In the latest edition of The People Behind the Tech Podcast, Peak AI’s Gary McCoy ponders the impact of artificial intelligence on coaching and performance.
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Gary McCoy is the CEO of Peak AI, which has been shortlisted in Sports Business Journals’ list of the 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech Companies of 2023.
Peak AI uses psycholinguistics to enhance performance and Gary has a firm view on that coach’s comment.
“If you don’t know what they do, go and lead them because they probably don’t know what they’re doing either,” he tells Joe and John on the latest edition of The People Behind the Tech podcast.
“Artificial intelligence and data, as a general staple in sports, needs guidance,” he continues, “it needs transactional guidance to evolve the athlete.”
Gary spoke at length about the need for coaches to fully engage with AI and also dipped into a range of areas, including:
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The former cornerback chats to SBJ Tech about his Coach Performance Assessment System.
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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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James Hasty was a premier bump-and-run cornerback in the NFL for 14 seasons, mostly split between the New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs. He received second-team All-Pro honors in 1997 and was named to Pro Bowls that year and again in 1999. A third-round pick out of Washington State, Hasty had 45 career interceptions, 24 fumble recoveries and 10 sacks before retiring after playing one game for the Oakland Raiders in 2001.
Hasty, 58, is now the Founder and Chairman of Eneje’ Consulting Firm that uses data and proprietary algorithms to champion the principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion among NFL coaches. The goal is to evaluate all candidates based on objective information — spurred by an insight from when Hasty coached at the Washington-based Bellevue High — and philosophical compatibility with the owners’ preferences. The hope is to surface more deserving candidates from all backgrounds to improve upon the league’s Rooney Rule.
On the origin of Eneje’…
Eneje’ as an African derivative word, essentially, means willingness to help your fellow man. The goal was to create a tool that allowed folks to grade a coach and his performance.
On what his experience coaching taught him…
I had coached high school football, and we were very competitive. In fact, every year that I coached at Bellevue High School as a defensive coordinator, we won the state championship. In fact, we beat De LaSalle out of California, and they had a 151-game winning streak — for nine years they hadn’t lost. What I struggled to show the kids is that the coach on the sideline didn’t have a game plan in his hand. What that showed me is that he calls plays off the top of his head, based off of what makes him comfortable, right. What I used was data analytics, to teach the kids the percentages of what they want to do in certain situations, and based on those percentages, we were going to set our defense up to stop them.
I realized, as a D-coordinator, I’m doing a lot of the work. I’m spending eight, nine hours a day breaking down film before I go to practice, and so what it said to me is, there’s got to be a way to create a system where we recognize people’s contributions to any organization, not just in sport, but in any organization everybody has a certain level of contribution to that organization. Everyone contributes towards a win, but they’re not all valued the same.
On gaining support for his idea…
That was the genesis of how I created this algorithm. Then I reached out to a friend of mine, Ronnie Lott, and I said, ‘Ronnie, I got this algorithm that I created, and it’s based off of these coaches and their contributions. So what do you think?’ And he’s like, ‘Man, that’s a great idea. I think you should go forward with it.’ I then went and met some folks that he suggested I speak to, and they encouraged me to continue to go.
I reached out to a friend of mine, his name was Dr. Steven Cureton. And Dr. Cureton and I go back to undergrad. He’s the head of the department now at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, their sociology department. And I said, ‘Hey, I need to sign you to a contract, and I need you to come on board. I need you to go ahead and do the research on the hiring practices of the National Football League over the last 102 years,’ at that time, and he said, ‘I’ll do it.’ With the help of people like John Wooten who played with Jim Brown back in the day with the Cleveland Browns. Woot assisted us with meeting with different people to do the research into what they consider important elements of hiring a head coach or a general manager.
On developing Eneje’s interview protocols…
We talked to current and former coaches, we talked to lawyers, we talked to journalists, we talked to athletic directors, you name it. From that study came the creation of the interview tool that we have. Because some people will say, ‘The game is not just about analytics.’ This interview tool was critical because we were hearing about the whole sham interview deal that was ongoing within the National Football League, and so this tool essentially would work very simply.
Let’s say you’re the owner. We come in, and we say, ‘What are you looking for in your next head coach?’ And you say, ‘Oh, I’m looking for these variables: I’m looking for leadership, I’m looking for understanding of the salary cap, I need you to be a play caller, I need you to be a guy in the locker room that is great with the players.’ You’ve got these certain variables, as an owner, that you want your next head coach to have, whatever that might be.
We would take that same interview tool, and we would document all the stuff that you said you’re looking for. And now we would go and find a candidate that you had recommended to us, and we would interview those candidates separate of you and ask them the same questions. The interview tool would then record and transcribe their answers and grade your answers as it relates to your answers to see how closely they’re aligned to one another. In the heat of the moment, you want somebody that thinks like you. You want somebody that has a similar belief system that you have.
On the company’s qualifications algorithm…
We’ve got a tool that grades your background — high school, college, pro — and who you’ve developed and statistics during that particular year. I reached out to Dr. Filip Saidak, a professor of mathematics at the same school as Dr. Cureton, and Dr. Saidak said, ‘I can show you how you can add other elements to the algorithm.’
As an owner, let’s say you may want a guy that has a defensive background or you may want a guy that has a quarterback background, or whatever those elements may be to you, personnel-wise. You may be strong in some areas, but you may be weak in others. And so you want a head coach to offset those weaknesses. Whatever those variables are important to you, we can add those elements to the algorithm to where those coaches are graded accordingly. And you will find which of those folks, based on the quantitative formula, have the higher grade.
It’s not based on race, it’s all based on performance. And you’ve got the interview tool that looks to match your psychological compatibility with the owner as a coach. And so now you’ve essentially have two options as far as how to identify candidate.
On building an objective coaching network…
When it comes to the CPAS, which is the Coaching Performance Assessment System, we believe there should be a database, whereby we’re able to keep up with all the coaches in our database. We’re able to truly develop a pipeline where the NFL can always have access to knowing where and who and what coaches are available so that there’s never an issue where we’re talking about why are we continually hiring the same people? Because now there’s a there’s a place where you can go and find these coaches, and they have outstanding careers. And you’re not hearing about it through the media. You’re not hearing about it through a network of cliques of different former general managers, or former head coaches or whatever.
