All MLS first team clubs, as well as MLS Next Pro and MLS Next teams, will have access to the platform to scout players who can upload videos and metrics to the app for free.
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“That’s why we think this technology is so powerful because all you need is this [smartphone],” MLS SVP Emerging Ventures Chris Schlosser said, “and suddenly, you can be scouted anywhere at zero cost. You can go do drills in your backyard or your driveway or local park, and that would allow you to get on MLS’s radar.”
MLS and ai.io will begin collecting data this fall to create appropriate benchmarks for evaluating players at various levels before all players gain access to aiScout in January 2024. The aiScout app uses Intel’s 3D Athlete Tracking computer vision technology and assess users’ physical and technical skills. Premier League clubs Chelsea and Burnley, which recently clinched a return to the top tier next season, are both R&D partners.
Fred Lipka, the Technical Director at MLS Next, helped champion the use of technology to eliminate the barriers of cost and geography from talent identification.
“Players’ pathways, as they journey through youth sport, is not necessarily soccer first,” Richard Felton-Thomas, aiScout’s COO and Director of Sport Science, said of the US. “And they didn’t just want to be an organization that’s picking up talent because they haven’t made it somewhere else. They want it to be at the forefront of talent identification, and he very early saw that the way to do this is to be able to make sure we can look at everybody in the country simultaneously and fairly.”
The founding story of ai.io originates from the experience of Founder Darren Peries and his son who, after being released from Tottenham’s academy, had no digital CV — data or video — to share with scouts of other clubs. And that was the case for a promising player who had been competing under the purview of a top-flight club. Many multiples more youth had even less access to the typical sporting infrastructure.
Perhaps the best case study of aiScout’s efficacy is its use by another early client, the Reliance Foundation Young Champs, a leading academy in India. During the pandemic when its scouts were unable to travel, RFYC used aiScout to evaluate 12-year-old players. AiScout was used to whittle down the number of candidates for a tryout — and led to the academy inviting four players from rural areas who weren’t even playing organized soccer at the time and thus never would have been on the radar.
“The nature of talent development can be a bit random,” Ben Smith, formerly Chelsea Football Club’s Head of Research and Innovation, told SBJ last summer before joining BreakAway Data full-time. “So if we can have a technology to work at scale across vast areas, then that our scope and our reach is potentially very substantial.”
MLS clubs will be able to search for talent globally, but the primary goal is to consider continental talent, given some of the regulations around homegrown players and international visas.
The aiScout app was part of FIFA’s innovation program and underwent validation testing at Loughborough University, London and Kingston University. A revamped version of the app was released last year to include more gamification and more content geared toward player development, as opposed to just evaluation.
“We wanted to prove that we were a trusted tool first with the clubs,” Felton-Thomas said. “What the new app does is it brings in more of those elements that players get to see, ‘OK, how do I get better if I’m not good enough today?’ We’ve got a bit more player focus to that journey of development, not just trialing.”
The aiScout app will be the focal point, especially early in the partnership, but the company also maintains mobile sport science centers, aiLabs, that has additional evaluative tools for biomechanics and cognitive function.
As the partnership progresses, each MLS club will be able to customize their use to include additional tests, datapoints and benchmarks that are bespoke to their needs. Schlosser said, to his knowledge, none of the league’s clubs have harnessed computer vision at the amateur level before, but he said they are eager to get started.
“The system is up and running in the UK,” he said. “They’ve done some trials with a couple of UK-based teams, so we have some confidence that this isn’t just fly-by-night stuff. This is real. And we’re excited to roll up our sleeves and then roll this out across the country. We think there are many, many kids that we haven’t seen yet.”
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.
Sportec Solutions’ Tom Janicot stresses the importance of communication and the advantages of the league owning its own system.
It is a question the Leaders Performance Institute poses to Tom Janicot, the Director of Video Solutions at Sportec Solutions, who has invited us to RTL Deutschland’s HQ in Cologne on a January evening to explore the German Football League’s (DFL) Video Assist hub during a round of midweek Bundesliga matches.
“The DFL decided to come here because it’s a broadcasting facility in general,” he says. “From a technical perspective, it’s a place where we’ve got maximum redundancy and maximum security for our technical installations and connections to all the stadiums in Germany.” The centre provides both the comfort – much needed for referees when making high-stakes decisions – and the technical infrastructure.
The VAR system for the Bundesliga, known locally as ‘Video Assist’, was first used across the German top tier during the 2017-18 season. It joined goal line technology, which was introduced during the 2015-16 Bundesliga season, as a staple of the match day experience in Germany. Goal line technology provides an instant, accurate judgement on whether or not a ball has crossed the goal line, resulting in a goal.
