New Zealand’s Ella Wyllie is leaving no stone unturned as she continues her return from injury – tech included – but, as she explains, it has to be matched by effort.
Main Photo: Getty Images
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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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.
The Sony-designed devices are designed to take into account both weather conditions and crowd noise.
The custom-made headsets — developed in less than a year since the NFL and Sony announced their wide-ranging partnership — borrow some features from their high-end consumer headphones while incorporating a new highly-directional mic to isolate the coach’s voice and new water resistance to ensure operability in all conditions.
The new Sony-branded headsets were tested in the background on NFL sidelines last season and were distributed to team coaching staffs late last month in advance of training camps opening this week.
“Sony engineers visited each of the sidelines — they heard feedback from the coaches to make sure that what are some of the points that they should be addressing?” said NFL VP/Football Technology Rama Ravindranathan. “So it’s an iterative development process where Sony engineers partnered with NFL IT, football operations, game operations, to ensure every bit of the feedback was gathered and consolidated.”
That included data collection of hottest and coldest NFL games from the past 20 years, as well as recording crowd noise from a Monday Night Football game at SoFi Stadium where the volume exceeded 100 decibels.
Shunsuke Nakahashi, Product Manager for Audio at Sony, said engineers replicated that noise in a special studio in Tokyo, wore the headsets in the shower and in large refrigerators to test its all-conditions functionality. The belt pack connects to the Verizon private network in use in all stadiums. Ravindranathan said that was tested by the yellow hat-wearing communications technicians last season as “coach proxies.”
“We use the insights and principle from XM6,” Nakahashi said, referring to the top Sony consumer product, “and also we have a deep engineering foundation in precision sound and also vocal clarity.”
The Sony lettering on the headsets is large and unmistakable and becomes some of the most visible on-field signage, said NFL SVP/Sponsorship Tracie Rodburg, noting that Sony joins Nike, Gatorade and Microsoft among the most prominent branding. Sponsorship of the NFL headsets had been vacant for two years since Bose exited its deal after eight seasons of holding that inventory.
“Working with Sony, we’re both committed to innovation,” she said, adding: “We want to make sure everybody knows that we have a trusted partner on the sideline.”
While the new Sony headsets are custom-built for the demands of NFL coaches, some of the newly developed features might eventually trickle their way down to the broader market.
“Right now, we’re just razor-focused on delivering the NFL Coach’s Headset, but once everything is settled, then probably we can foresee what element we can bring to the consumer,” Nakahashi 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.
The two-time Olympic triathlete sat down with SBJ Tech to discuss the impact of technology on his career as he ventures in the world of sports business.
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.
* * * * *
Since announcing his retirement last November, the 37-year-old has grown increasingly immersed in business. He co-founded a nutrition brand, TrueFuels, and has invested in more than 20 startups. Brownlee is an associate partner at Redrice Ventures and a member of the IOC Athletes’ Commission who consults on human performance and emerging technologies. He also leads The Brownlee Foundation, the charitable endeavor he started with his Olympic triathlete brother, Jonny.
On the impact of tech in his career…
Some technology happens in, let’s call it, a relatively linear progression. But the example of a technology that hasn’t happened in a linear progression is shoe tech, which is incredible. Of course, there were small innovations here and there in shoes, using slightly different forms of rubber soles. Then, all of a sudden, we see a steep change in innovation, with using the light, thicker foam and inserting the carbon rods that we started seeing probably 2018, 2019 and really exploded in 2020 and ’21.
The real innovation in terms of technology, for me, is training attitudes and approaches, which isn’t as sexy and obvious. I saw technological progressions on every form, in terms of attitudes, in terms of the scientific approach to training, in terms of the equipment we’re using, whether that is shoes or bikes. I started out with a bike that was all made of metal and your gear-changing happened very manually, and I went to electric gears with a power meter on a bike that was mostly carbon fiber.
