make an Olympic team, let alone put down the best run and either miss the podium or have the wrong color medal for whatever reason.”

To check the medal finish, Owl AI created a data set to look back at the past five years of judging for both 720s and 1080s. What it discovered: The two scores Fukada earned in Milan Cortina on her 720s (7.7 and 8.3, respectively) stood out drastically. The scores on Sadowski-Synnott’s 1080s were also near the peak of scoring for the moves but still very in line historically with the judging from which Owl pulled.

Owl rejudging still slates Kokomo Murase as the bronze winner. But it flipped the finishes of Fukada (with an 86.67 adjusted score) and Sadowski-Synnott’s (89.13).

“This is where we really think we could augment the judges,” said Josh Gwyther, Owl AI’s CEO. “Because if you, as a judge, are putting in a score and immediately saw this deviation, you might be like, ‘Okay, let me see, Is there something there?’ And maybe notate that anomaly.”

Both Bloom and Gwyther have often shared that Owl is not meant to replace judges but to be a helpful tool to set everyone (judges, athletes, fans) up for success around an event. But because judges can vary in their experience, background, and biases, Owl becomes guardrails of context. For example, Bloom pointed out, 720s won the men’s version of this event in the 2006 Olympics. It’s no longer a cutting-edge move, which should be reflected in the score.

Because Olympic moments happen at a four-year frequency, it adds extra pressure to make these decisions as correct as possible.

“On one hand, you want to honor those who won,” said Bloom, a former world champion and two-time Olympic skier. “You want to say, listen, on this day, given this criteria, that’s your gold medal. And any sort of commentary beyond that shouldn’t sort of diminish you because that was their day.

“But at the same time, if that athlete or any athlete would agree that there’s a lot of subjectivity to these sports and everybody would like to push for a more objective world.”

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

Main Photo: Airo

By Joe Lemire

Speedskating team pursuit debuted at the 2006 Olympics, with three-skater teams racing in sync, taking turns leading the pack to absorb the wind.

At times while looping the course, because the skates don’t have brakes, one athlete might incidentally bump a teammate from behind. Back in 2018, Shane Domer, US Speedskating Chief of Sport Performance, wondered if those pushes were beneficial and how to optimize the number of exchanges at the front of the line.

Domer contacted the Chair of the governing body’s Sports Science Commission, aerodynamics expert Ingmar Jungnickel, to build a projection around these ideas. Jungnickel concocted what he called a “napkin math kind of model” that immediately showed a savings of about a second and a half, Domer recalled.

A week later, however, Jungnickel called back and told Domer, “Shane, I think we’re doing this thing all wrong. What if we don’t exchange at all?”

Jungnickel proposed that the two trailing skaters, who benefit from the energy savings of drafting, use that to push the leader forward rather than take the time to sprint out in front, likening the concept to bump drafting in NASCAR.

“The model showed that pushing was so clearly advantageous that you shouldn’t sometimes push,” Jungnickel said. “You just should abandon taking turns at the front altogether, and this should replace the old strategy.”

After years of testing — both through advanced computational fluid dynamics models and on-ice training — that revolutionary technique has propelled the American men from also-rans to both the podium and the record books. The US, which finished eighth at the 2018 Olympics, won a bronze at the 2022 Games and gold at the 2025 world championships while setting the world record in the event.

Internally, it’s called Project Slippery Fish, but to the world, the technique has come to be called the American Push.

Jungnickel had worked with Olympic cyclists in his native Germany, as well as with Tour de France teams, but at the time of this discovery, he was leading an innovation team at Specialized bicycles. Given the success he had in speedskating, Mike Levine, USOPC Senior Director of Performance Pathways and Innovation, suggested he apply for a grant from the donor-backed Performance Innovation Fund.

That funding enabled Jungnickel to start a sports tech R&D consulting firm, Inspire Gold, which then built an AI-powered aerodynamics spinoff — Airo — that replicates a wind tunnel by creating digital twins of athletes that can be manipulated in 3D to determine the best posture and formations. US Speedskating was the first client, but Jungnickel said he has also worked with national teams in ski and snowboard, cycling, luge and triathlon.

Without the grant, Jungnickel said he likely would not have started the company. Now, the core IP remains proprietary to US Olympians, but related use cases are helping support Inspire Gold. Levine emphasized that many Olympic sports don’t have technological support because they lack a large enough commercial market.