On the development timeline for the full platform…
CPAS, the database that we have developed, we put in a few thousand coaches ourselves right now. We believe that this database needs to be available for folks to join, and we want to make this available in the spring. So right now, I’m working with Microsoft to make it available in the marketplace so you can go and download the app. It’s available, but we don’t want it to go live yet — let’s just put it that way. You can go on Google Play, you can go into Apple, and you can find CPAS in there. Because of what we also have to get access to joining the database. But within that it’s also a tool that we call Huddle Up.
Huddle Up is basically [similar to] these podcast platforms like Clubhouse. There are these virtual rooms where people can go in, based on that particular topic, and they can talk about whatever the subject matter is. And in this particular case, we’ve created Huddle Up for coaches to go into these various rooms and talk on a podcast-like platform about their particular sport, any practice or game planning or anything relating to that particular sport. We want to use Huddle Up as a platform for coaches to engage and learn from one another, kind of like a peer-to-peer learning network.
On his vision for CPAS adoption…
Ideally, we’d like to make this a system for the league to use, not just for individual teams. We’d like to see a baseline approach where these owners have a place to start. What we do is we go back to the owner, and we say, ‘Here’s a quantitative grade. Here’s your qualitative compatibility score. Pick from these guys which one you want. It’s your call, obviously.’ We’d give them the information to where now they can go forward and have a better idea who may be the best fit for their organization. But our job is certainly not to tell them who to hire. We’re just providing information on these candidates that we believe in the long run [will succeed], based on the data, based on the research.
The five-time grand slam champion on the evolution of technology in tennis both on and off the court.
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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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Sharapova, now 36, retired from tennis in February 2020 and became a mom in 2022. She also has been active in business, starting her own confectionary brand, Sugarpova, as well as reportedly investing in the UFC, Therabody, Tonal and more. Sharapova recently made an appearance at the US Open on behalf of IBM to discuss its latest innovations and held a small roundtable with a small group of reporters.
On evolution of technology and tactical analysis during her career…
Huge, and also for the teams that are surrounding the player. So imagine you have a coach that looks at the draw, he sees you’re playing against someone and maybe you’ve never faced them before, but he immediately knows how your opponent has performed on the surface against other players. So that analysis is done so much quicker than him having to go out and find videos. ‘What surface did that player play on? OK, well, maybe that doesn’t apply to my player’s match at the US Open.’
Providing tools for your team is also [important]. As a player, you go out there and you play on instinct, and you just become a competitor. When it’s 6-all in the third set, you’re most likely not thinking, ‘Unfortunately, looking back to the analytics, they said I was going to win. It was supposed to be in two sets, and now I’m deep in the third set and we’re in a tiebreaker. This isn’t how I planned my day.’
On key datapoints she sought out…
One stat that was quite good and I was actually very interested in and like to know about: When a player is down breakpoint and they’re serving, what’s their comfortable serve? Are they doing down the T or are they going out wide? And if, down break point, this player goes out wide 80% of the time, as a returner, you take a couple steps to that side to give yourself a chance to not be late to that first serve. So those types of stats really, really helped.
That’s part of the homework that you do with your coach in looking through those tools. But one in particular was second serve percentage. So if an opponent had a weaker serve, you most likely identified it in the stats, so what does that mean? As someone that was quite an aggressive and powerful player, I could maybe take two steps in front and attack that second serve. If a player has a really good second serve, maybe I don’t go for that first ball so much. So there’s absolutely technical aspects [of interest]. It’s one thing to have analytics, but it’s how do you apply to them and what you’re doing that’s most important.
On the timeliness of scouting data…
Recency is really important because the tour is basically cut into almost — I see it, as a former athlete — four parts. You start with the hardcourt season in Australia through Miami, and then you go onto the clay, then you go onto the grass, and then you go back onto the hardcourt. So within those periods, you have sections of success for different types of players based on their weaknesses, based on their preferences. Some players didn’t enjoy playing on clay. They’d skip those four or five weeks of competition and move on to the grass.
It’s a long season, so you have to pick and choose where you believe your game will most likely succeed. So recency, in terms of, what is the surface that this little chunk of time requires you to be on? Are you injured? Have you been competing for the last several weeks? So all that goes into play whereas [the global] ranking most of the time, because it goes back to points on how you performed a year ago, it’s not very relative to today.
On fitness monitoring devices…
I actually didn’t use many wearables. During practice, I would have a heart rate monitor, but [compared to] right now, that’s like nothing. I’d say I was fairly old school in my approach. My team relied on a lot of that — they wanted to know my HRV. But I was more focused on getting out on the court, and that’s why I was emphasizing the team if you can. If you as a player can gain confidence in all these tools for your team, the level of engagement that you will then indirectly have with those tools is significantly positive.
On the growth of fan interest and access…
I remember, the Tour was questioning whether you have fans in the stadium to watch you practice. Right now, as I came to the US Open and I was just flying over here, there was a live feed of the practices. Players are being mic’ed. The evolution of where the game is to where I started — I remember speaking to my manager on whether I needed a social media account.
But there is a part of sport — and then tennis in particular — where it’s down to heritage and tradition. And now I’m on the other side from being a player to being a fan and loving the game so much and wanting more access than just the players playing, the hour-and-a-half or two-hour match. I want more insights, I want to know about their matchups. I don’t see that on a day-to-day basis. So by having these tools in front of me, it’s such a quick way of accessing information and just makes it for a better experience.
On her pre-tournament pick at this year’s US Open…
I hope it’s Coco [Gauff]. If I’m predicting, I think she has an amazing head on her shoulders, I think she has a great vision of the game, and she also has this amazing voice as a young woman for change. She’s created a platform for herself. She’s way above her age in terms of her thoughts and how she speaks, and I find that professionalism so impressive. And that’s hard to find.
On her victory at the US Open in 2006…
The victory here was very special. Besides holding the trophy, in the final I beat Justine Henin, who, when I was growing up, was a huge idol but also the most challenging player that I played against because of her game, just talking about matchups. I think that was my first victory against her was at the finals in the US Open. If IBM was around [with predictions] then, it would have said, ‘Maria has no chance.’
