Last month at SBJ’s Tech Week, Bettman took to the stage to discuss how the NHL continues to embrace technologies that push the boundaries of performance.
Main image: Marc Bryan-Brown
His 32-year tenure has now arrived at a place where the sports industry is infused with tech, and the league is pushing in so many areas to advance its product: NHL Edge player tracking data, the digitally enhanced dasherboards and the alt-cast avenues it uses to reach various sections of its fans.
“The game has got to be good fundamentally,” Bettman said. “And you don’t change the game for the technology. What you do is use technology to enhance the game and to connect people with the game — whether it’s the players, the coaches or our media partners or our fans.”
As the headline speaker for SBJ Tech Week on Wednesday, Bettman rolled through the NHL’s various tech ventures, which continue to grow in both dedication and success. Here are some of his key thoughts on their current and future plans.
Boosting the referee process: One of the league’s recent developments focuses on officials using Apple Watch, which started in September.The hardware is helping officials track the game clock and also alerting them at the end of periods and penalties. Bettman sees the potential for that to expand to notifications that eventually include the players who commit penalties. The pairing of this technology with Hawk-Eye (one of SBJ’s 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech Companies) can help in the various judgment calls in games.
“I’m not sure we want to take all the human elements out of the game,” Bettman said. “However, something like offsides and high-sticking in terms of where the puck was touched, those are things that we may be able to do better of using not just the Apple Watch or the Hawk-Eye system but even using artificial intelligence in terms of re-creating situations.”
NHL Edge tracking data: Bettman pointed to the continued evolution of NHL Edge — which became operational for puck and player tracking in 2021-22 and added fan-facing features in 2023 — as a foundation of its tech mission. It supports the league’s alt-casts, as well as coaching insights. It has the potential to help video reviews, too.
“It took us better than five years and more money than I think I’ve ever told the owners to figure out how you could embed something in the puck that could actually be tracked,” Bettman said. “And then putting the chips on the player was a lot easier.”
A growing presence on Roblox: Roblox has increasingly become a space for the NHL to build and connect with younger fans. The league’s work on the platform started in 2023 with NHL Blast, which has housed All-Star Weekend and Stanley Cup Final deployments.
“It’s a combination of content creation [and data],” Bettman said, “And we now, because of the data we accumulate, we create more content and make it more readily available.”
Cloud-based live game broadcasts: The NHL, along with AWS, were SBA: Tech finalists for Best Technology Collaboration — the first live game broadcast of its kind.
“Producing the game on the cloud is more efficient from an environmental standpoint, a manpower standpoint, a financial standpoint,” Bettman said. “That’s the way of the future. That’s the way everybody’s going to be producing games.”
AI usage league-wide: Bettman mentioned that the NHL has leaned into AI in both fan-facing and back-of-house use cases. AI has streamlined aspects of selling tickets and scheduling games for its 32 teams.
“We schedule over 1,300 regular-season games, looking at building availability, looking at traffic patterns to get people in and out of games,” Bettman said. “These are all things that AI is going to make us better at.”
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.
How haptic feedback helps officials to keep their eyes on the ice during games.
Main image: Getty Images courtesy of the NHL
The league and its officials, in collaboration with Apple and technology innovation partner Presidio, developed the NHL Watch Comms App to track the game clock and signal the imminent end of periods and penalties. But to help the officials focus more on the action around them, the primary function is to provide haptic feedback with vibrations, rather than visual cues.
“The watch doesn’t distract you,” said Stephen Walkom, a former on-ice referee who is now NHL Executive Vice President, Hockey Operations. “It actually informs you. You think you’ve got to see a watch, right? And we feel a watch, but we know what time it is.”
Rollout of the Apple Watches began in September, with the league reporting a 92.5% adoption rate by officials. Saturday’s NHL Stadium Series game, in which the Columbus Blue Jackets are hosting the Detroit Red Wings at Ohio Stadium — the usual football home of the Ohio State Buckeyes — is an important milestone for the technology.
Every arena hangs scoreboards and places LED-ribbon clocks in different places, but over time, the officials grow familiar with their locations for quick time checks. In a one-off location like with the Stadium Series, everything is new, plus the size and typical depth perception is thrown off by the vast size of the venue.
“In that building,” Walkom quipped, “you’d be spinning like a top on the ice looking for a clock.”
Part of the impetus for the technology was a safety concern. There have been collisions and near-misses on the ice when players emerge from the penalty box and an official happens to be skating near the door. Having the haptic reminder that a player is about to emerge can help clear that space.