“Airo is selling the technology to bike fitters and bike shops, but there’s a speedskating version and the ski version that we will never sell to anybody but the US Olympic Committee,” Jungnickel said. “That’s our core business model: Essentially develop technologies that help Team USA win, and then commercialize them and long-term fund these businesses.”

The 26-member Performance Innovation Advisory Committee is chaired by Apple’s Eddy Cue and includes members from disparate backgrounds, such as team executive (the Spurs’ RC Buford), athlete (NFL lineman Kelvin Beachum), investor (Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon), business analytics (KAGR’s Jessica Gelman) and medicine (Texas Children’s Dr Jeff Shilt). The fund has raised about $50 million to date.

“It’s really a talented and generous group who provides us this risk capital, strategic guidance and network connections to invest in and execute bold ideas that can create competitive advantages for Team USA and elevate the performance, health and wellbeing of Team USA athletes,” Levine said, adding that the scope is “agnostic. We’re not defining what lanes we’re playing in.”

Founding committee member Geoff Yang, the managing director of Redpoint Ventures, explained the goal in 2015 was to combine “data, applied technology and ingenuity” to support and identify talented Olympians and Paralympians.

“The United States is home to the most innovative technologies in the world,” Yang said, “and Team USA should be a leader in applying those technologies.”

There are four main allocations:

• An international competitive analysis that uses machine learning to develop medal expectancies, helping drive high-performance planning;
• Athlete 360, a custom management system available to NGBs for free;
• Monthly online forums and an annual performance innovation summit “to create the collisions and spark a shared learning and cultivation of ideas,” Levine said; and
• Grants, such as the one utilized by US Speedskating and VAMA, a motion capture technology used to great effect by USA Track and Field.

“Without the funding to get these projects going, we lose steam on the innovation side,” Domer said. “Some of them fail, and these guys are OK with that. And that’s awesome because that helps us create the lack of fear of failure that we’ve had in the past.”

The speedskating team happens to be full of engineers who understand the underlying concepts. One skater, Emery Lehman, even spent time as an intern with Airo’s athlete engineering project. The willingness to experiment from the athletes and coach Ryan Shimabukuro has been critical.

“I give him and our athletes a lot of credit because they didn’t know what the payoff would be,” Domer said, “and to commit to doing this thing — well, as a speedskater, you’re not taught to skate pushing someone. So it took a lot of work to get them to adopt the technique.”

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

Main Photo: US Figure Skating

By Ethan Joyce

For US Figure Skating’s Justin Dillon, a collaboration announced last week for the organization resonates with the beginnings of his love of the sport.

Now the Chief High Performance Officer for US Figure Skating, Dillon’s affinity for the sport launched a career that reached the senior men’s national level. There was no resource to track progress or compare skating techniques in real time, something that will be much easier to do for skaters with the organization’s partnership with OOFSkate, which provides high-level analysis in an accessible way through an app.

“I was very self-driven, which is a great quality, but it was lonely,” Dillon told me. “So, I think that this also gives you the opportunity to compare your data. It’s almost like skating with a friend, because you can compare your data with athletes that either are similar levels or that you choose to share your data with or athletes at the level.”

The work comes as US Figure Skating looks toward the future, Dillon shared, in discovering how technology can move the sport toward the cutting edge around judging and analytical improvements. That journey is one that many sports and governing bodies find themselves on, with new startups trying to help that pursuit.

Simplifying analysis

OOFSkate is founded by Jerry Lu (the company’s CEO) and Jacob Blindenbach (CTO), a pair with extensive experience in applying innovation to performance and tracking for athletes.

Lu told my SBJ Tech colleague Joe Lemire that the startup’s education around skating has been powered by some significant names in the sport via an NBC connection, like former Olympians and world champions Nathan Chen, Tara Lipinski, and Johnny Weir, as well as the Skating Club of Boston.

With OOFSkate, skaters or coaches can record or upload skater routines to see insights like jump height, spin rotation and landing. It also provides for comparative analysis, where two videos can be analyzed simultaneously to compare multiple jumps from the same athletes or enable a skater to compare with fellow skaters. It only needs a single smartphone camera.

“If a coach records an athlete, they’re not going to carry a big camera connected to a big desktop computer that connects to something in order for them to use it,” Lu said. “So, it is designed to be a system that can be run on your cellphone with minimal lag.”

OOFSkate will support the upcoming Winter Olympics by providing data to boost TV production graphics and commentator analysis. The startup is self-funded. The founding pair met as students at the University of Virginia and have developed similar analytics tech for Olympic swimmers.