I went into that match just so confident because I was having this great run but also knowing that this opponent in front of me just clearly knew my game so well. And looking across the net and seeing like someone so accomplished, I had only won one Grand Slam, prior to that year’s Open. So there’s a lot going on in your mind. I was only 19 years old. I was still kind of young on Tour, figuring things out. When you are that young — this young success, this fresh success — it is a fresh breath of air because you come from having no experience of these large victories.
[I loved] every little piece of it, I mean, being giddy in the press conference after and like when they offer you champagne, you’re like, ‘Do I drink it?’ When I started, New York was very intimidating. I think for many people, when they arrived in the city, it was overwhelming. And from an athlete’s perspective, when you’re not playing, you’re always recovering, and you’re in a city that never sleeps, so how do I recover? Your mind is always on. And then you just appreciate falling in love with what it brings you, from a fan perspective, from arriving at the US Open and feeling the energy and allowing that to lift you up, especially when you’re having a bad day. As an athlete, it is the best feeling in the world. And there’s no one that does it better than a New York fan.
On the pickleball phenomenon…
I signed up for pickleball, and I’m playing you. You want something? I’m actually I’m playing with John McEnroe in February against Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf. So I have no choice but to get my stuff together. It’s funny how, if you’re a tennis fan, when I mention pickleball, I’m seeing it from the outside because there’s so many racquet sports now. When you’re in Europe, everyone is talking padel. And then you’re in the States, and everyone’s talking pickleball.
So what I like about pickleball is the entry level element of it. Tennis is a very difficult entry level sport. That’s not a secret. For you to feel like you’re competitive, it’s going to take you a few months, so you can get discouraged. Pickleball, you can pick it up and you feel fairly natural soonish. So I love that about it because, thinking from a business perspective with partners and engagement, it’s just easier. It’s also very social.
If I ask my friends to play tennis with me, they’re like, ‘Forget it. Let’s go play pickleball.’ I’m like, ‘I really don’t care [about competition]. I just want to spend time with you.’ They’re like, ‘I’m not going to play tennis with you.’ ‘I’m really not that good anymore.’
Pickleball has become like my entry level with my friends. So yeah, I love the future. I love this future of racquet sports, and it’s another way to engage with the youth. Which when you think about getting children off their screens, and I’m a young mom, so I start thinking about that, how are all the screens impacting my engaging my child to be outdoors and adventurous and having fun and being playful? If that’s pickleball or something else, I’m all for 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.
Samford University is winning championships and is being assisted in its efforts by the athletics department’s renewed focus on data.
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Now he’s two years into his role at Samford University as Assistant Athletic Director, Sports Performance. Mathers oversees Project SAMson, a universitywide effort to infuse a data-focused approach into the entire athletics department.
In its short life so far, the project has helped to produce the greatest sports season the university has ever seen: a total of 11 championships, counting regular-season and conference tournament crowns. That included the school’s first outright Southern Conference championship in football, an 11-win campaign that set a school record.
In the battle for competitive advantage throughout college athletics, biometrics and sports science have often been treated as an effort to keep up with the Joneses (or in this case, the Sabans and Smarts). A lot of big programs have data. But schools like Samford, which kicked off its football season last week with most of the nation’s programs, show how data digestion could become a new divider between winners and losers.
“I think people are starting to use it in ways that really help them to structure and manage what they’re doing with their athlete loads every day,” said Mathers, a day before Samford’s game with Division II Shorter University. “I would say five years ago, 90% of people had it as a recruiting tool. It was the shiny thing.”
That’s a progression that Matt Bairos has observed as well. Bairos is the Chief Product Officer at Catapult. The sports performance analytics company, notable for its wearable vest that features GPS tracking, works with every Division I school in the country.
Catapult introduced two new products for football teams ahead of this season: Catapult Scout and Catapult Hub. The former allows for the quick generation of scouting and recruiting packages, as well as transfer portal monitoring. The latter improves video creation and sharing abilities to incorporate more teaching and data infusion.
Through Catapult’s partnerships with the likes of Formula One, Bairos points out, rich data sets have become descriptive, prescriptive and predictive. College football may never be that sophisticated analytically, he said, but he sees the room available still to grow for the sport.
“I think there’s a lot more variables as it relates to sports that involve humans running around,” Bairos said. “But the more pieces of data that we put together, it’s almost like we’re putting that map together of what’s going to happen next.”
Samford University has taken that notion and proliferated it. The private university, with a total enrollment of just under 5,700, houses the Center for Sports Analytics. The center has partnered with professional leagues and teams, as well as brands like Nike and Coca-Cola, as an integration into student curriculum that features three focuses: business, statistical analysis and sports science.
According to the center’s Executive Director, Darin White, the idea for Project SAMson originated from former Samford football player and donor Gary Cooney. Between the programs on campus, plus the school’s existing partnerships with Andrews Sports Medicine (the team doctors for Samford) and the American Sports Medicine Institute, the pieces were in place. A $1 million grant to the school supported the tracking of all Samford athletes. “It’s rare to find a team that has no data being collected,” White said. “But I’d also say the vast majority of teams are only utilizing that data in summary fashion.”
Project SAMson enhances the strength training and injury prevention efforts. Phase 1 consisted of a workout equipment overhaul. In total, Mathers estimated, it was roughly $250,000 in total enhancements. Samford uses EliteForm, a motion-camera system, on all of its weight room racks. Those systems track the movement of the bar, measuring how fast the player moves it through a lift. Players can enter login information on a touchscreen and record video for review with strength coaches.
Mathers said they also utilize VALD Performance equipment, mainly the company’s NordBord for hamstring strengthening/testing, ForceDecks for strength and movement testing, and timing gates for sprinting. Catapult is used by the Bulldogs, too. Mathers and his staff can use all these tools as part of their effort to measure player load. The staff can forecast how future adjustments to practices and activities could even affect the energy an athlete has for output.
Soon Project SAMson will take another big step: Samford will start using Smartabase, a platform that houses all performance data from multiple sources in one place. Samford’s sports performance unit has five full-time staffers and two graduate assistants, and also draws upon an intern group of about 35 to 40 students.