Technological innovation is across all those different domains. In terms of tech, like hardcore tech — wearables and monitoring and having an impact on training — I started out in a world where [there was] a stopwatch and you might use a heart rate monitor as your primary training monitoring devices. I remember, as a 16-year-old, using a heart rate monitor and starting to use the first GPS watches to now where there’s all kinds of training monitoring devices, whether that’s internal — heart rate monitoring, HRV, muscle oxygenation — to external: power meters, GPS watches and bike computers.
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On his business interests…
I did a finance master’s at university, and so that business approach always interested me. I always had an attitude that I wanted to invest and build value for the long term because I knew that my athletic career won’t last forever, so that was an important aspect to me. Some of my early sponsorship deals had bits of equity in them. So a business like Boardman Bikes, for example, that was a big sponsor of mine from the early days — part of that was an equity deal.
I also had always been interested in businesses that can be a solution to make people perform better in elite sport but also perform better in terms of living healthier, active lifestyles. Obviously, backing great people to make great companies and great solutions is part of the answer. It’s not the whole answer — government plays a role in that, and charities play a role in that — but also great private businesses play a role in that.
On the impact of AI…
AI will affect sport in every different domain, as it’ll have an impact on all our lives in every domain. It will affect how people train. It will affect how people integrate data, use data, interact with data, how they’ll use all that information to prescribe their training going forwards, how it will help people understand more and deeper insights in recovery.
In terms of how we engage fans, obviously, there’s going to be massive changes there — engaging fans on a really personal level to watch events and interact with athletes and teams. Whether that’s camera angles or following a particular player or athlete or learning more about them as the events are happening, or learning more about how you can engage in whatever that sport might be, whether it’s badminton or football or triathlon or whatever.
The IOC are looking at it from an organization point of view as well. How can you use that technology to be more efficient? Use energy better, help people get in and out of stadia better.
On co-founding TrueFuels…
I was always being fascinated by maximizing human performance, and my [approach to] nutrition probably came out of me developing my own fuels in the last few years to race on was a challenge. I’ve got a feeling that the majority of people for whom a marathon or an Ironman or whatever endurance challenge goes wrong, nutrition is the primary reason for that.
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I had this idea of, how do you create a brand that is about helping the consumer to understand what they need, to make sure that nutrition isn’t the limiting factor for the event, whatever the event that they’re doing? The combination of that is product and education and community.
On his role with Redrice…
I invested on my own, joined local angel networks and got known to invest in sports businesses. Over the last few years, I only really invested alongside various VC funds, one of those was Redrice. I got to know the team at Redrice over the last couple of years. They’re a consumer VC, but my thesis is that everything is going to become more wellness-based over the next five or 10 years, especially the consumer market. And we see all kinds of evidence of that increasing spend on wellness, especially in the younger demographic who are spending proportionally more on wellness than older people. Health and wellness is becoming a luxury signal.
I started talking about a role with them as they work towards investing more in this space, and we came up with the idea of a sports collective that I’m leading and Andy Murray is a part of it.
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.
An enhanced version of semi-automated offside technology will make its debut at the tournament, which is set to take place in the US, Canada and Mexico.
That’s the joint venture created last November by FIFA and Hawk-Eye Innovations with an initial charge of assisting referees and automating data collection.
FIFA and Sony-owned Hawk-Eye first debuted Semi-Automated Offsides Technology at the Qatar World Cup in 2022, and now it has created an enhanced version of it. Only calls in which a player is within 10 centimeters of the offsides line require manual oversight from an official. Also at this tournament, the tabulation of event data — everything from shots, passes, corner kicks and the like — has been automated with computer vision algorithms, supplanting what historically had always been a very manual process.
Early feedback has been positive, putting those innovations on track for an appearance at next year’s tournament. The quadrennial World Cup typically serves as a debut for new tech. Goal-line technology first appeared in 2014, VAR in 2018 and SAOT in 2022.