Perhaps my favorite detail? The “OOF” in OOFSkate is to replicate the reaction like “oof, that was bad,” but later retrofitted the acronym ‘obsess over form’ thanks to the help of sports scientist (and US Figure Skating Sports Science Manager) Dr Lindsay Slater.

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

Main Photo: NHL

By Joe Lemire

“Goal, Anaheim.”

“Goal, Boston.”

These pronouncements from video technicians were, for a time, the only interruptions piercing the quiet murmur of the NHL’s Situation Room, the league’s high-tech Toronto facility where every replay challenge is reviewed and ruled on.

Most goals are straightforward, but every one is reviewed by a hockey operations executive to ensure its legality. So long as the puck wasn’t kicked or high-sticked into the net, the game continues. But the technicians, each assigned a single game, watch several angles of each goal to prepare for a possible coach’s challenge — such as whether the offensive team was offside.

“Goal, Pittsburgh. This one’s on us.”

Suddenly, the room stirs to life. The Penguins appeared to net a game-winning goal against the Flyers in overtime, and the Situation Room initiates all challenges in the final minute of regulation or in OT. As the braintrust began reviewing the play — several hockey operations executives and a retired referee — word arrived that the on-ice refs whistled an infraction that nullified the goal.

A few minutes later, the Flyers scored their own apparent game winner, but very quickly, a potentially incriminating view of their entrance into the zone appeared on the screen.

The Situation Room features 16 LED flat screens along the front wall and roughly a dozen workspaces for technicians, each assigned to one game. Photo: NHL

“We’re going to challenge this. Let’s get the linesmen on.”

Word is communicated to the on-ice officials, one of whom informs the crowd that “the previous play is under review by the league to see if the play was offsides prior to the goal” as boos cascade down from Flyers fans.

Situation Room staff pored over several angles, most notably a Sony 4K camera installed right on the blue line for exactly this use. And the final verdict, made by the Situation Room, was close, but clear: Offside. No goal. About 80 seconds after the review began, the ref shared the news in Philadelphia. Even more boos followed.

“We are the keepers of the game,” said Kris King, NHL Executive Vice President of Hockey Operations, the department’s No. 2-ranking official under Colin Campbell.

This is the second year of an upgraded, high-tech Situation Room. There are 16 LED flat screens adorning the front wall, a desk in the middle of the room for executives and roughly a dozen workspaces around the perimeter, where technicians monitor every game. SBJ was one of two news outlets granted behind-the-scenes access on the first night the 10th-floor space was open to media.

“Our job doesn’t really change a lot, but the equipment that we use, and the knowledge that we gain from using better equipment, just gives us a little bit of an upper edge to get to the right answer quicker,” King added.

The NHL was the first professional sports league to centralize its reviews back in 1991, and it has worked with Sony-owned Hawk-Eye’s Synchronized Multi-Angle Replay Technology (SMART) as its video replay provider since 2015.

Separately, the league named Sony a global technology partner earlier this year, and Hawk-Eye’s tracking cameras were installed in every NHL arena prior to last season. That system offers potentially richer data: Whereas NHL Edge, which is powered by SMT sensors on the players and in the puck, tracks a single, center-of-mass location for each player, Hawk-Eye collects data from 29 points on each skater and six points from the hockey stick.

In time, that optical data from Hawk-Eye should inform a richer future of hockey analytics, more immersive fan engagement and, perhaps, data-driven support for officials.

“The NHL are very much innovators in the space — they want to innovate with us to create the future of technology in sport — but I love the fact that it is coupled with patience,” said Dan Cash, Sony Hawk-Eye’s Managing Director for North America. “They know that this is going to be powerful for their game, but they aren’t trying to sprint to the finish line here, which I think with technology can be sometimes a mistake.”

Cameras display a multitude of angles to enable the Situation Room crew to make speedy reviews. Photo: Joe Lemire

‘A real-time league’

When King joined the league office in the early 2000s, the process was dramatically different. When a discipline issue arose, King would need to ferry a VHS tape to Campbell, who lived in Tillsonburg, a two-hour drive from the NHL office in Toronto.

They’d each get in their cars and drive halfway, inevitably connecting at a Tim Horton’s, the most Canadian of meeting points. Campbell would then drive home, review the tape and make a ruling about a possible suspension or fine. Nowadays, that video is transmitted in about 125 milliseconds from arenas to the Situation Room and about as rapidly to Campbell’s house, saving immense time and gas, at only the cost of a fresh coffee.