Such a drastic, long-term change can be a hard sell in a results-now business, Mathers said. Project SAMson established itself in a time when health monitoring was desperately needed: Samford, along with many other FCS schools, played a spring and fall season in 2021 due to COVID’s postponement of 2020. The team played 18 games in that calendar year, producing data that couldn’t reflect a year with normal preparation and recovery times.
Fortunately, Mathers said, he works with a head football coach in Chris Hatcher who trusted the vision for the project. That trickled throughout the program. “I think the SoCon championship is the result of everybody doing their job really well,” Mathers said. “I think we were able to give objective data to them. It helps the coaches do their jobs better, and it helped the athletes do their jobs better.”
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.
Crystal Palace and Royal Antwerp have developed data storage and visualisation systems that increase athlete availability, enable smarter recruitment, and ensure more efficient workflows.
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Dr Cedric Leduc, a sports scientist at English Premier League club Crystal Palace FC, is sharing his experience with practitioners working in athlete monitoring.
It is a natural enough recommendation for a sports scientist to make but the case Leduc makes to the Leaders Performance Institute is compelling. “If you aim to work in a sports club as a practitioner,” he continues, “one of the key things when considering your own learning and development journey is to integrate some of those data skills that will help you to understand what is actually required by an organisation when it comes to data and technology.”
Why a data infrastructure is important
Leduc, who has been at Crystal Palace for almost two years, addresses that question on a daily basis. “How can I refine a thousand possible metrics on the market into a presentation or construct of what I am seeking to present?” As he sees it, there are two viable approaches; firstly, by calling upon his own experience and relationships with colleagues, coaches and athletes; and secondly, by running statistical analyses that enable those selections to be made in an objective way.
Crystal Palace and Royal Antwerp track Player Availability using Smartabase, which enables performance staff and coaches to make informed training and performance decisions. Image: Smartabase
“A combination of both works,” he says. “When you have to turn things around quickly, you might actually use your experience, but when you have time and access to a good historical database, you might be able to run those analyses. There’s a trade-off between short-term actionable points and more long-term objective decisions.”
Leduc and Crystal Palace use human performance optimisation platform Smartabase as a data storage and visualisation solution for all players and staff, from the academy to the first team.
“In a way, building the system from nothing was an advantage because you can build it the way you like and set up the structure” – Peter Catteeuw
To operate without such a system puts a club at a disadvantage, as Dr Peter Catteeuw, the Head of Performance at Belgian Pro League champions Royal Antwerp FC, explains.
“When I arrived at Antwerp in 2017 there were no records of injuries, records of tests with the players, no records of training sessions and so on,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. Mindful of how well Smartabase had served him in his previous role at Racing Genk, he began to use their technology at his new club, building a monitoring system for a second time with the help of Smartabase’s agile customer success team.
“In a way, building the system from nothing was an advantage because you can build it the way you like and set up the structure,” he says. “It’s still changing every day and getting better, helping players from the academy to the first team. The team’s management and administration is also coming onboard.”
It is a product of the latitude afforded to Catteeuw and his ability to scale the system. “We needed time to build the system to our own needs and it continues to develop. On the other hand, we can implement changes immediately.”
Smartabase enables the collection of both objective and subjective sources of data relating to athlete wellness. Image: Smartabase
Of advice he would give a team who are starting from scratch, Catteeuw says, “You can easily start with a smaller group within the club, say the academy, and then progress through the organisation as you build the system.”
How accessible and actionable data can improve workflows
Alignment and accessibility are critical for new members of staff. When Leduc arrived at Crystal Palace, his first question was: where is the data and can I access it easily? “Then you start to realise that you have multiple data sources like in any sports organisation,” he says. “What’s important, if you want to make practical use of that data, is to first make sure they are stored in one secured place so that it can be easily accessed – then you can turn that into something actionable.”
“We have a holistic view of the players; what they did in training, what they are doing outside of training, how well they are recovering every day and if they are ready to train or take on more load or not, and if they are ready to play games or not” – Peter Catteeuw
At Royal Antwerp, Catteeuw welcomes the ability to tailor the club’s data management platform to his wishes thanks to Smartabase’s hands-on approach to customer success. A response within hours is the norm. A solution often follows in a day or two. “Most systems are fixed but Smartabase gives you the tools to create your own club system to enable you to work the way you like with physios, strength & conditioning staff, the technical coaches and management. Most companies only make it if it’s interesting for other teams.”
Injury Risk Profiling is an essential area of Catteeuw’s work at Royal Antwerp. Image: Peter Catteeuw / Royal Antwerp FC
Leduc has witnessed the benefit first-hand at Crystal Palace. “A new player signed this summer and the head physio asked me if he can integrate the profile of that new player so that he can start adding notes,” he says. “Another example from pre-season was the request to implement a new technology, integrating its data with their Smartabase storage system.” The organisation was able to facilitate the club’s request. “They are very reactive in trying to understand your needs and not simply relying on what already exists.”
At Royal Antwerp, Catteeuw was able to make the API work in linking the sleep tracker Whoop and Smartabase. “Now it’s up to me to pick the right data, the data we want to see, and make clarifications if necessary,” he says. “I will make the first simple dashboards for ourselves, the medical staff or the coaches to have a quick view every day. In the next days, I will try to combine data we have now from Whoop with the players’ wellness questionnaires and with all the training and game data we collect so that we have a holistic view of the players; what they did in training, what they are doing outside of training, how well they are recovering every day and if they are ready to train or take on more load or not, and if they are ready to play games or not.”
Agility is critical to data-informed decision making
There is the imminent possibility that this process will lead to red flags with some of the players. Perhaps they have not slept well on a consistent basis. This will, however, not lead to an overreaction from Catteeuw and his colleagues.
“We don’t have to take drastic action right away. These alarms just let us say ‘let’s first talk to the player and see what’s going on’ and then maybe check with the physios. Is there something else from the medical staff? Is there something from the training pitch that also raises an alarm?”