“We recognize that, in order to do stuff which is pretty game-changing, you have to do it on a two-, three-, four-year cycle,” Rufus Hack, the CEO of Sony’s sports businesses, told SBJ. “It doesn’t take a year to develop the technology, to implement it, to refine it, to test it, to introduce it. And so we came on this concept of, let’s do an eight-year joint venture where, effectively, they put in some of their IP, some of their technology, their football expertise. We put in people, our technology expertise, our learnings from other sport.”
The vision of the FTC
The Football Technology Center is based in Zurich, like FIFA, and relies on dedicated personnel from both FIFA and Hawk-Eye. In lieu of a CEO, it is steered by a board of directors, consisting of Hawk-Eye’s Hack and Managing Director Ben Crossing and FIFA’s Dir of Innovation Johannes Holzmüller and Technical Director Steve Martens. There is also a separate joint operational management committee with equal representation from both entities.
“We see this as potentially the Football Technology Center creating new football technologies, assets and IP, which then can potentially be commercialized-slash-distributed to the rest of the sport,” Hack said. “Ultimately, FIFA are very much about looking to democratize sports technology down to the member associations,” referring to the 211 countries and territories across six continents that are represented by FIFA.
“For us, this is less about a significant revenue opportunity of being able to create new products,” he added. “It’s more about being able to be thought leaders and sitting side by side with FIFA, who are effectively the guardians of football technology in the game, to be able to do these new innovations, and then potentially working together to distribute some of that for the rest of the football community.”
Hawk-Eye’s cameras and algorithms capture data from 29 points on the human body, so a player’s limbs, hands and feet are fully tracked. That generates millions of datapoints per game, but FIFA sought practical use of it.
“We have high-quality data available, but at the end of the day, we also want to have valuable information — an outcome, not only for officiating, but also for other areas,” Holzmüller said. “We needed to have some vehicle where we can develop and explore how this data can be used in the future.”
The lead time for many of these projects is long, but there other avenues that can be explored. For instance, Hack said it might be possible in the future to use technology to determine whether that ball has gone out of bounds or whether it struck a player’s hand or other part of the body.
“We believe in these big, long-term strategic partnerships,” Hack said. “We believe it provides a much better opportunity for the rightsholder and partner to co-invest alongside each other and genuinely feels like a partnership, rather than that buyer/supplier relationship.”
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.
As Dr Robert Cantu and Mike Oliver from the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment explain, their research is helping the sport to understand overall head impact exposure in a more nuanced fashion, while potentially influencing training methods, rules and player development models.
Main Image: courtesy of NOCSAE
The Sports & Fitness Industry Association reported that 758,000 youth ages 6-12 were regularly playing tackle football as of 2023, which is down from 965,000 who consistently played a decade ago in 2015 — a 21% decrease. And those who do play have been wearing helmets certified by a safety standard primarily with adults in mind, not kids.
That is now changing, as the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, which first established safety guidelines for football helmets in 1973, is introducing its first youth football helmet standard specifically designed to protect players before they reach high school.
While the existing NOCSAE testing standards minimized impact energy in all helmets, from youth to pros, this more targeted measure should offer further protection to those players participating in leagues affiliated with Pop Warner, American Youth Football, USA Football and similar organizations.
“That’s been really very effective in preventing injuries in kids, too,” renowned neurosurgeon and NOCSAE Vice President Dr Robert Cantu said of the standard previously in place, “but we are very well aware of the fact that kids are not miniature adults. They have unique situations. Their brains are not as myelinated. Their necks are quite weak, so their head is a bobblehead doll. Their heads are quite big when they’re young, and quite heavy. And the types of hits that they take in football are not the same as older kids take.”
Peer-reviewed, university-led research more than a decade in the making drove the new youth standard led by NOCSAE’s Scientific Advisory Committee, which Cantu chairs. The most critical change in the new mandate, which goes into effect in March 2027 to give manufacturers time to adapt, is that helmets for the youngest players — facemask included — cannot exceed 3.5 pounds.