“We had a really high-level objective: It was an interest to figure out, how can we help the officials keep their eyes on the ice more?” said Dave Lehanski, NHL EVP of Business Development and Innovation. “We can’t understate how important it was to collaborate with the officials and how agreeable they were to participating in this.”
The NHL brought that goal to its tech partners. Apple had previously helped the league by providing iPads for in-game bench use, and Presidio developed applications for the NHL Draft and the league’s streaming operations.
As straightforward as the end result is, there were technical challenges to develop it, not to mention the need for significant input from the officials to ensure the app didn’t disrupt their workflow. Presidio developed the app, extracting about two dozen datapoints from the NHL’s OASIS data feed, rather than pushing notifications to the watch.
The NHL Watch Comms App showing the imminent end of two penalties (Photo: NHL)
“We had to build, not necessarily a push-based application, but a pull-based application, which was really, really unique, to make sure we had accurate data for the officials,” said Andres de Corral, Presidio VP Digital Services, noting that the timeline required “a series of design thinking sessions and trial and error.”
“The NHL has a real patience about these implementations,” added Scott Brodrick of Apple Worldwide Product Marketing. “The goal is the seamless use of technology to enhance the game, and I think that has materialized over this period of development. Sometimes the simple solution is the most powerful.”
Now, before games, almost every official grabs an Apple Watch as routinely as his shin guards, microphone and striped shirt.
“Guys just came to trust it,” Walkom said, “and we have less and less looking for a clock in the rink.”
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 this edition of SBJ Tech’s Athlete’s Voice, British triple jumper Naomi Metzger discusses how data and AI are transforming her recovery.
After narrowly missing the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, Metzger is documenting her goal of qualifying for the LA28 Games on the blockchain. Cudis was founded by UCLA graduate Edison Chen, and it targets Gen Z athletes, having also secured partnerships with UCLA athletics and individuals competing for Lamborghini Racing (Cam Aliabadi), in Ironman (Patrick Schilz) and in Olympic rowing (Kate Knifton, a two-time NCAA champion at Texas who was Big 12 Athlete of the Year in 2023).
On how she learned about Cudis…
I actually found it on X. I was scrolling through, and I’m always having a look at what the next thing in crypto is — and then Cudis popped up. I saw wellness, web, crypto all combined — own your data — all these words that I’m thinking, ‘This sounds really interesting.’ So I shot them a message, and I was like, ‘Hi, I would love to be an athlete ambassador.’ I got talking to Edison, and then they made it happen. So I got sent the ring to test out, and then I got sent the version two ring. For the past six months, I’ve been playing around with the ring and really got to enjoy using it.
Cudis rings add a new layer to the wearable experience with their Web3 features that can transform real-time data into valuable points redeemable for exclusive rewards. (Image: Cudis)
On her interest in crypto…
Kind of out of desperation because I got dropped by my sponsor in 2021, so I wanted to find a way of how I can fund my athletics. I was on TikTok and stumbled across a Gary Vee video talking about NFTs. He was really passionate. So I was like, OK, let me just see if this works. So I created my own NFT collection in 2021 and stuck around since then.
On her prior use of wearables…
I used the Apple Watch but never to monitor my sleep because the problem I found with the Apple Watch is that you constantly need to charge it, and then when I’m sleeping, I might forget. So I never really tracked my sleep. A lot of athletes were using a Whoop, but they have to pay a monthly or yearly [fee] — it is a subscription-based model.
I don’t really like to pay monthly fees. I’m an ambassador, but I knew Cudis is a one-off payment. And I was like, OK, that appeals a little bit more to me. Since getting the ring, I’ve started to track my sleep as well, and that’s been pretty helpful.
On what she’s learned about her sleep…
I basically learned that I wasn’t getting as good of a sleep as I thought I was because I’m always quite proud of the fact that I get eight hours, but a lot of that was very light sleep. It wasn’t deep sleep, and I realized that once I got more deep sleep, that meant spending longer time actually in bed and trying to aim for a bit more than that eight hours, I felt a lot better, and the more I started tracking that, I realized that training was better when I well rested, my mood felt better. So that’s something that I wouldn’t have learned if I wasn’t really tracking it and looking at the data.
On how she tried improving her deep sleep…
I Googled, and I was asking people, “Do you have any tips?” I went with magnesium before bed, and that seemed to really help. A colder room and weighted bed sheets. I literally tried everything because, even though I was getting those hours, I really wanted to maximize my sleep because I know that’s super important for recovery.