Catteeuw recalls an illustrative example from last season when Royal Antwerp used NordBord, ForceFrame and ForceDecks in strength testing. “In every first training session after a match, we ran tests. The data gives us a signal i.e. it’s too slow for these players, the difference between left and right is too large. We won’t pull them out of training immediately but we’ll check the player and see if there’s anything too serious to let them train. But most of the time it means we maybe have to adapt a little bit of training or we need to get an additional session in the gym.”
Access to the initial sources of raw data has enabled Leduc at Crystal Palace to streamline some of his processes. “The initial data collection with a given technology can be pushed into Smartabase in the right format,” he says. “I can then push it to get the right visualisation or run some analysis on it in a very straightforward way. You limit human interaction, which decreases the risk of errors. Having access to the original data enables you to be very agile with the data you’re collecting.”
However you use your databases, the important thing is to understand the needs of your organisation. As Leduc says: “Do you need a storage or visualisation solution? That will depend on your organisation.”
Crystal Palace and Royal Antwerp use Smartabase to track player soreness on a daily basis. Image: Smartabase.
The data landscape is changing and the days of teams failing to track even basic performance metrics are largely consigned to the past. In addition to Crystal Palace and Royal Antwerp, Smartabase clients include both Arsenal and Nottingham Forest in the Premier League, Stoke City in the English Championship, to AS Monaco in the French Ligue 1, Ajax in the Dutch Eredivisie and SL Benfica in the Portuguese Primeira Liga – all clubs looking to make a real difference both in training and in competition by developing a data infrastructure that enables coaches, practitioners and the players themselves to make faster, smarter and better informed decisions.
The world soccer union wants greater education and regulation around data that can help to prevent injury and improve performance.
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Such a statement reflects data’s evaluated status in modern sports. Yet while name, image and likeness rights have been commercialized extensively in professional sports, data rights are a nascent field, evolving at varying speeds based on club cooperation, league and union maturity and legal jurisdiction. There’s a wide range of data collected, too, inclusive of GPS vests, optical tracking cameras, force plates, heart rate monitors and more.
FIFPRO, the consortium representing 66 global professional soccer unions, recently announced its grand ambition to tackle the issue itself, serving as an accelerant of a universal solution across soccer. The idea, Baer-Hoffmann said, is to “translate the highest standard of data protection legislation” into a centralized platform whose development is led by FIFPRO with the athletes’ interests at the center.
The Netherlands-headquartered FIFPRO started exploring rights and protections of athlete data about five years ago. A survey it conducted during the 2020-21 season reported that 80% of pro players rated their interest in using data as at least an 8 on a 1-to-10 scale. Only about half, however, had full access to it or even understood why and how it was collected.
This led to the Charter of Player Data Rights that FIFPRO created in collaboration with FIFA and published in September 2022. Athletes’ three primary expectations for data was codified in that document — access, portability and control — and followed the framework of stringent privacy protections instituted by the European Union’s GDPR and others.
FIFPRO’s work is independent of the Project Red Card lawsuit — through which 1,400 cricket, football and rugby players are seeking compensation for what they consider unlawful use of athlete data — but it espouses the same underlying legal reasoning.
The first test case of this plan was the FIFA player app made available to all participants in the men’s World Cup 2022 in Qatar last December and again in July and August this year for the Women’s World Cup 2023 in Australia and New Zealand.
“We obviously have much higher ambitions and ambitions that go well beyond a World Cup environment but really go throughout the entire career parameters of any of the professional players around the world,” Baer-Hoffmann said, “whether it’s club, whether it’s country, whether that’s commercial partners, whether that is high performance coaching, etc., with all the different applications, risks and opportunities that come with it.”
FIFPRO has not announced any technology partners, but the expectation is that one or more third-party vendors will help build the product, which Baer-Hoffmann estimated will take six to nine months. Educating and onboarding athletes across so many leagues and countries will take considerable time as well.
The scope of global soccer makes FIFPRO’s task daunting while some individual unions have begun seeking their own solutions, with the NWSL Players Association partnering last week with BreakAway Data for use of its athlete data passport app.
“One of the things that’s become very clear is that an athlete’s right to have access to their own data is important, but it’s not very practical unless there’s actually a tool to make that access easy,” NWSLPA Executive Director Meghann Burke said.
Baer-Hoffmann contended that most current uses of athlete data by clubs could be easily challenged legally, but he was clear that athletes don’t seek to shut down all such uses and want to preserve the many benefits of preventing injury and improving performance — just with agency over how it’s used. The data platform, he added, can help bring to life the privacy rights that are often “very technocratic, and the enforcement is very, very legalistic.”
“A natural phenomenon that is happening at the minute is that the innovation potential, in the private sector around sports data and technology, is just a whole lot faster than the regulatory response, which is the case in many parts of society, right?” he said. “Usually technology just exponentially grows faster than the regulatory capabilities of institutions that govern the country or a certain sector.”
Basic game stats such as goals scored and shots saved plainly reside in the public domain. MRI results and bloodwork are clearly private medical records. But the performance data in question — biomechanics, movement patterns, heart rate — sits “somewhere in between, and which way should it lean?” BreakAway Data CEO Dave Anderson said.
Volumetric data, such as Hawk-Eye’s ability to track 29 points on the body for 3D motion capture, is an example of the increasingly granular data that prompted Anderson to conclude “that performance data is starting to lean more and more towards health data and that it’s vital to understand, how much wear and tear is on these guys?”
Commercial opportunities for the data are possible, too. The NFLPA is among the unions investigating that market fit, partnering with Sports Data Labs last year to explore possible revenue generation potential.
“We ultimately view your personal data — if you’re an athlete, a patient, a citizen with a watch that collects data — as a digital asset,” Sports Data Labs CEO Mark Gorski said, before cautioning that such assets won’t immediately lead to new income. “Most people want to talk about the end use case. There’s a whole bunch of steps that have to be taken in the right way in order to get there. What we’re spending part of our time with is really helping groups navigate some of those complexities on a global level.”
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The NASCAR driver talks tech, using a simulator and partnering with Hurley in his first season racing in the Cup Series.
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Gragson, 25, is a Las Vegas native and graduate of the NASCAR Next program for promising drivers. The affable self-proclaimed Mayor of Throttleville is also a two-time ‘most popular driver’ award winner, claiming that honor during the 2018 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series and the 2022 NASCAR Xfinity Series. Among his sponsorship portfolio are Wendy’s, Black Rifle Coffee Company and, most recently, Hurley.