Only a few manufacturers already make sufficiently light youth football helmets, such as Light, Riddell and Schutt, but they represent a limited selection in the market. Light CEO Nicholas Esayian explained that heavier helmets typically fare better in lab tests but often don’t serve the needs of players on the field, especially younger players.
While the NFL and NFLPA have led pioneering work to test helmets for that league and NOCSAE has continued to iterate and improve its standards required at the pro, collegiate and high school levels, the youth player had been overlooked.
“Everybody tends to think, well, as long as they’re not going any faster than the [older] guys up above, then the helmet should be OK,” said Mike Oliver, who served as NOCSAE executive director for 20 years before stepping down this spring and remaining as the organization’s general counsel. “But the comment was made that we really don’t know what the risk exposure is. So how likely are you to get hit at some velocity versus hitting the ground versus hitting another player?”
Research funded by NOCSAE and led by professors Steve Rowson (Virginia Tech) and Blaine Hoshizaki (University of Ottawa) investigated head impacts, collecting data from sensors, triangulated cameras and predictive modeling in youth players. Rowson looked at ages 10 through 14, while Hoshizaki focused on ages 5 through 9. The results were surprising, Oliver said, noting that “the younger group actually had the higher head accelerations in games and practices than the older group, and turns out the primary reason is they hit the ground more often.”
New standards for helmets are designed to provide more protection for young players before they reach high school. (Image courtesy of NOCSAE)
While most governmental agencies require only self-certification of compliance, NOCSAE, an independent nonprofit, has required third-party certification since 2015, with manufacturers needing accredited institutions to assess products.
Cantu previously has recommended that there not be any tackle football for children younger than 14, but that’s his personal position. With NOCSAE, he views his role as ensuring best practices.
“If somebody is going to be doing something, I feel very strongly that I would like to be, if I can, helpful in making the activity as safe as absolutely possible,” he said.
There’s a compounding effect with head impacts. There’s greater research and understanding that the accumulation of sub-concussive hits can lead to problems over time, so minimizing that exposure early can pay dividends.
“To the extent we can attenuate the forces the brain sees, even if it’s 10%, that’s meaningful over thousands of hits to the head over a lengthy career playing a sport,” Cantu said.
New NOCSAE Executive Director John Parsons previously served as director of the NCAA Sport Science Institute and indicated the importance of how the college and pro games have taken steps to modify rules to mitigate risk of all head impacts.
“The conversation has shifted a little bit, so we’re not only just talking about concussion, but we’re also talking about head impact exposure,” Parsons said.
To date, NOCSAE has funded roughly $12 million in grants for researching concussions in sports. In addition to the work done by Rowson and Hoshizaki, the SAC reviewed more than 40 other studies related to injury risk in youth football to help inform the new policy. The weight limit is the biggest change, but the youth standard also has a lower threshold for acceptable rotational acceleration, as that type of impact is shown to cause injuries.
What neither the new standard nor the one for older players requires is any particular material or shape.
“Our standards are intentionally design neutral,” Oliver said. “Technology is moving pretty quickly, and if we did that, our standard may specify something today and six months from now, there’s something better, or there’s something new. And so we don’t do that, and it’s one of the reasons why you see such a divergence of engineering approaches to helmet design, whether it’s pro or otherwise.”
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.
Commissioner Rob Manfred announced that he plans to propose that ABS be implemented for major league regular-season games next season.
But it won’t be the first top league to do so. The Korean Baseball Organization has had ABS in place for two seasons. Its robot umpires call every pitch, as opposed to the two-challenges-per-game system in place in Class AAA and expected in MLB, following a spring training trial.
MLB’s own testing has been rigorous, dating to the MLB-affiliated Atlantic League’s usage back in 2019 and continuing through all levels of the minor leagues. But the KBO represents an opportunity for learnings from the third-most prominent league in the world.