The DFL Video Assist HQ is operated at a central hub in the city of Cologne. (Image: Deltatre/Sportec Solutions)
Ahead of the 2022-23 season, in March 2022, the German Football Federation (DFB) appointed the Munich-based Sportec Solutions as the Bundesliga’s officiating technology partner for the next five seasons.
It is a pioneering development, as Sportec Solutions is a joint venture between renowned sports and entertainment technology provider Deltatre and the DFL, who operate Germany’s top two divisions under the auspices of the DFB.
Keeping the Bundesliga’s Fifa-certified VAR and goal line technology in-house affords the league overall control, as Janicot explains. “When it comes to changes in setup or innovative features, there’s a huge advantage to being in control of the road maps and the directions we want to take in the future. This also reduces development and feedback cycles. It is challenging for us but also good for our product that the DFL set a very high bar in terms of standards. It is relatively achievable to get everything to work 98% of the time, but that final 2% – that’s where it costs a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money sometimes to get to that stage.” Sportec Solutions achieves such accuracy using technology designed by its subsidiary, Vieww, which specialises in camera-based systems.
Earlier in the day, Janicot had taken the Leaders Performance Institute to inspect the match day setup at the BayArena ahead of Bayer Leverkusen’s meeting with VfL Bochum. In the Bundesliga, he explained, both VAR and goal line technology are set up according to two camera plans: 19 for some matches and 21 cameras for others. A prominent fixture such as Bayern Munich-Borussia Dortmund may have a camera plan of 23. Additionally, there are 14 ‘intelligent’ cameras within a stadium tracking at 200 frames per second in real-time.
A Sportec Solutions van onsite at the BayArena ahead of Bayer Leverkusen’s meeting with VfL Bochum on 25 January. It is one of 12 all-electric vans in the Sportec Solutions fleet. (Image: Deltatre/Sportec Solutions)
Sportec Solutions will have a team onsite, both in the stadium and the TV compound outside, and will work to provide both images and audio to the VARs and operators back in Cologne. For each match, two match officials – a VAR and an assistant VAR – will work directly with two operators, who themselves are supported by an onsite backroom team.
There are eight screens at every terminal. The two largest screens relay footage from the main camera above the halfway line. The others will relay a variety of angles and enable operators to assemble a quad-split for the VAR officials to review an incident from multiple angles.
While the Bundesliga employs the full system, Vieww’s tech could theoretically be rolled out in more modest circumstances. There are already versions in the Portuguese men’s third division and the Bolivian men’s league. “The system we have built here in the Bundesliga is extremely modular,” says Janicot. “You can reduce it to a bare minimum and you can have a functional system – the processes don’t go away – you’re still going to check a red card exactly the same way. That’s something that’s very important for us, to document all of that to make sure that we have the same standards no matter the size and capability of the competition.”
The system in Germany is refined through regular VAR and operator feedback. “What we want is better decision-making and then you break it down from there. ‘OK, this is what you want to get to, how do you build every single building block to make sure that you support VARs in making the best possible decisions?’” adds Janicot, who says referees are involved in review processes.
“We had a testing phase of about one year of putting a product in front of them, getting them to give us feedback on how they liked it, how it was being used, what they didn’t like especially, and then being able to change that.
“I think it’s a luxury we’ve had in building this product from scratch over the past few years after VAR had been introduced [in German football]. We didn’t create it and then put it live and then figure out we need to change this and that. We went in with a fresh mind having had three or four years’ experience within our team and then using that to build the product as it is now.
“And now, on a weekly basis, we’re still discovering things where we get feedback from the referees or from operators and think, ‘hey, maybe we can add this or change that’. That’s a continuously evolving thing and I think that working so closely with the refereeing department – that’s really the key.”
Sportec Solutions deploys its officiating technology across both divisions of the Bundesliga, the German Supercup, and selected matches in the national cup competition, the DFB Pokal. (Image: Deltatre/Sportec Solutions)
This ongoing review process led Sportec Solutions to discard touchscreens for VARs. “If you put technology in front of someone then they’re going to feel like they need to use it,” says Janicot, who explains that VARs were initially able to zoom in on a shot for themselves without the help of an operator. “What we actually found is that it was detrimental to the operation because the operator actually had something else in mind but you had the VAR doing something else. So you had two people to control the system when actually we found it’s better to have just one person who is in charge and the VAR hands-off, simply communicating.
“That’s the thing where you can’t solve everything with technology, you need to think about what the strengths are with the different people that are at the table and what their ultimate goal is or what their role is in the operation and then make sure they have all the tools to be able to fulfil that role.”
Nevertheless, the system still looks complicated to the uninitiated and the Leaders Performance Institute was all at sea when called upon to rule on an offside decision in a trial match-based scenario. Yet any risk of information overload is offset by the VAR and operators’ training, experience and ability to communicate.