On preparing for race weekend…
It’s a seven-day-a-week job, for sure. You race on Sunday, you fly home Sunday night, we got back at about 2:30am Monday morning this past weekend. Then I headed to the gym, leaving the house at 6:30 in the morning, then meetings the rest of Monday. And then try to get done by 3 or 3:30 and have the rest of the afternoon to relax. Tuesday is working out again. I did simulator this morning for the first half of the morning and had a meeting. Do some interviews like we’re doing. That’s what I’m doing the rest of this afternoon.
Wednesday, it’s usually a workout in the morning time, got pitstop practice, and then it’s more meetings with the race team, going over the race weekend stuff. Thursday morning, we’ll do a workout and then pre-race debrief with the guys in the Chevrolet program with Josh Wise. He runs the Chevrolet program — he’s an ex-driver — and now a lot of Chevrolet drivers will prepare for the races together. So we’ll do more race prep, then we’re either flying out on a Thursday afternoon, or sometimes we have the second half of Thursday off if we’re not in the simulator ’til about 6:30 on Thursday nights.
Then we either fly out Thursday afternoon, Friday morning, go to the racetrack, do tech, do some sponsored stuff, practice, qualify on Saturday, and then again race their Sunday and then back home. And it’s a constant seven-day-a-week job, but I love the process of everything. It’s a lot. It’s definitely time-consuming. But it’s a lot of fun as well.
On his use of the simulator…
It’s helpful, definitely for the Chicago street course, which is a brand new track for NASCAR. They just made it. We’ve never raced on a street course before. We’ve never raised at this particular track so utilizing the simulator and trying to just get some ideas on what you need to focus on for when you go to the real track in real life — how far can I drive in before I have to hit the brakes? What are my visuals looking like? Little stuff like that is what we really use a simulator for helping build up the setups and get the car tuned in on the simulator to give us some ideas when we get to the real racetrack. It’s definitely very beneficial, and we utilize it a couple of days a week for sure.
On his fitness training…
We definitely track our heartrate and everything like that. So when we work out, we’ll do a little warm up and then whether it be a run, row, or the skier or the bike, then we’ll stretch out. Then we get into a daily workout we have. We’re in the gym three days, and then we do karting or other stuff on Tuesdays where there’ll be a trail run or whatnot. But Dan Jansen, the Olympic speedskater, he is our trainer over at Chevrolet. So, man, he loves the leg workouts — they suck — because he comes from the speedskating side and having all that power in his legs. I mean, this dude’s legs are just massive. It’s crazy.
So we do a lot of leg workouts and a lot of heat training on bike rides and runs. Upper body stuff in the gym as well. And then we’ll sit in the sauna for about 30, 45 minutes after the workout just to get some more heat training in. And so that takes about two, two and a half hours a day of in the gym and prepping for the races.
On his use of SMT analytics…
We definitely look at that a lot throughout the week and the race weekend and just finding where we can be better. The majority of the time, it’s during the race weekend and right before practice. We’ll take a look at the prior year and how guys were and where they’re lifting on the gas, how much brake pressure they’re using. We can overlay [data] and compare that.
So that’s a definitely a double-edged sword, I think the SMT data is. Normally you spend your whole racing career figuring out how to go fast, and now it’s like, if you’re in the second group in qualifying, you just look at what the guys in the first group did. And you just go implement that into your driving and try to match up the data to the fast guys. So I think it’s good if you’re first starting to expedite that process of learning the tracks and where you need to be, car placement-wise, how much break, how much throttle you need to use, but at the same time, it kind of takes away a little bit because you just see what the fast guys are doing and you just go copy that.
On partnering with Hurley…
The coolest thing is I grew up surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding. I loved action sports and always wore Hurley stuff at the beach. I remember when they came out with the Phantom swim trunks, in the early 2010s probably. Being a kid, there was a store in Laguna Beach — we’d always go down to Laguna Beach every summer with my family — called 225 Forest or something like that. It was a Hurley and Nike store, and you could customize swim trunks and Nike shoes and Hurley swim trunks and Hurley t-shirts. I just thought that was the coolest thing ever.
I was a little kid running around and would try to do some chores throughout the week so I could get a little spending money. I so got a couple of pairs of custom phantom Hurley swim trunks back in the day and just loved them. I wish I still had them. I think my mom probably threw them away or something. She calls me a hoarder because I like collecting cool stuff and crazy stuff, and my argument to her would be, ‘Those are my first pair of custom swim trunks, c’mon.’ But that was pretty cool. That’s how I got introduced to Hurley and have worn them ever since.
On his creative interests…
[The custom shorts] were pretty wild. It was like a blue and black cow print on one leg — and, I mean, they were wild — and yellow and gray stripes on the other leg with a crazy pocket. I forget exactly, but they were really, really wild looking. I always liked the wild, bright, colored stuff. Now for me from the swim trunks to now designing my own helmets and the paint schemes on my helmets, I really liked getting to do that. So it’s a cool process.
I liked drawing a little bit when I was a kid. I like the helmets because I feel like you can show personality and do some cool stuff and be unique. So yeah, I like art a little bit. I think it’s cool and definitely always loved the designs on race cars, designs on helmets and just cool t-shirts and stuff.
On how he evaluates brand partnerships…
I’ve always told our management group [to pursue] just stuff I believe in, stuff that I enjoy wearing in this scenario or food I like eating. Just stuff I’m passionate about is really the biggest thing. You see so many ambassadors and athletes and whatnot that have partnerships with companies, but they’re just getting a check and they don’t necessarily believe in it or are passionate about it. We turned away deals because I don’t have any passion over this, so why would I want to be an ambassador a spokesperson for this company if I don’t believe in it? It’s a complete opposite with Hurley. I’ve always been a big fan of their stuff. I call myself a swimsuit model for them even though I’m not really.
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As the league introduces Hawk-Eye as its new tracking technology, the level of granular detail available to officials is set to grow.