“We have a nice back and forth with KBO and NPB on these rule issues,” Manfred told SBJ, referring to the Korean and Japanese pro leagues. “We pay a lot of attention to those sorts of experiments, how they’ve worked. They were very satisfied with the way it played out in Korea, and we take that as encouraging as well.”
More details emerge on MLB’s robot umpire plan
The KBO uses a camera tracking system from its longtime data and technology provider, Sports2i, just as MLB will utilize Hawk-Eye cameras, the same system that powers Statcast. MLB’s minors have used a two-dimensional plane at the center of home plate, but the KBO ABS requires a pitch to cross through the strike zone at both the middle and back of the plate.
ABS in the KBO uses the corners of the plate and adds 2 centimeters to either side, using a formula based on a player’s height. The zone was lowered roughly 1 centimeter at the top and bottom edges between 2024 and 2025, based on feedback.
Any strike zone can be inputted into the technology, and it may take some iterations to get it just right. The rulebook defines a rectangle but, in practice, most human umpires call an oval — neglecting to call strikes in the upper and lower corners. Human umps also typically widen the zone in blowouts or on 3-0 counts.
The impact of ABS in the KBO: Walks have ticked up slightly, from 9.1% of all plate appearances in 2023 (the last non-ABS season) to 9.4% this year, while strikeouts have increased more dramatically, from 17.7% in 2023 to 19.9% in 2025.
Kwangwon Lee, Sports2i’s team leader for its global business unit, told SBJ, “Our partner, KBO, always makes bold and innovative decisions to develop the league,” and added that its R&D department continues to iterate and improve the tracking system.
Mets designated hitter Jared Young, who starred in a 38-game stint with the Doosan Bears last season, said pitches on the edges were called normally but noted it appeared to be “a very up-and-down strike zone” and that it seemed inconsistent from one stadium to the next. “But,” he added, “you can’t complain. Everyone’s got the same thing.” Having also spent time in Class AAA the past few seasons, Young endorsed the challenge system as his preference.
Daniel Kim, who formerly scouted for MLB clubs and made appearances on ESPN during its 2020 COVID coverage of the Korean league, is now a popular KBO media analyst with 164,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel. Kim said fans, and even many players, were upset with the state of human umpiring.
“Fans love it,” Kim said, adding that all they want is consistency. “From the player side, surprisingly, we got some mixed reaction. Veteran players started complaining quite a bit in the early part of last year, whether pitchers or the hitters. As you know, the older established players had their own strike zone. They got the benefit of the doubt, I guess.”
One KBO team executive, who requested anonymity to speak freely about umpiring, said, “ABS shows no mercy or bias toward either side. It is as objective as it gets, and the machine does not care for any context of the situation at all. In a vacuum, that is how it should be, as the strike zone has been defined by the league of how it should be and the ABS follows the rules.”
Player evaluation is changing as a result of ABS: Pitchers with high velocity and big breaking pitches are being prioritized over pitchers with less dynamic stuff who try to command the outer edges.
“ABS does not care how well a pitcher locates the shadow zone” — referring to a baseball-width addendum on either side of the zone — “or how well a catcher frames a pitch,” the executive explained. “It only cares if a pitch crosses the zone or not. So the pitchers that used to live in the edges of the zone that would often benefit from umpire calls/framing are out of luck.”
ESPN and MLB Network analyst Xavier Scruggs, who hit 61 home runs in two KBO seasons, has kept in touch with old teammates who have shared good feedback about the system. He and Dan Kurtz, who runs the league’s leading English-language media site MyKBO.net, both noted that ABS was a safeguard against gambling improprieties, as it removes the human element. They pointed out the KBO endured some bad headlines — mostly a decade or longer ago — related to allegations of scandal.
“You have something that’s set in stone to where you don’t have umpires affecting the game in such a drastic way that could be concerning,” Scruggs said.