“How we transport video is the secret sauce, so to speak,” Cash said. “It’s not easy to transport video as quick as we do over a wide area network.”

We are the keepers of the game.

Kris King, NHL Executive Vice President of Hockey Operations

It’s even less for the league’s next-door neighbors. The goal horn from next-door Scotiabank Arena blared concurrently with a Maple Leafs goal scored on the Situation Room monitor. (The horn also later sounded for a Blue Jays home run; the World Series, featuring the local team, was discreetly on a few Situation Room screens.) That immediacy lets the Situation Room prepare video clips and look at questionable calls before even hearing from the on-site staff.

“It definitely is a real-time league now,” said Rod Pasma, NHL Group Vice President of Hockey Operations. “A lot of times we’ll know exactly what’s going on before [the coaches] even call the officials over to challenge a play.”

On that night, the Situation Room scoured replays to prepare a ruling that never materialized, with the on-site coach opting against the review process. “That’s a good non-challenge,” King said, noting the likelihood the call wouldn’t have been reversed.

The NHL continues to add cameras: There are three in each goal, one above, four on the blue lines and an elevated 4K lens to provide the All-12 viewpoint of every skater. Some arenas now have Cosm C360 cameras. The league will soon begin testing an 8K version of the All-12 at the Prudential Center — where the NHL and Verizon also are creating an innovation lab to test new tech, scheduled for full operation early in the new year.

On this particular night in the Toronto Situation Room, as part of ESPN’s Frozen Frenzy, all 32 teams were playing, many of the start times staggered by 15-minute intervals to make the action nonstop. One workstation was solely dedicated to pressing go on a digital dasherboards celebration for Alex Ovechkin’s 900th goal. The NHL didn’t want to chance it flashing live on-air, only for the goal to be overturned on review.

“The technology’s gotten to a point where the only thing we can’t do right now is literally hit the horn in the building,” Pasma said.

Hawk-Eye’s tracking cameras were installed in every NHL arena prior to last season. Photo: Joe Lemire

Bird’s-eye view

High in the rafters above Scotiabank Arena, looking down on the Maple Leafs’ 1960s Stanley Cup banners, are six black, rectangular cameras affixed to the catwalk and helping power the Hawk-Eye tracking system. From up here in the rafters, the ice seems impossibly low, but the 4K, 60-frames-per-second cameras capture granular movement data via images streamed directly to the cloud — Hawk-Eye’s first leaguewide deal to be cloud-native. Another six cameras are placed on lower levels of the arena to avoid obstruction from the center-hung video board.

Those dozen video inputs are triangulated and processed to determine the precise location of every skater and his stick. Hawk-Eye has provided MLB with bat tracking data for a couple seasons, but that’s only one bat in a known location every time — far different than 12 sticks across a 200-foot-by-85-foot ice rink.

For now, the AI models interpreting this data are still going through iterations to reach the confidence threshold for accuracy needed for wider distribution. The NHL has never had stick data, and Hawk-Eye and the league are in the “true development phase in refining the technology,” said Sean Williams, NHL Vice President, Innovation and Technology Partnerships. Williams added that it could soon be used to enhance the existing Edge tracking that teams can access through the data feed.

When Hawk-Eye data does become a part of the NHL Edge repository, it will not only further enrich the data-driven storytelling for fans via broadcast and digital media and help clubs more intricately analyze the sport, it also could provide other inputs for referees, linesmen and Situation Room executives.

“Not currently, but that’s definitely where we’re going,” said Sean Ellis, NHL Vice President of Hockey Operations, of using tracking data for officiating. “We’re not going to roll it out until we’re 100% confident and comfortable that the data that we’re getting is accurate.”

Even then, the potential is more to inform than automate. “We are genuinely looking at all options,” Williams said, “but our fundamental strategy is to keep the call on the ice made by humans.”

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

By John Portch

Do you have a process in place to make sure that the tech you implement is the right one?

Fabio Serpiello, the Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University, first posed this question to Leaders Performance Institute members as part of the survey that resulted in our Trend Report.

Fewer than half of respondents said ‘yes’, with more than a third saying ‘no’. Curiously, nearly 20 percent said ‘I don’t know’.

“That’s a good chunk,” Serpiello told members of that 20 percent figure while leading a recent Leaders Virtual Roundtable. “It is probably more interesting than the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ given that most of the people that responded are at the ‘head of’, ‘director of’ or ‘vice president of’ level.”