On her analysis of daytime metrics…
It was the stress levels that I found really interesting with the ring. Although I’m pretty in tune with my body and what aches and pains, because I’m at 100% all of the time, whether that’s training or I’m doing the crypto things or making videos, I didn’t realize how stressed that I’m actually becoming when doing that. So when I started to have a look at the ring data and seeing that way the stress levels are pretty high, that told me to maybe rest a little bit, self-care, and prioritize my mental health a little bit more. And it sounds silly that I wasn’t in tune with my own brain, but I feel like the ring almost helped me to figure that out a little bit.
Naomi Metzger is an athlete ambassador for Cudis, a wearable ring technology with a Web3 component. (Photo: Corbis via Getty Images)
On using Cudis’ AI coaching functionality…
It really helped when I was looking at my sleep and looking at that deep sleep. When I first got the data, it was almost so much data, and I didn’t quite know what to make of it, so I asked the AI component, the coach, ‘Can you have a look at my sleep data and let me know what needs to improve and what’s the average and that type of thing?’ It was able to feed back [info] using my data what I should aim for, and I found that really helpful.
I also sometimes just ask for a little bit of advice. It sounds weird to speak to AI for advice, but sometimes I’m like, ‘Hmm, is it okay do you think to have a coffee now? Or do you think I should wait till maybe a bit later?’ And then it would be like, ‘This is the optimal times of having coffee.’ It’s quite cool to use AI in these ways, when I’d normally, I guess, be a bit too embarrassed to ask my actual coach.
On the ring’s Web3 component…
I’m really incentivized by rewards. As athletes, we’re obviously aiming for medals and things like that. The idea that your fitness gives you points, and those points can add up, and soon, I think, it’ll be able to be monetized, which is really cool. It’s a really good way for me to make sure that I’m tracking my workouts, sharing them, to get other people to, I don’t know, give them a bit of a boost — but it also just holds me a little bit more accountable.
You have a vitality score, and I’m always trying to aim for that 100 score. But sometimes I can be like, I don’t really need to do this rep, and I remember I’ve got the ring, it’s tracking me. I’m like, Okay, let me just do it. So I think, especially because I train on my own quite a bit, it’s a good way to hold me accountable.
On how much she continues doing her art…
I actually feel like I don’t have the time but definitely something that I want to get back into a little bit more. That was something that calmed me down. As I said, I’m always at like 100 but drawing was a way of calming me. And when I was doing the NFT collection, I was drawing a lot, and I had a really good athletic season. And also, when I was injured, I was drawing a lot as well because it was keeping my brain active when my body couldn’t move.
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 St Louis Cardinals’ star rookie of 2024 discusses his use of tracking technology in the pursuit of performance gains.
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.
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Despite weathering an early injury, Wetherholt slashed .295/.405/.400 with 2 home runs and 20 RBI across 29 appearances for Single-A Palm Beach in his first season in the Cardinals organization, culminating in a game-winning double in the league’s championship game in September. He entered 2025 as MLB.com’s seventh-ranked SS prospect (23rd overall).
Before that, Wetherholt was a standout for West Virginia, where he was introduced to Pison, the maker of AI-powered neural sensors that measure cognitive functions through smart wristbands. WVU, along with several other collegiate and youth programs, use Pison’s tech as an athlete performance tool on an institutional basis, and MLB is in the process of testing it for on-field approval. The company recently launched a training platform specifically for baseball, called Pison BASEBALL Pro, and integrated sleep tracking data into its Pison Perform product. Wetherholt is a brand ambassador.
As he prepares for his second pro season, Wetherholt spoke to SBJ about his use of Pison and his goals moving forward.
On his first impressions of Pison…
I thought it was interesting. I wasn’t really sure the practical use of it. I thought it was cool to get a benchmark [of my reaction time] and compete with your friends. But then, after that, I didn’t really understand how it could be beneficial or helpful. It’s like, ‘You just got a score, what now?’
As I’ve gotten used to it, I’ve found cues that say, ‘Hey, do it on days that you’re feeling slow and you might see an improvement.’ Or, ‘Do it after your lift and you’ll see an improvement.’ Just different ways to mess around with it, use it on a more consistent basis, to remind your brain and wake it up on days that you’re sluggish.
On how he uses the reaction tests…
A light flashes, and you move your hand open, and it measures how fast you moved it in accordance to when the light flashed, basically. And then there’s also a mode, which is pretty cool, it lights white and you’re supposed to move your hand, or it’ll light yellow and you’re not supposed to move. It’s kind of a yes-yes-no type of thing, which is pretty similar to baseball and hitting.