But the KBO even demoted a few umpires to the minors in 2020 for calling inconsistent strike zones, so technology can mitigate that variation.
“KBO looks at ABS as trying to help speed up the games and trying to prevent confrontations,” Kurtz said. He added, “Korea is a very forward-thinking, technology-using country in itself, and so they’re basically, if we have it, why are we not using it?”
Many US baseball fans have asked the same question, but won’t have to wait much longer — at least for a small taste of what the KBO has.
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
The New York Mets’ starting pitcher, who is enjoying a breakout year, ponders whether tech leads to changes or provides validation.
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.
* * * * *
The 29-year-old Canning, a former second-round pick out of UCLA, has credited the Mets’ pitching lab and its tech-savvy coaches as part of why he signed with the club in the offseason — and why he’s off to a strong start to the season.
On how the Mets’ pitching lab has helped…
Personally, probably the biggest thing has been the KinaTrax. It can show your body, just as a skeleton moving through your delivery. I feel like it’s a little easier to look at just the skeleton, instead of maybe video of yourself to really dissect how you’re moving and maybe where your mechanics are off a little bit. And then obviously every team has the Edgertronic to see how the ball is coming off your hand and be able to tweak your pitches a little bit there and see just how to make them more consistent.
On whether KinaTrax data led to changes or validated what he was doing…
A little bit of both. I can see how my feels match up with some of the numbers and what it looks like. It’s a helpful tool in-season, too. [If you] maybe have an outing where your mechanics feel a little bit off, you can go to that and see, maybe you moved on the rubber a little bit, or you’re not lifting your legs high, or your front side is doing something a little bit different. It’s a tool just to help keep you on track and not let things spiral.
On the tools he uses in the offseason…
I threw some on a force plate mound at Banner Health in Arizona. It’s super helpful to see where you’re at and get some validation for maybe how you’re feeling. It’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of comparing yourself to ‘the hardest throwers have this.’ So I think it’s a double-edged sword of understanding who you are and knowing yourself, and then just trying to maximize that.
On his use of the Oura ring…
Going to bed early is definitely valuable for me. Trying to getting to bed early and then hitting that [lowest heart rate before] the midpoint — those are usually the nights that I get my best sleep. It’s a little harder in-season with different schedules, traveling.
If anything, it’s probably more of a tool to hold you a little bit accountable because you don’t know exactly how accurate it is. Sometimes you wake up feeling great, and your sleep didn’t match all. So I think it’s more of a tool just holding yourself accountable, wanting to see a good score when you wake up in the morning. You don’t want to put too much stock into it because if you wake up on a day that you’re pitching, you don’t want to let that get in your head.
On why he embraces tech…
You’re always trying to find an edge of how you can feel your best consistently every single day, just with how long of a season it is. We’re here every single day. It’s just about checking all the boxes — your nutrition, your sleep, your recovery — just to feel your best and be able to go out there and perform.
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.
In a world where they don’t know ‘what it takes to win’, Fran Longstaff and More Than Equal are ‘building the road as they walk’.
Fran Longstaff, the Head of Research at More Than Equal, reminds the audience at April’s Leaders Meet: The Talent Journey that no woman has competed in a Formula 1 race since the Italian Lella Lombardi in 1976.
This is despite motorsport being one of the few mixed gender sporting domains where men and women can compete on equal footing.
“Our research rates show that females make up ten per cent of participation rates in motorsport,” adds Longstaff. “That goes down to four per cent at the elite level.”
More Than Equal’s mission is certainly bold. The organisation was founded in 2022 by former F1 driver David Coulthard and philanthropist Karel Komárek. The pair recognised that even the most accomplished young female drivers are behind on the development curve compared to their male peers.
Longstaff was drafted in to better “understand the problem behind the problem”. “Research and data runs through our Driver Development Programme like a stick of rock,” she tells the audience at the Royal College of Music. This approach is critical when the end point is still unknown.