“Clear communication is the absolute key to reaching fast, precise decisions,” says Janicot. “The team needs to speak the same language, to trust each other to do their respective jobs, especially when it comes to a complex process like an offside decision.”
Sportec Solutions’ VAR and goal line technology is provided by its subsidiary, Vieww. (Image: Deltatre/Sportec Solutions)
The DFB has brought in commercial pilots to work with referees and operators to help them to better understand how to engage in clear, direct communication techniques when issuing requests, commands and responses.
But what if the technology itself were to fail? “You need to make sure there are no single points of failure and that’s the whole way along the chain,” says Janicot. “All the way down to a single cable going to a monitor or making sure that you have a separate monitor going through a separate line, going through a separate converter etc. So making sure that you separate the work flows completely to make sure that there’s no one point where anything can fail. That applies to technology and also to people, right. What is your back-up plan if somebody gets ill the day before a match? Or if a van doesn’t make it to a venue the day before a match?
“About a year ago, we spent quite a few hours going through all the different scenarios. We called it a ‘pre-mortem’. Thinking about the absolute worst-case scenario. What happened? How can we fail? Then it’s making sure that you step back from that and going through all the different scenarios and you try as a team to cover as many as possible.”
An operator draws the lines during a trial run of the technology that enables VARs to rule on offside decisions. (Image: Deltatre/Sportec Solutions)
What about imminent developments? Where does officiating technology go next? Janicot cites the potential for enhanced player tracking. “Do we at one point want to look at tracking more parts of the body than just the centre of mass?” He also refers to the use of balls containing microchips that support the use of VAR, goal line and semi-automated offside technology in Fifa competitions. “They showed it’s possible that it can be done and at Sportec Solutions we are of course having the discussion, if this is something that we need? What benefits do we get from it? And again, what benefits does it bring to the refereeing world?”
Offside decisions are another area where the DFL and Sportec Solutions are looking to further refine their process, particularly the length of time it takes to reach a verdict and the steps taken to get there. “We are looking at each segment of this decision tree and seeing ‘can we improve this? Can we improve this by work flows between the operators and the VARs or with technology?’ I think that’s something where we can make big steps forward.”
And if money were no object? “Informing the fans in the stadium, I think, is a real key part. Finding a way to do that in the best possible way. I think that’s key.”
He is optimistic for the future of officiating technology in football. “Top leagues have always had high requirements when it comes to precision and it’s also important to us because it’s an elemental part of the game. Afterall, it has influence on the decision-making process, so for us, along the whole way it was very important for us, at the end of this road, that we do get a world-class product where we have the chance to bring in our requirements in terms of quality and reliability but also our wishes and ideas for our future.
“We absolutely feel confident that we are in a very good position right now and in a very good position to develop whatever direction we might want to go in terms of the next years for refereeing technologies.”
Sports teams and organisations have spent the best part of a decade collecting data on athlete performance, but what does the next decade hold? Zone7 believe that the answer lies in making sense of it all. In fact, they refer to this as sport’s next ‘arm’s race’. This is just one of the themes touched upon in this Special Report, which is brought to you by our Partners at Zone7.
Complete this form to access your free copy of In The Zone, which delves into the growing sophistication behind data interpretation, the importance of openness and collaboration between stakeholders, particularly when addressing any reservations, and how data can transform the way business is done in the front offices of elite sport.
The Irish startup PlayerStatData says that their app helps to provide a holistic picture of young player development in soccer.
During the pandemic pause on sports, however, Brett recognized an even greater deficiency in the player development infrastructure, so he pivoted his startup, PlayerStatData, to address the Under-13 through Under-19 population. The target user is currently academy directors and player development coordinators, but Brett says further iterations will likely suit coaches and the athletes themselves.
The PlayerStatData app, which launched in the US and Canada earlier this month, seeks to provide objective performance data culled from video analysis, physical test results, a centralized library of coaching assessments and, crucially, a monitoring system for psychological and socio-economic insights.
“We want to see be a solution for all and to be an all-encompassing solution as well, which means that we want to be accessible, affordable and available to all clubs at all youth levels across the US and Canada,” says Brett, the CEO and co-founder of the Waterford, Ireland-based company. “And we want to give them the full picture of a player’s development.”
Context is critical. Family backgrounds and finances all play a role in player progression, especially in the North American pay-to-play model with costly club and travel teams representing an important pathway. Teenagers’ mental health and perspectives need to be considered, too.
“Coaches have become a lot more open to psychological output because, especially with the age that we’re looking, 13 to 19, there’s a lot going on physically and mentally with them at that age,” Brett says. “There’s a lot of stuff to understand with them too. So that’s where we want to get the best advice, because it’s important to get that right.”