I’m not a huge person to be like, ‘Oh, my reaction time is bad today, I’m going to stink.’ So, for the most part, I really wouldn’t pay attention to it too much on a gameday. But on an off day it’s cool to see where you’re at. If you had a heavy workload and you wake up and you feel good, but then you check and your reaction times are low, it’s like, ‘OK, maybe I have to do it a little bit more today to try to wake up.’ It’s cool as a benchmark in that regard.
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On his use of athlete performance technology…
I’m definitely not a genius in the tech field, but I’m open to it. Baseball is getting more and more tech-driven, so all of the stuff in regard to hitting, Trackman, where you can see all the metrics on your swing — that stuff’s really cool. The only other thing is sleep, which is the biggest selling point that [Pison] is introducing now, being able to track sleep. I want to know how I sleep, I want to know HRV rates, stuff like that, where it’s going to help me be able to see how I can recover better.
On differences in technology investment at pro and college levels…
We had decent exposure to it at school. We didn’t have the [same extent] of it as professional ball, as you would expect. Now, pretty much every swing is videoed, and you have your Blast [Motion] numbers and Trackman numbers, which we didn’t have at school.
But also, with [analytics], it’s a blurred line. You don’t want to dive too much into it, where it’s like, ‘Oh, I got perfect metrics on my Blast Motion sensor, but now I can’t hit.’ It’s about finding the middle ground of knowing what’s a red flag and what’s not.
It’s different from person-to-person, [coaches] are going to work with everyone differently. For me, I’m tracking bat speed, attack angle, vertical bat angle and rotational acceleration, which is all measured from the bat. So that stuff is concrete. Other people look at it differently. It’s definitely been a little bit of an adjustment — you can get over-consumed. That’s been a big point [from coaches], they’re like, ‘Do what you do. Play ball. We’re just here to help. If you have questions, ask, we’ll explain it to you. But here’s what we want you to focus on. We’ll bring [metrics] up to you if we think there’s a problem.’
On his goals for his second MLB season…
I’d say the biggest thing is to play as many games as possible. I want to be healthy. You can’t play good baseball and you can’t move up levels if you don’t play — and if you’re not healthy, you can’t play.
And then, no matter where I go, just competing to the highest level at that particular level, whether it’s Low-A, High-A, Double-A, whatever the case may be. Just competing and trying to dominate at that level and not looking at anything past that. It’s easy to get centered on, ‘This guy got moved up in this org,’ or ‘I want to go up.’ But at the end of the day, you’re going to move yourself up. If you’re too focused on jumping levels and not dominating the level that you’re in, you can look too far forward and forget to commit to where your feet are. So, just staying present, and then hopefully win a bunch of games.
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 wellbeing plans available to student-athletes to include connections to mental health professionals, as well as the Zone’s screening tool that monitors athlete wellness.
Outside of just being the right thing to do, there’s a straight line from holistic support of athletes and business success. Wellbeing begats better performance, which begats results, greater fan interest and, ultimately, a product fans will pay for.
Last year, the NCAA released the latest version of its mental health best practices, outlining obligations for all member schools (regardless of division) to create a healthy environment for athletes. Components of that plan included support via resources and connections to mental health professionals, as well as a screening tool to monitor athlete wellness.
The NCAA required D-I members to provide this by last August. And this November will be the first deadline for schools to prove they’re doing so. With that mile-marker approaching, The Zone is gearing up to test a new feature in its athlete wellness platform: the Mental Readiness Score. The metric will provide insight into an athlete’s mental state.
Knowing the score
In a walkthrough with SBJ, The Zone CEO and Co-Founder Ivan Tchatchouwo showed a series of check-in questions that help create the score. Prompts focused on physical essentials like hydration and sleep but also considered ratings for categories such as confidence and energy level. The quick series produces a score (scaled from 0-100) that a coach can see for each player, while the individual student view will show tiered descriptors (such as ‘Fully Ready’ or ‘Needs Attention’) to take away the pressure of potentially seeing a poor numerical score.
Tchatchouwo said the feature, which The Zone will pilot with select schools as part of its premium platform offering before a future rollout, came as an idea from numerous conversations on different campuses since the company was founded in 2021.
The Zone has a client base of roughly 200 teams at various levels of the NCAA, offering three tiers of its platform: basic, premium and enterprise.
“The biggest thing, and we’re seeing this in all sets of industries and technology in college sports, is how do you harmonize this data to drive value for the athlete but also to drive value for the administration?” Tchatchouwo said.