Yet in the same survey, almost 90 percent of respondents believed that a framework was at least ‘somewhat important’:

Logically, it seems likely that a good proportion of those respondents face frustrations in their work.

This likelihood set the stage for the third and final instalment of Serpiello’s roundtable series looking at tech-related innovation in sport.

First, the table noted some common problems around making decisions on tech.

A lack of decision-making frameworks: the magnitude of the challenge will depend on to whom you speak. Some markets are more mature than others; some sports resist tech-related innovation. As Serpiello said: “We are experiencing a lot of difference in the maturity of the European context and the Australian context versus the American context in some of these discussions, naturally, because of the way sport works.”

Overzealous vendors: almost every practitioner has heard a misfiring pitch from tech vendors at some point; they’re even more likely to have seen purported tech solutions gathering dust in a cupboard at their practice facility. A senior sports scientist illustrated the reality in his role:

“It’s not always us identifying a gap and reaching out to the best fit to fill that gap. It’s a lot of companies reaching out to us and trying to be ahead of the curve sometimes, which is maybe filling a need that you don’t have.”

Pressure from leadership: in some cases, senior leaders are pushing their high performance teams into finding the latest gadget. The aforementioned sports scientist also feels pressure from above:

“We’re being pushed from the top, even if you don’t know if the suggested tech solution makes sense. They’ll say: ‘just get some fancy toy that people will talk about’.”

The table also pointed to several solutions.

Serpiello spoke of the Sports Tech Research Network, specifically its Quality Framework for Sports Technologies, as a time-saver.

This white paper introduces a standardised, evidence-based framework which can be adopted by sports technology stakeholders to assess the value, usability and quality of technology.

Developed in collaboration with 48 experts across the sports industry by means of a Delphi study design, the framework includes a range of qualities grouped under five overarching pillars:

“Some of these pillars lead to more hardcore science questions; accuracy, repeatability, reproducibility, construct validity, or predictive validity; those are very much science-driven,” said Serpiello. “Some of them are more operational such as compliance, data privacy or environmental sustainability; and some are more user experience; how does the customer support and training work? These things are very important for you in sport because they make or break the day-to-day choices and the day-to-day use of technology.”

He then illustrated how the framework might be used to make informed choices:

One or two members had already used and adapted the framework to their team, as one sports scientist explained:

“We’ve adopted it when we’re looking at multiple systems for velocity-based training or GPS, just to give our practitioners and stakeholders guidance and have that scoring system to then see how it ends up; and to put in some objectivity to the potential subjectivity of that process. I think it’s helped us a lot because different stakeholders in different departments can come together. We actually added to it as well for things like partnerships and sponsorships and adapted it to our setting, which made it even more useful.”

Governing body mandates

As Serpiello explained, international confederations such as FIFA and FIBA, as well as national governing bodies, such as the Dutch Olympic Committee*Dutch Sports Federation, mandate the format in which data must be produced by companies.

In a similar vein, the AFL has an “internal technology group” for vetting all potential tech solutions. Serpiello said: “It includes coaches, medical, sports science, S&C, commercial, legal personnel and they say ‘we meet once a month and we deal with the approaches this way’. So outside that process, they do not respond to you, they do not engage with you, they say to you as a company ‘this is the process, submit your inquiry, and then we’ll assess it’. I like it because it takes away a lot of that constant having to deal with companies that come and say ‘we’ve got this amazing product’ only for you to then realise that it’s really the same product as before.”

Another example is the NBA Launchpad, which is the league’s initiative to source, evaluate and pilot emerging technologies.

“It’s basically ‘come and show us what you have and we’ll look at it’,” said Serpiello. “That’s slightly different from ‘okay, we’ve got an issue and we’re going to throw it out there’.”

Accuracy and reliability are less important than practicality

Accuracy and reliability are important but they are not everything.

“I’ve slightly changed my mind on this over the years,” said Serpiello. “I’ve seen organisations chasing the product that was one percent more accurate or reliable on some of the main variables, only to then completely disregard the other part, which was does it have API [application programming interface] connections with my other systems? Does it allow me to make quick decisions every morning when the athlete rocks up? Those things are far more valuable than being able to say confidently that high-speed running this week was 1K or 1.1K.”

A programme manager in the Australian system concurred while highlighting the tension between providing broadcast data (where granularity and accuracy are not as important as they might be for a high performance team).