Main Image: Hawk-Eye
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To the right is the group overseeing the implementation of the Hawk-Eye player and ball tracking system that is set to replace Second Spectrum as the raw data collector and enhance the offering by providing 3D pose data via 29 points on the body, rather than a single center of mass. To the left is the on-premises replay room, a luxury not typically afforded the NBA Summer League.
The Summer League, which took place between July 7 and July 17, was used as an experiment in innovation, as the league conducted a final test of its new tracking provider while also assessing new avenues of reviewing close calls and then communicating those decisions swiftly to the earpiece or wristwatch of an on-court official.
“Number one is just a dry run of the core tracking system because that’s the lifeblood of team front offices and Sportradar, our partner — we want to make sure that is working because that’s the foundation of all this,” said NBA Basketball Strategy VP Tom Ryan, who oversees technology initiatives. “Building on top of that, we are, for the first time, going to see what a fully-integrated, tracking-plus-video replay system looks like. We’ve never used tracking data live in a replay center.”
Image: Joe Lemire
The legacy product of Sony-owned Hawk-Eye is its precision ball tracking used to adjudicate line calls in tennis before an expansion to tracking players, their limbs and balls in other sports, like MLB. Its other primary offering is the Synchronized Multi-Angle Replay Technology (SMART) video replay that’s used by the NFL and others.
Now, the NBA is pairing the two with an eye toward generating supplemental evidence to help referees make decisions on goaltending, the primary point of emphasis this year. Foot-on-the-line and last-touched-out-of-bounds calls will be in R&D all year. In the future, those determinations could be fully automated, though that step would require sign off from the Competition Committee and the National Basketball Referees Association.
“Our top objective here at the Summer League is to showcase how all of our different technologies can come together to create this synergy of solutions to provide the NBA with ultimately what they need to better officiate the game,” said Dan Cash, Hawk-Eye’s Managing Director for North America. “We believe that if you couple that [tracking] with replay, which we’re demonstrating here, you have a really powerful tool to be able to officiate the game efficiently and effectively.”
Hawk-Eye installed its optical tracking system in every NBA arena over the course of two months, January to March, this year. It entails 14 cameras with 4K resolution that are expected to operate at 120 frames per second — double the broadcast standard for sports — and could go even higher, although the requisite processing power necessitates a trade-off with latency. A 15th camera may be deployed at times that’s capable of a whopping 1,000 fps with even greater resolution.
What these cameras provide, first and most obviously, are more angles of the action. A questionable three-pointer in the Summer League’s first few days lacked a conclusive broadcast view, but one of the Hawk-Eye cameras had a better angle to confirm the foot was behind the line.
But the tracking data provides a new dimension of analysis. The NBA flew out its usual Secaucus-based replay operators for a trial. “It’s video plus data, which is a new skill to learn,” Ryan said, adding that “we have a different [replay] partner that we’re really happy with,” referring to EVS. Hawk-Eye’s three prior visits to the Summer League were all for testing in the background; this is its first time used in games.
The cameras collect positional data of the basketball and players’ hands, then apply the rules of goaltending and the laws of physics. On the replay operator’s screen are yes-no indicators for the goaltending criteria.
“Goaltending is relatively easy — if the ball passes its apex, if it’s over the cylinder, if it’s touching the backboard — those are all pretty defined use cases, but if we haven’t collected data for a significant amount of time, you don’t have a historical data set to refer to, to understand where your pain points are,” Hawk-Eye Commercial irector Justin Goltz said.
“Realistically, the technology moves in at a pace that it can do it relatively quickly, but there’s a lot of logistics to get it from this broadcast truck, or from the stadium, down to the court that needs to be hashed out over a season or two.”
The operator also sees a second-screen experience with a replay animation similar in spirit to what Hawk-Eye has made famous in tennis. The NBA is still evaluating the best presentation of information and visuals to, first, help make the correct call and, second, show the fans. “A big part of this initiative is just more transparency,” Ryan said.
Image: Joe Lemire
Following the same adage that content is king but distribution is queen, so too with this enhanced replay format is that accuracy is paramount, but efficiency is critical, too. The league is testing two methods of communication to its referees: both audible messages to an earpiece or haptic and written transmissions to a watch.
The NBA, for example, introduced a new mechanism for relaying a scoring change from the replay center to the on-court officials last year. If a two-pointer became a three, or vice versa, a blue light would flash at the scorer’s table. The problem: looking in that direction was never part of the usual routine or field of vision. Of about 120 such blue light indicators, only five were organically spotted.
That’s an obvious starting point — and not novel as other sports, such as soccer, have done this for years — but it could lead to other use cases.
“Live communications with the ref is definitely a core component of our strategy because if we’re doing all this work on the automation side,” Ryan said, “you have to be able to communicate that with the ref in real time.”
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Smith’founded Crux Sports, a consultancy for women in sports, with a view to grow women’s football and give females the support they need whether in the boardroom or out on the field.
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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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Rebecca (Bex) Smith is among the most connected people in women’s soccer. She captained teams for Duke University, Vfl Wolfsburg and the New Zealand national team, competing with the Football Ferns at two World Cups (2007 and 2011) and two Olympic Games (2008 and 2012). Smith also played professionally in Sweden and Germany before her career ended in 2013 due to a knee injury.
Smith, now 41, went on to work at FIFA for nearly five years as Competitions and Event Manager for all FIFA Women’s World Cups — the flagship event as well as the Under-17 and Under-20 versions. She went on to become the Global Executive Director of the Women’s Game at Copa90, a podcast host co-produced by the BBC, UEFA venue director and now Founder/CEO of Crux Sports, a women’s sports consultancy. In May, Crux Sports published research, in partnership with YouTube, on the value and impact of DAZN making the Women’s Champions League available for free on the social streaming platform.
She earned three degrees, speaks four languages and is either a board member or advisor for numerous companies and programs, including AI-powered injury risk platform Zone7 and the Isokinetic Conference, the largest football medicine conference in the world. Smith will also co-host the daily morning show for Australian broadcaster Optus at the upcoming Women’s World Cup being held in Australia and New Zealand.
On what she’s building with Crux Sports . . .