Coaches will be able to see Mental Readiness Scores for each athlete and a collective score for a team, allowing for responses at the individual and group levels in their teaching and preparation. The Zone’s athlete experience also offers support via breathing and visualization exercises that cater to the user’s preference.
One of The Zone’s biggest triumphs of 2024 came through validation from its own data and research. Tchatchouwo said that athletes who used The Zone 15 times saw their moods “significantly” improve, and that was especially true for women who used The Zone’s platforms. He also added that client schools see up to 3X more access to their athletes via The Zone platform, meaning an increased understanding in what their athletes are collectively experiencing on the mental side.
“What we’re seeing is the athletes that are stigmatized, that don’t talk about it, are getting help from The Zone,” Tchatchouwo 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.
Tech vendor Receptiviti worked with Senior Bowl partner Tatnuck Group to transcribe interpersonal interviews, then create 52 reports that measured and compared players based on psychological traits.
This year, analyses of those sessions included reports created by language processing technology vendor Receptiviti, which worked with existing Senior Bowl partner Tatnuck Group to ingest and transcribe interviews, then create 52 reports that measured and compared players based on psychological traits.
“We’ve always looked for the most effective and reliable means to objectify what we do from an interview and assessment standpoint,” said AJ Scola, the former Assistant Director/Personnel at the Atlanta Braves who founded Tatnuck Group in 2020 as a sports-focused talent assessment and development firm. “Receptiviti did a great job of delivering on that.”
This was Tatnuck Group’s fourth year supporting Senior Bowl staff, a mandate that includes providing performance coaches for players and interview training to scouts, but its first wrapping Receptiviti’s API into its offering.
Receptiviti’s software, called LIWC, was invented by Dr. James W. Pennebaker on the back of several decades of psychological research. Its thesis is that the propensity with which humans use different categories of words – ranging from the academic (e.g., prepositions, conjunctions) to sentiment-based (positive emotion words) – can correlate to different psychological characteristics.
“Two different people who see the world differently, who see their own place in the world differently, are going to use these different grammatical categories at slightly different rates,” said Kiki Adams, Receptiviti’s Head of Linguistics. “By combining those word categories, we have formulas that give us the probability to which someone is in a certain psychological state or trait; things ranging from personality – like extroversion, agreeableness – to their emotions – fear, sadness, happiness.”
Photo: Don Juan Moore / Getty Images
Receptiviti’s tech analyzes thousands of word categories and subcategories to ultimately score speakers in more than 200 “dimensions,” which include everything from personality type to whether someone is a more intuitive or deliberative decision-maker.
It then feeds that data to large language models, trained on the company’s psychological research, to place that raw data into context.
Receptiviti’s Senior Bowl reports, as one example, charted each quarterback’s standing across the “Big Five” personality traits, with text summaries attached that described what those measures mean and how they apply to football.
“If a player scores higher on a measure like neuroticism, meaning they’re more likely to experience things like anxiety and stress and negative emotionality,” said Jade Marion, Receptiviti’s Senior Manager/Customer Success, “we include information about how a coach might work with a player with that type of disposition.”
Such assessments have a clear use-case in athletics, where optimal performance is table stakes and, on-field talent aside, relationships can make or break a team’s chemistry.
But Jennifer Glista, Receptiviti’s CRO, said the company’s integration engine is used by sports organizations for more than just personnel scouting, including to better inform coach and executive hires.
“Language is so flexible, and so, from our perspective, the more data you have around the entire organization, the more effective you can be,” Glista said. “But it depends on what each customer’s application is setting out to do.”
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 this recent edition of The Athlete’s Voice, SBJ Tech catches up with former Olympic badminton player Howard Chu discusses the implications for AI that can deliver real-time feedback and data across racket.
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.
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In January, the self-described “tech nerd” appeared at CES to try out a new AI-powered badminton training system developed by Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). An automatic serve machine fired shuttles, and when Shu returned the serves, cameras using computer vision relayed data such as shot speed and trajectory as well as on his own swinging motion.
Shu, 34, is a UCLA graduate and former EY consultant now working in supply chain logistics as Manager Business Development & Operations for Hizooo Network Technology. He was recently starred in a short film about his athletic career called 10,000 Days of Chasing My Dreams.
On connecting with ITRI before CES…
I didn’t know anything about it, actually, so it was really exciting. They reached out. I did a little bit of quick Google search as well and saw the machine that they had. This was my first time actually seeing it and testing it out. First impression, it’s cool. I think there’s some refinement [to be done], and we weren’t in a perfect, controlled environment, but just running through my head, there’s so many use cases for it already.