The programme itself is divided into four pillars:
Their search began in karting. They trawled through the race results in a sport where it is notoriously hard for girls to take the next leap.
“That sounds like an easy task but karting race results are often stored as PDFs,” says Longstaff. “It is objectively the worst way to store data.” They also had to gender mark race results, which took time.
Additionally, more than 500 young female kart drivers heeded More Than Equal’s call to apply for their Driver Development Programme. The drivers with the most potential were invited to follow-up interviews, which extended to parents and families. “That way we could understand what activity they’d already done to enable them to get the results we were seeing on the track. This is where you could have some interesting conversations and even say the driver was over-performing their level of activity in that sport.”
Six drivers, all aged 13-14 years old at the time, made it into More Than Equal’s first cohort:
To understand the problem behind the problem, More Than Equal, produced its Inside Track report in 2023:
“There were fewer than 30 research papers on the human factors related to driver performance,” says Longstaff, who explains that they are “building the road as we walk”. Data is even more scant when it comes to female drivers or their experience behind the wheel. “We’re looking at how we can optimise and adjust cars to ensure that females can perform at their best without being hindered.” Longstaff underlines that this will not come at the cost of performance decrements to the car.
Additionally, the Driver Development Programme takes a 360 approach, taking in the physiological, psychological and technical elements of racing in an effort to better address the difficulties young girls face in karting. “We want to make that transition as seamless as possible,” says Longstaff.
There are regular coaching contact points. “We have camps every six to eight weeks where we come together as a community.” The girls recently had the opportunity to spend time with Coulthard at the Red Bull Ring in Austria. “They asked a lot of questions about his experiences and could really start to understand what it is to be an elite racing driver.”
Longstaff also explained that More Than Equal’s research is freely shared with F1 teams, which is a break with the usual secrecy that governs their interactions.
Benchmarks simply don’t exist for female F1 drivers. “We don’t know what a racing car driver should be doing and look like at 16 versus 18,” says Longstaff.
More Than Equal has commissioned two PhD students at Manchester Metropolitan University to help establish those benchmarks. “One student is going to be building physiological, psychological, cognitive training and anthropometric profiles from drivers all the way from karting to F1.”
The research into male and female differences will kick all tired and unfounded assumptions about female drivers into the long grass.
The other PhD student will research how hormones impact performance, particularly when it comes to cognitive function.
This work will help More Than Equal to build was Longstaff calls “the largest data lake on the planet on the predictors of female racing driver performance”. She adds: “All of those PDF race results get pulled into one central pool and we start to overlay that with the physiological, cognitive and psychological data. Once you have that, you can start to make predictions and we can understand who may have a greater chance of success at the next level of competition.”
It will also help to widen the talent net. “Once we have these driver profiles, we may be able to start to understand whether there are certain populations where we can spot talent.” Longstaff suggests the world of esports. “It’s a 50-50 split in terms of male-female players, so there’s a huge population we might be able to pull from.”
On top of that, digital twinning technology has the potential to enable teams to optimise how they adjust cars to the needs of their drivers with recourse to expensive testing. “You don’t necessarily need to be on the track,” says Longstaff, “but we can only do that by having all those data points in one system.”
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iBrainTech has worked with some of the biggest names in soccer, including Juventus, and now they are seeking to deliver their neurocognitive training tool to the ranks of academy soccer.
Main photo: iBrainTech
Users wear an EEG headset, which monitors brain activity and translates intention into action on the screen. The goal is to help soccer players sharpen their decision making and execution. It has been adopted by clubs in Serie A (Juventus), MLS (Orlando City SC and formerly Atlanta United), LaLiga (Real Sociedad) and the Portuguese Primeira Liga (SL Benfica). Longtime MLS star Jonathan Bornstein was an avid user.
Now, i-BrainTech is seeking to broaden its reach to academy and youth players. It’s a well-trodden path for performance tech to prove themselves with the elite before reaching the larger consumer market. But i-BrainTech has both the advantage of its inherent gamification and the challenge of making complex tech more frictionless.