My company was born out of the fact that I had a very diverse background coming from playing to then governance and managing one of the biggest women’s sporting event on the planet to then going into media content production to then working with big brands to doing branded content and working with athletes. So I really just wanted to have a place where we could help all stakeholders so whether it is brands or governing bodies or content production or athletes themselves to either get into the women’s game or to help fuel it.
So it’s really about driving sustainable positive growth into the women’s game, but then helping stakeholders to increase their bottom line or to work on their marketing or figure out their strategies for integrating women’s sports and female athletes into their propositions as well. So it’s very diverse. I work with YouTube and Google and helped them do a research project, all the way to Champions League to working with big brands like Xero on their partnerships with the FA or FIFA to working with on content production or working with athletes directly, helping them work on their post-career transition and maximizing their commercial opportunities during their career.
On her interest in player health and wellness . . .
It comes from my own experiences in football and sort of more negative experiences, I would say, throughout my career where I found that there was a lack of support. Despite the fact that I had three degrees on the side and was trying to work at the same time — because I was trying to just set myself up for post-[playing career] — I still felt really unsure, insecure, going into that post-career, post-football life and having to do so with a really bad injury. I hurt my knee, and then it was not very properly looked after at my club. And I was continually playing on a very swollen knee. And in the end, I can’t run anymore. So for me, it was really important.
When I was at FIFA, we did a whole medical study on the athletes and players, and what their medical setups were. And in the end, we couldn’t publish it. So I gave it to my buddy at FIFPro. So they did the very first employment study. So it was based off of a lot of the data and research that we had done. And yeah, it’s just really about trying to better the situation for the next generations. And it sounds so hokey, and so cliché, but it’s so important that we continually improve the game for the athletes because they are at the heart of the game.
On her work with athletes . . .
So many people work in and around sports, and they run this or they run marketing, or they run broadcast, and they’re very important, they make loads of money, but at the end of the day, if the athletes are continually getting burnt out and injured and aren’t taken care of properly, then it won’t be sustainable. So for many reasons, one, the health and mental health and safety of athletes because they’re human, but secondly, because it’s a business, and it needs to be sustained as well. And you have to take care of your people in the business. So they’re at the core.
Do I think it’s gotten better? No. I wish I could say that it has. I think in some areas, in some clubs, there’s better medical care and a little bit more investment in that, but I still think that it’s a huge gap, which is one of the reasons why I work with a lot of athletes. I don’t really market it, they just come and I work with them to help them get prepared mentally and also just physically — what are they actually doing to prepare for it. So, ya know, there’s still a really long way that we need to go for that.
On Zone7 . . .
Not just because I’m a strategic adviser to them, but I think something like a Zone7 [can help]. I really wish it was around when I was playing. And I’ve said that before. But to have the technology that we have now — AI — that did not exist when I was playing, or was not, let’s say, mainstream when I was around, and to be able to have those types of algorithms where so much data is going in that is being perfected constantly and tinkered with and filtered down, that you can really get to the point where you can say, ‘This is the percentage of risk that you are at for this type of injury, and therefore you should change your training to do this, this and this.’ It’s mind-blowing.
I come across lots of tech companies or people trying to help out with athletes, and it’s all — even what I do — very time-consuming and very one-on-one, whereas this is a mass market product that that can really help. Now they’re in leagues as well, so it’s not just with individual clubs or teams.
So far, that’s the most incredible thing that I’ve seen that I think would just really help reduce injury in a huge way, really quickly and very significantly. But other than that, there needs to be a lot more investment by clubs and leagues and those that are making money off of athletes. They need to have a certain percentage invested back into the athletes, that would be my standard approach to things. But good luck trying to get them to invest back into their players.
On her recent project for YouTube and Google . . .
I did a research project with them around the Women’s Champions League. So because they put the Women’s Champions League, through the rights with DAZN, on YouTube free-to-air and global, it meant that there were a lot of knock-on effects. What they were measuring was traditionally just the live match number — what’s the audience watching this live match? Which is obviously lower than if it’s on normal TV in in France, but that’s because a lot of people didn’t know it was on YouTube.
So we were really looking at the value and impact more broadly on the different stakeholders. So from media, players, the teams — so I interviewed 15 out of 16 teams that participated in the group stage — got their opinions on things, talked to the players that were involved, talked to media and then we did a big fan survey.
On her work with the Global Esports Federation . . .
That’s quite fun. I sit on the players’ commission, and that’s really interesting because I’m learning more than anywhere else, I’d say. It’s really understanding how athletes in the gaming space are being treated, what their challenges are, how the Global Esports Federation can help support athletes better. From my former career as an athlete, but really looking at gaming as one of the biggest, fastest growing industries on the planet. And my goodness, every kid is involved in it.
On the importance of New Zealand co-hosting the Women’s World Cup . . .
It’s pretty massive and not likely to ever happen again. It really is a one-off opportunity, I think, for a country the size of New Zealand that always punches above its weight anyway in its sports teams, but in terms of the size of the country and being able to host such a massive event, it’s huge. And obviously, co-hosting with Australia has been a large part of that as well and will be truly beneficial for both parties. You still have some of the beauty of New Zealand and a totally different vibe and a little bit closer to be able to travel within the country, as opposed to Australia. I’m hoping that all the fans are going to come and turn out and really support the teams down there.
On the broader growth of the women’s game . . .
What the women’s game has suffered from prior is that we have big, big moments, and then it really drops off. So you have the World Cups and obviously the women’s Euros this last summer in England — and then with England winning, that really pushes everything forward quite quickly. You have 1 billion viewers from the last FIFA Women’s World Cup in France, but then we really have struggled to translate that into the [domestic] leagues and Champions League.
I think this year has been one of the first years where we’ve really seen massive pickups of numbers of people in stadia of sellout crowds. Literally every single week, I’ll open something on my phone, and it’s a record being broken of some club or some stadium being sold out. We had the Arnold Clark cup here. They had it in Coventry, and it was the biggest game they’ve ever had in sports — and that happened to be women’s football.
So it’s just it’s growing massively. So I really think that this Women’s World Cup is no longer going to be just another pinnacle event that will see the drop off after. I just think it will help to increase that level so that the trajectory just keeps going up. Obviously the time zone is going to be a challenge. So I think the on-demand elements of it, the highlights and things will be really, really important.
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