On the AI trainer…
Basically, it’s a typical shuttle feeding machine, which we’ve seen already. That’s not new, where it basically shoots a shuttle at you. You see this in tennis as well, if you’re trying to practice by yourself. But what happens is, after I hit the shuttle, it gives me some data output, like speed of my return shot, positioning, height. So those are some of the metrics that it was actually giving me after I hit the shuttle that it fed to me.
Photo: Getty Images
On whether he typically saw such data…
I haven’t. If we talk about AI or technology in the space with other racket sports like pickleball or padel, we’ve seen some other technologies trying to track number of shots in a rally or where you made the mistake. On tour, we do have metrics like speed, but it’s not to your own use where you can track every shot. Sometimes they’ll track a big smash or something like that, but not [it’s] something in your hands where you can track every single shot of your own.
On the limited data on tour…
If you’re in a big match, you might see, ‘Hey, this player hit a 400-kilometer-an-hour smash once during the match.’ It’s not like I would be able to dial in and say, ‘Hey, during the third match, I was feeling a little bit more tired. I want to know if my smashes were dropping off by 5 per cent or 10 per cent.’ So those are the kind of metrics that you would really be able to act on if you had something like this.
On using this new badminton data for racket fitting…
One of the main use cases that I thought right away is — I follow a lot of other sports like tennis and golf — I think this type of technology would be extremely helpful in customizing or picking out the proper equipment for the athlete. So we see this in golf a lot, right? They use their Foresight [launch monitor]. They track ball speed, ball spin, height, all these details that are really meticulous, right?
And so if I’m an athlete and maybe I’m not optimizing the proper equipment, whether it’s string tension or there’s head light or head heavy. I could go on to a court, test out 10 different models with 10 different variations of strings tensions and figure out which one is giving me the best smash, the best speed, things like that, which otherwise would just right now be going by feeling like, ‘Hey, this racket feels good. That smash felt good, [but] I don’t know exactly what the speed was.’ You’re seeing it in some of these other sports that have a little bit more money, that are already implementing it into a lot of their strategies.
On other tendencies the system could learn…
I’m sure those cameras are capable of [identifying tendencies], whether you put in a match video and it spits out some sort of post-analysis data like, ‘Hey, I made X amount of mistakes in my backhand or X amount of mistakes in my forehand.’ They might even be able to drill down to more meticulous details like, ‘Hey, the height over the net on this shot was five inches or 10 inches, and that’s what led to losing this point.’ It’s obviously a lot of back-end code and different scenarios that they have to run, but there’s definitely a ton of use cases for something like this.
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On his own data-driven training…
Very late in my career, at 34 years old, one of the things I’ve done is I’ve laid off of all the impact cardio. So, for example, no more running, whereas in my early 20s, I did a lot of that. But now it’s always low-impact cardio — swimming, biking — but then it’s tracking my heart rate, making sure I’m getting into the right zones to push that cardio.
There’s so much recovery tech out there, whether it’s compression boots, plunge, infrared sauna. These are just all things that I would say were not accessible to the average consumer, five years ago, 10 years ago, and now we’re really seeing companies push the envelope where it is very accessible to consumers. And I don’t know what the timeline is on a machine like this, or a technology like this, but I’m sure it’ll be scalable to one day where it will be in the hands of consumers.
On the surprising speeds of badminton smashes…
The world record now is [565] kilometers an hour. That’s [351] plus miles an hour. That’s obviously at contact because the way the shuttle works is, there’s a cork, right? So as it flips when it lands on the other side, it’s not traveling at 300 miles an hour anymore. It’s impact that they’re tracking. But I’m confident to say I could probably still get it over 240 [mph, I would say. I’ve seen people do challenges where they smash a shuttle into a watermelon or break through cardboard and things like that.
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.
Springbok Analytics’ technology offers the latest develop in preventative health measures for athletes.
Inside, a portable MRI machine needed only 10 minutes to scan the women’s lower bodies, at which point AI algorithms from Springbok Analytics took the 2D imaging and converted them into 3D digital twins that can be used for muscle analysis — establishing baselines that can be used to individualize training and flag latent injury risk.
Unrivaled, the 3-on-3 women’s league that debuted on Jan. 17 in Miami, is the latest league to partner with Springbok Analytics. In the past two years alone, Springbok has collaborated with three of the five biggest North American sports leagues: It graduated from NBA Launchpad; completed data collection on an NFL-funded research project into hamstring injuries; and began the initial phase of an MLB-backed study into pitcher health.