“All transformative technologies should be ready and willing to become accessible, to validate the impact on the top level of performance and then to allow access of youth,” i-BrainTech Co-Founder/CEO Konstantin Sonkin said. “You need to be ready to cater your value to the young generation, and we are so lucky to be an engaging game at the end of the day.”
Sonkin has been working on this technology for 15 years to balance high signal quality with ease of use. He described a remodeled product as “a top-level, consumer-ready headset.” The goal is not only to improve the performance of younger players but also to encourage more athletic participation and unlock new revenue streams for clubs, such as with a co-branded cap or content.
“We want to drive them from Instagram back to the pitch,” Sonkin said. “Because when you exercise your mind, you’re so eager to execute in the [physical world] because your brain got so excited. It’s called neuro-priming. It has excessive, let’s say, electricity. It wants to utilize that in real-world actions, and that is the connection between their content created by clubs and then a long lifetime value.”
Michita Toda previously used i-BrainTech with rehabbing players as a physical therapist at Orlando City, where he saw value in keeping injured players mentally sharp while physically recovering. He recently joined the North Carolina Courage as its Head Athletic Trainer and is hoping to bring the product there, both for the NWSL club but also for the associated men’s USL team, North Carolina FC, as well as for the large youth academy system in the area.
“Being on the medical side of things, we talk a lot about youth sports specialization and how the more they play at a younger age, that might make them more susceptible to injury,” Toda said. “Well, using technology like this to supplement what they’re already doing, but not overdoing it physically, they still get the mental reps and get the quote-unquote ‘practice’ without having to tax their body.”
Members of the Juventus Residency Academy train with i-BrainTech. (Photo: iBrainTech)
Limited studies have shown promising results with the transfer of skill from the i-BrainTech product to the pitch. Real Sociedad B — the LaLiga club’s reserve team, which competes in the Spanish third division — completed a 15-player case study that spanned three months and 12,500 visualized actions. Those using i-BrainTech improved 12.4% in the accuracy of long kicks compared to 2.6% in the control group. Five of the eight players using i-BrainTech’s neurofeedback training also reported better concentration in matches.
“When we actually repeat all the actions on the pitch, most of the time we train our mind-body connection,” Sonkin said. “We train our muscle memory. Muscle obviously doesn’t have any memory. Memory lives in the brain.”
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.
In the second episode of our three-part series, the AIS’s Director of National Performance Support Systems discusses how tech can be better used to deliver insights to athletes and coaches.
A vodcast brought to you by our Main Partners
“One of the things we’re trying to figure out, particularly for fresh graduates coming into high performance, is that sense of pressure to utilise technology because that’s what’s seen to be done in high performance,” she tells Teamworks’ Andrew Trimble and Leaders John Portch.
Miranda is the Director of National Performance Support Systems at the Australian Institute of Sport and a practising physiotherapist, which made her an ideal guest on this special Teamworks Vodcast, particularly when it comes to sharing her perspective on the way the Australian sports system uses technology.
“The next step is ensuring practitioners have got the critical thinking skills to understand why I am using this and what is it adding. What is it telling me? It’s getting that ability to analyse.”
Her words bring to mind High Performance Unpacked, the Teamworks Special Report that spoke to the importance of the practitioner optimising a given tech product to the final user.
It resonated with Andrew too. “When you haven’t got a centralised mechanism for presenting and communicating data, it shines a light on how important it is to be done correctly,” he says. “The greatest dataset in the world, if not communicated correctly, is nowhere near as effective and may be detrimental.”
Elsewhere in this episode, Miranda and Andrew discuss the idea of the physio room as the heartbeat of the team; the balance between system and individual performance [29:30]; why the physiotherapist is a ‘life coach’; and bridging the evidence gap in female athlete health.
Check out Episode 1, with Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers:
Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.