He said:

“I think that’s the healthy tension between something that is returning value, whether it be in the speed of decision making or feedback from experimentation; that’s the inherent tension of scientifically valid and reliable systems versus commercially valuable systems… and just because something’s not valid and reliable doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. You just need a measurement to be able to reduce that accuracy and reliability to a standard that you’re comfortable with.”

What to read next

Tech Change Is Coming – Are you Prepared?

Main Photo: Movrs

By Joe Lemire

As the inspector made his final rounds following renovations to the University of Georgia’s Foley Field, head baseball coach Wes Johnson and some sports tech vendors were among those waiting outside. As soon as the ballpark received its certificate of occupancy, they went to work so Bulldogs pitchers could immediately start using the two new high-tech pitching tunnels.

Outfitted with NewtForce pitching mounds and motion-capture cameras powered by Movrs algorithms, pitchers fired fastballs while scaffolding, forklifts and hard hat-wearing construction workers were still cleaning up the space. That’s how much Johnson — one of the sport’s most innovative pitching minds — prioritized the data his athletes could glean from the synchronization of biomechanics analysis and ground reaction forces in real time. Prior systems required processing times too long to make immediate adjustments.

The idea behind the NewtForce pitching mound originated with Johnson, who mentioned the idea to his childhood friend of more than 40 years, Kyle Barker, who operates his own aerospace engineering firm, AeroNautique.

“If you’re really going to get into development, you need it real time,” Johnson said. “A pitcher can’t wait to throw pitches seven minutes at a time. We started testing it, and it’s a leader in the industry. This is something that nobody has been able to perfect, quite frankly, except him.”

The Bulldogs began using the new high-tech pitching tunnels while construction workers were still clearing the space. Photo courtesy of NewtForce.

For Barker, this installation was a milestone he had waited for since the company’s founding in 2020. Sports technology, he explained, suffered by existing in “fractured silos of excellence.” Joining forces with other providers — in this case, multi-camera motion capture from Movrs — lets the end user get better insights in a more seamless fashion. By syncing biomechanics data and mound force data, coaches can quickly pinpoint areas needing improvement.

“Movrs has been a great addition for us there because they buy into that vision,” Barker said. “A lot of these coaches will tell you they don’t need any more data. They need to try and figure out what to do with what they’ve got.”

Representatives from numerous MLB organizations have visited Athens to see Georgia’s facilities and take notes for their own operations. Johnson said the pitching tunnels — which, in addition to NewtForce and Movrs, have Trackman radars and Edgertronic super slow-mo cameras — are used daily, with each pitcher getting assessed about three times a week (though not always while throwing baseballs at full effort).

“This is not medical-grade, research-level data acquisition,” Barker said. “This is getting on the ragged edge of sampling rates and wait times and trying to find a sweet spot where we can give you something before the guy gets the ball back and throws the next pitch.”

Then, a coach can give a cue for the pitcher to adjust his movement in hopes of effecting change. That rapid feedback loop, he added, can help identify necessary tweaks far more expeditiously than a strength and conditioning coach designing an eight-week program to correct a physical defect — which might still happen but can sometimes be avoided.

“What’s completely liberating to the right kind of coach there is he can be wrong,” Barker said. “He can be wrong two or three times in that session, and see it because he’s seeing the next pitch — we’ve wasted two pitches, not two months.”

Making this new system possible was a joint integration stemming from Movrs’ change in business model from direct sales to a partner-led approach. Movrs is a graduate of the Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech Accelerator, through which it has collaborated with both Sky Sports and NBC Sports.

“We had to figure out where we sat in the value chain, so we went to this partner model, and NewtForce represents our first partner,” said Movrs CEO Dorian Pieracci. “If we want to explore or go into baseball, we want a partner who’s going to go and leverage our technology and our capabilities.”

The ideal partner for Movrs, he added, is a firm with technical proficiency to build a differentiated product and then also a capable, compatible executive team. NewtForce, led by Barker and former MLB pitcher Zach Day, checked both of those boxes in baseball, and Pieracci hopes to find similar counterparts in other sports and even other industries.

“Movrs helps people and artificial intelligence agents understand how humans move and interact in the real world by generating structured data from video,” he said. “Ultimately, whether that’s for sports, whether that’s for robotics, whether that’s for whatever else, the partner model actually allows us to do that across a variety of markets and verticals.”

Georgia’s Johnson, whose career has wound through seven colleges and a stint as the Minnesota Twins’ pitching coach, was an early adopter of biomechanical analysis a dozen years ago. While at Central Arkansas some 15 years back, a researcher visited the team to run studies measuring the directional force pitchers were placing on their back foot — how much was down into the mound or back toward the pitching rubber.