Now boosting Springbok’s rapid growth across pro sports and into broader populations is a newly closed, oversubscribed $5 million Series A led by Transition Equity Partners , which also led a $3 million seed round in 2023. Joining the investment were the NBA, which added to its initial equity stake from Launchpad, and Cartan Capital , a sports tech venture firm led by former pro tennis player CiCi Bellis .
“This is a clear sign that our current and new investors are excited to see us scale all aspects of our business,” Springbok CEO Scott Magargee said, “and from a dollars-in-the-door perspective, it allows us to advance what we believe is our global leadership in the area of muscle analysis for large demographics of athletes and patients across the entire health care landscape.”
The interactive reports Springbok produces are musculoskeletal avatars shaded various hues of red, orange, tan and blue that detail muscle asymmetries, fat infiltration and a proprietary score comparing a person’s muscle size with others of similar sex, size and sport. Springbok recently released sport-specific databases for men’s pro basketball and soccer athletes — a women’s soccer counterpart is planned soon — for more apt comparisons. It received FDA clearance in October on its flagship lower-body scan, and added core and upper-body scans to what previously was lower extremity only.
Such a tool is even more important when the athletes are such physical outliers as in the NBA. More than 100 players are in that database, and in addition to partnering with nearly half the league’s teams, Springbok continues working at the league level during the pre-draft process.
“Their work with us proved that this is a really interesting new dataset in elite sports,” said NBA Senior Vice President Tom Ryan , who oversees Launchpad and all basketball R&D. “Springbok data is starting to become an important piece of the puzzle to help support player health and performance initiatives. That’s really the story: It’s very strategic for us, both at the league and team level.”
The continued strategic relationship helped facilitate the additional funding, NBA Investments Associate Vice President Pat Crouch added. “First and foremost, for companies that come out of the NBA’s Launchpad program, we look for follow-on investment opportunities when there is a continued strategic relationship. We only invest in companies where there’s some type of commercial partnership, at either the league or the team level, that has gained meaningful traction and has upside to continue to grow and expand.”
Notably, Springbok has no true competitor and a 15-year head start on understanding the use of this data, making it “a piece of the puzzle that nobody else is,” said Magargee.
“The fact that our expertise is the technology, but also in human performance and muscle physiology, we know where to keep going with it in a way that’s meaningful,” said Silvia Blemker , Springbok’s chief scientific officer. She added that one recently devised new metric is an objective injury severity score, which can quantitatively assess a strain or sprain rather than rely on a human practitioner to subjectively evaluate it.
Though Springbok Analytics’ work in sports has intensified in recent years, the foundational technology has roots dating back to 2009 and Blemker’s biomedical engineering lab at the University of Virginia. The company’s headquarters remain in Charlottesville, sitting in a nondescript office at one end of its pedestrian-friendly Downtown Mall. Springbok’s dual recognition in 2024 from SBJ Tech — as a Most Innovative Sports Tech company and SBJ Tech Award winner for Best in Athlete Performance — prominently greets visitors.
In those early days, Blemker was working on solutions to aid treatments of cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy when the lab began developing the machine learning to extrapolate 3D data from MRIs. Those life science use-cases remain a part of Springbok’s mission, while also adding the human performance sector that makes it a highly differentiated product appealing to investors.
“Not only do we really believe in the team, but the technology, we think, is pretty unprecedented, especially with the years of R&D,” Bellis said, “and then the beachhead that they’ve had into the sports market is super interesting, because they can really instantly provide value to these sports teams and instantly give them money back, so to say, by having this preventative health measure for athletes.”
That expediency of the scans — much quicker than what’s needed for traditional MRIs — has helped Springbok amass its large elite athlete databases, including a thousand college and pro American football players, Blemker said. Those were collected to build a hamstring injury predictive index in collaboration with researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Australian Catholic University, and funded by a $4 million grant awarded by the NFL’s Scientific Advisory Board.
It’s that rich dataset, as much as any algorithm or an investment check, that is sparking Springbok’s growth — and the same competitive advantage will only continue to grow the same way it started.
“It’s taken us time,” Magargee said, “and it’s taken us partnerships.”
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 pilot program will see biomechanics labs installed at the the Cavaliers, Jazz, Pacers and Suns.
The protocols, as explained in a league-wide memo in January, have been developed in consultation with the NBPA as well as sports medicine and performance experts. Provisions for such a screening program are codified in the current collective bargaining agreement, requiring players to participate in up to four assessments per season.
“It’s one of several major initiatives that we have in the works, including with the Players Association, to try to reduce injuries in the league,” NBA EVP for Operations & Administration David Weiss said, emphasizing its scope and ambition by adding, “We’re not aware of anything quite like this league-wide in the world.”
Planning for this project began long before a perceived uptick in the injury rate over the past year, but it remains set against the backdrop of ongoing conversations around appropriate load management and player participation policies.
The NBA is now in the process of installing biomechanics labs with four pilot teams: the Cavaliers, Jazz, Pacers and Suns. The goal is to have identical setups, with the same technology vendors and the same prescribed athlete motions, to ensure standardized data collection.
The four tech companies that won the league’s RFP are:
P3, a private facility that independently has evaluated the biomechanics of roughly 70% of current NBA players, will work with the league as a consultant to the program. The NBA first hired P3 to assess prospects at the draft combine in 2014. Individual teams can also contract with the firm for additional insights and normative data.
Image courtesy of P3.
“This relationship between how we move and what happens to us is a strong relationship,” P3 founder and director Marcus Elliott said. “It’s stronger than most people realize, which is why we invested all this energy into all of it. And the more we can start actioning that — and not just waiting for bad things to happen — the better it is for everyone: for the players, for the teams, for the league. I’m super bullish on the potential of biomechanics to make lives better and for us to follow these signals.”
Access to the data collected in these biomechanics evaluations will follow similar guidelines to how the NBA handles medical records. Players have full access to their own reports, which they will retain even as they change teams. Coaches, executives and performance staff will be able to see data for players currently on their rosters. Weiss indicated MDs and PhDs conducting vetted research will also be to connect the data with injury information for studies on potential risks.
One source noted a “vast discrepancy” in the way franchises have utilized biomechanics data to date, praising this new program as a way to ensure consistent, efficient and accurate assessments. Some teams have been investing in biomechanics for years while others have yet to allocate any resources toward it. By implementing his program across the league, the NBA can collect in one year as much data as any team could collect in 30 — hastening the pace of understanding what correlations exist between movement and injuries.
Deployment of this program, which is scheduled to last at least through the end of the current CBA in 2030, has been measured to make sure it is properly communicated and rigorous. Evaluating success will take time, too.
“Certainly whether we can reduce injuries long-term or a particular type of injury — that’s going to be one of [the KPIs] — and whether we can connect certain movements or certain changes in the way an individual moves to injury,” Weiss said.
Image courtesy of P3.
Though the NBA’s in-game tracking system — powered by Sony’s Hawk-Eye — is camera-based and collects data on limbs and joint angles, that solution is only nominally a tool for rigorous biomechanics. Sony’s recent acquisition of KinaTrax, the leading baseball biomechanics technology, might help in the long run, but the current in-game tracking system doesn’t have the same fidelity the new lab-based system will provide.
There is a consensus that biomechanics might be an especially helpful tool in a sport like basketball “that certainly requires you to be a pretty impressive, high-flying athlete,” said BreakAway Data CEO Dave Anderson, a former NFL receiver. “The game is played well above the rim in the NBA, so jumping and your ability to land are critical to your career.”
Weiss added that experts with whom the league has conferred, including on its two biomechanics committees, point to “a number of factors — the size of players, the nature of the game, the number of games in the season, the hardcourt surface — that there’s reasons to think about biomechanics could be as helpful in basketball as almost any sport,” he said.
Image courtesy of P3.
These lab assessments are expected to take about 15 minutes, following a pre-scripted set of “motions that are directly applicable to their sport and health,” Theia CEO Marcus Brown said, describing his company’s software as “an accessible tool that also enables standardization within a vast data set. As a generalized neural network, Theia3D doesn’t require additional data for unique movements, environments or outlier athletes.”
It’s a highly technical distinction, but an important one: other motion capture solutions compare movement to various models, which can add to discrepancies when analyzing data from different sources and different seasons. “Having consistency in data collection over a long period of time on a big group of people is just something that I know our customers are looking for,” Qualisys product manager for life sciences Nils Betzler said, praising the “unified approach.”
“They’re really doing a tremendous job trying to better understand player biomechanics, player movement, and overall player health,” added Anderson about the NBA and NBPA. “They’re really trying to use science and numbers and research to make sure that the players are playing at the highest level. And I really appreciate that because a lot of these leagues are just adding games, changing roster sizes, and changing rules, and they just assume the players will figure it out. The NBA is taking this player-first initiative, and that’s just really cool to see.”
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.