Early versions of NewtForce a decade ago weighed “about two tons,” Johnson recalled, but even the prototypes provided the missing dataset. Since then, Barker has streamlined the hardware to be less cumbersome.

“We started to see extreme relevance in what we were getting,” Johnson said, “and then obviously he’s taken it and gone to the moon.”

More than 50 high-tech mounds have been installed to date. Pittsburgh Pirates ace Paul Skenes, who pitched for Johnson at LSU, began using NewtForce in college and has said, “The mound removes the guesswork.”

Initially, the NewtForce mound had cameras shooting video, but the data wasn’t synchronized with the imagery. The new setup with Movrs approaches the “holy grail” of analysis, Johnson said.

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

By John Portch

“Organisations face rapid technological change but often lack structured decision-making processes,” said Fabio Serpiello.

The Director of Sport Strategy at Central Queensland University led the second instalment of a three-part Leaders Virtual Roundtable series aimed at exploring the dynamics of tech-supported innovation in sport.

As host, Serpiello wanted to “provide frameworks and stimulate discussion on how to select the right technology for performance challenges, ensuring decisions align with strategy and context.”

The Leaders Trend Report earlier this year highlighted that fewer than half of practitioners can point to a structured decision-making process within their organisation. Many have lamented this with Serpiello, which stands to reason as nearly all respondents in the report perceive such a structure as important.

It starts with a clear performance question, as a sports scientist working in European football put it.

She said: “If we’re going to make a decision, we have to have something well-structured. We need to ask what do we want from what we’re collecting or what do we want from what we’re asking the athletes to do.”

Another attendee, with oversight of several sports, recalled their own situation with problem clarification. “The solution looked like the key, but many sports were unclear on the problem.”

Serpiello presented the group with two models to address this issue.

Greg Satell’s Model of Innovation

Innovation, Serpiello argues, comes in several shapes and forms depending on the nature of the problem. To make his point, he introduced renowned change management specialist Greg Satell’s Model of Innovation, which provides a practical framework for introducing innovative practices, encourages strategic thinking about problems and helps to facilitate better collaboration.

He presented a diagram of Satell’s model to the table:

Serpiello had previously shared his thoughts on each quadrant:

Basic research – a low understanding of both domain and problem: “We don’t really know what the problem is and we don’t really know in which field or area it happens.”

Disruptive innovation – a well-understood domain but poorly understood problem: “In this area you may need something like innovation labs or launch pads.”

Breakthrough innovation – a poorly understood domain but well-defined problem: “This is the reverse of disruptive innovation… the classic example of open innovation.”

Sustaining innovation – a well-understood domain and problem: “The most common form in sport [and often the subject of] continuous research, design thinking or road mapping.”

A fuller account can be found here.

A general manager of a successful Paralympic programme gave an example of breakthrough innovation in their work supporting totally blind swimmers:

“We’re working with our institute partners and also reaching out to universities to understand if there’s interest in terms of product development and research in this space.”

There is a clear problem, the domain is less defined, and the organisation is piloting new concepts.

Another attendee working in the Olympic and Paralympic system spoke of an example of disruptive innovation when their team sought coaching tools, primarily:

“The piloting was done with the university [engineering department]… the final year project has to be sponsored, innovative, and they’re graded on the finish of the product and customer satisfaction… they were constantly in touch with us, so in terms of getting clear on the problem and implementing a solution, they were fantastic, these young engineers… The projects that succeeded were embedded into sport, and it was because the engineer was back and forth with the client, with us, and with the athletes.”

The Cynefin Framework

Serpiello then reacquainted the table with the Cynefin Framework.

‘Cynefin’, which is pronounced ‘ku-nev-in’, is a Welsh word that signifies ‘the multiple factors in our environment and our experience that influence us in ways we can never understand,’ as Snowden and Boon wrote in their 2007 Harvard Business Review essay titled ‘A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making’.

The Cynefin Framework, they continued, ‘helps leaders determine the prevailing operative context so they can make appropriate choices’.

Source: HBR

The framework classifies decision-making contexts into five domains:

“The Cynefin Framework essentially classifies decision-making on the continuum between order and unordered conditions,” said Serpiello, adding, “because if you make the wrong decision, or if you use the wrong quadrant, you may waste a lot of time without actually getting to the right answer.”

He cited the example of tracking tech companies selling their wares as the answer to complicated and complex problems. “What tracking technology should do really well, in my opinion, is give you the ability to quickly categorise what’s happening in training and then respond properly, whether it is a load management, readiness or a recovery response.”

Other ideas

• Serpiello mentioned the Performance Innovation Groups favoured by AFL teams in Australia. These clubs hold quarterly meetings with representatives from coaching, sports science and medical. The groups aim to review emerging issues from internal processes and evaluate inquiries from external technology providers (who must submit an application).
• A performance specialist from the UK spoke of her use of the STRN Framework (Sports Technology Research Network Quality Assurance Framework). It is a methodology developed to help sports organisations evaluate and implement technology solutions effectively. Find out more on the STRN Framework here.

What to read next

The Three Literacies of Repeat Medal-Winning Systems

Main Photo: Getty Images

By Joe Lemire

You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.

* * * * *

New Zealand cyclist Ella Wyllie competed in her second Tour de France Femmes, which this year expanded to nine stages. After turning pro in 2023, she first participated in that summer’s Tour de France and finished second in the youth classification and later took eighth overall in Australia’s Tour Down Under. Wyllie, who is also studying civil engineering at the University of Auckland, missed last year’s Tour de France with injury but returned this year to finish 80th and pick up two points in the general classification as a member of Liv AlUla Jayco.

We caught up with her ahead of the race.

On preparing for the Tour de France Femmes…

I’m so excited. I did the Tour two years ago, and it was my first big tour. And last year I missed out just because of injury and everything, so it’s really nice to be in a position this year where I’m happy with my form coming into it.

The Tour is getting longer, which is exciting, and, yeah, definitely the last couple stages, I was lucky enough to go on a recon with the team. We’ve checked them out, and they are looking pretty hard so I’ve been doing some training to replicate that. And there’s a hilltop finish, so I’ve been doing a lot of climbing.

 

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A post shared by Ella Wyllie (@ellawyllie)

On her training plans…

I have a team coach, Marco [Pinotti], so he’s been really helpful because he just plans the training for me, and I discuss how I think things went or maybe my own feelings about things and where I think I’m struggling a bit more. He just looks at all that and the course demands, and we just plan intervals, VO2 efforts, all the fun things, and mix it in with a bit of endurance riding to get a good base. But yeah, it’s really the spicy VO2 efforts that get the race kick in the legs and hopefully will put me in good form.

On the tech she uses…

I have a power meter on my bike, and also heart rate is another big thing in terms of just seeing how you respond on the fatigue and all those kind of metrics. Lactate testing can also be helpful in certain periods of training and everything. Cycling is just getting more and more technically advanced in all those metrics, but also, at the end of the day, you’re not looking at your power meter when someone’s attacking. You might understand, oh yeah, it’s hard, but I’m not going to say to my competitor, ‘Oh sorry, we’re 100 watts over what I should be doing for three minutes. Sorry, I’m just going to wait.’

At the end of the day, that’s just all to help the training, really, because in the race, it’s actually just all on perceived effort. And you just have to go hard when you need to go hard. Especially on long climbs and breakaway efforts, you’re probably more in tune with, Okay, I’m going to try and stick around this watt range because you know exactly how you can handle fatigue. It’s always a useful tool, but you also have to remember that at the end of the day, it’s a race.

Photo: Getty Images

On what she applies from her engineering studies…

I’m always messaging my coach with, ‘Oh, look, I saw this.’ Yeah, I definitely appreciate all of that stuff. I’m very analytically minded, so if I can notice patterns or see improvements through certain things — I think sometimes it’s not so obvious — but when you do look at all the data, you can pick up the small wins. And to me, that’s motivating too. I’m also known to like Strava.

On evaluating brand deals and supporting her journey in sport…

I’m in probably a bit more of a unique position coming from New Zealand where we didn’t have so much support from our governing body, Cycling New Zealand. They are really great in some areas, and obviously we have the chance to be racing in the world championships, but we don’t have the money, necessarily, to fully fund it. So when I go to a world championships, I’m paying the majority of the fees to go, and it’s expensive because I have to pay the flights, you’ve got to pay towards staff support and accommodation.

So, yeah, I’m definitely reaching out to brands and people that are wanting to invest in my journey and everything. But it has to be the right partnership. I think it has to be mutually beneficial and also things that make sense. I’m not going to go and promote something that’s completely outside of my realm being a professional cyclist.

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.