For that, Brett has turned to Laura Finnegan, a lecturer in sport management at South East Technological University in Waterford, as an advisor. Her master’s thesis was in sports psychology, and her Ph.D. dissertation studied the organizational structure of talent development in Irish soccer. Finnegan has done research work on behalf of Uefa and US Soccer as well.
“It’s valuable everywhere to be able to see the player in the round,” she says. That 360-degree view, which PlayerStatData will incorporate piecemeal in future updates, is a novel approach to a market that does have several digital scouting video platforms, GPS wearables and new sensors already. “I really think that’s what’s going to set them apart,” Finnegan adds.
Malcolm Gladwell detailed in his book Outliers that a disproportionate number of NHL players were born in the early months—January, February and March—because the Canadian youth program cutoffs were at the start of the year, thus favoring the slightly older kids. Finnegan has noted similar patterns in academies in the United Kingdom and thus advocates for delayed selection of players because many physical skills don’t manifest until after puberty.
“It’s all stacked with boys that are our early maturers, and in the early years, all born earlier towards the cutoff as well,” she says of the academies. “That was one example of something that we could layer in so that you’re not just necessarily comparing Boy A with Boy B, but actually, you’re comparing boys with someone of the same maturity status as him. You’re trying to be fairer for those kids. For me, it’s just adding an extra lens for coaches.”
PlayerStatData has done some early work with the academy of Waterford FC, which competes in the League of Ireland’s First Division, and has attracted some early clients overseas such as Ottawa University Arizona, a nationally ranked NAIA program. PlayerStatData also sponsored a local Under-14 tournament where it did analysis for the participating teams, which included a team from the Blackburn Rovers, whose first team is one rung below the Premier League. Brett envisions a platform that’s truly customizable so that users can meet their needs no matter the staffing and resources.
“What’s useful is we did some bespoke design,” says Waterford FC academy director Mike Geoghegan. “So Colin sits down and asked me, what information am I looking for? What’s the sort of things that I want to track as a head coach? Because it may not be the same for every head of academy.”
For now, the PlayerStatData staff manually tags video and collects data, but computer vision algorithms developed in conjunction with professors at the local university are being developed. Brett wants that process automated within 18 months so that coaches only need to upload video into the app. “We want to get into a situation where it’s drag, drop, collect, and pick up the reports,” he says.
The Waterford academy, for instance, is staffed by part-time coaches who don’t always have the time to “extract and properly manage the data and draw insights from that data,” Geoghegan adds. “So I’m saying, I’ve got lots of recordings, lots of football, lots of coaches, but I’m not really getting this information in any way because it’s no one’s job.”
Brett sees the US and Canadian soccer systems as needing a tool like his to eliminate subjective coaching bias; the volume of players and vastness of geography make it hard for objective monitoring.
“It’s a bit of a wild west when it comes to pay-to-play and the sheer size of the market,” he says, adding: “There’s an openness to data, there’s an openness to finding that edge, it’s an openness to use a couple of innovations to get ahead, be that as a club or be as a player.”
This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.
This question was tackled by Gavin Benjafield of LAFC and Ben Mackenzie of Zone7 in our latest webinar.
Ben Mackenzie, a Data Research Analyst at Zone7, an injury risk forecast and load management platform, is talking at the organisation’s webinar titled ‘Blending Sports Science and Data Science’.
“Quite often, when people refer to injury prediction, I think the mind goes to ‘this injury, on this day, at this time, as a result of this action’ – and it really isn’t any of those.”
Instead, Zone7 can dip into its ‘data lake’ of over 200 million hours of performance metrics and over 10,000 injury instances to produce an injury forecast based on clean, consistent data.
Still, data science remains misunderstood across elite sport. “Sometimes data analysts and data scientists get blended together now that we have analytics departments,” said moderator Dr David T Martin, the Chief Scientist, Director of Performance at Performance Health Science. “Some people will say ‘I’m not a data scientist, I’m an analyst’.”
Mackenzie and Martin are joined in conversation by Gavin Benjafield, the Director of Performance at Los Angeles FC, who have worked with Zone7 for two years.
Mackenzie uses Benjafield and the club to further illustrate his point on injury forecasting. “We’re able to identify that ‘this’ player, if he continues on the path that he is, he might be outside a certain range, might be at risk or is a risk of an injury as a result of being outside of the norms for LAFC’s training data. Therein lies the risk forecasting. This player either needs to do more, we suggest that he does more, or we suggest that he does less to mitigate that risk of injury.”
Practitioners from across the globe logged on to listen to the trio discuss the distinction between sports science and data science, the misconceptions that abound, as well as the steps teams can take to better use the data they are collecting.
Here, the Leaders Performance Institute highlights the other key insights from the session.
Sports science vs data science
There is a perception in the sports science world that data science is just another element of the job. Benjafield shares the story of a job opening at LAFC. The position was for a data scientist and the job description made that clear, yet just 25% of the 200-plus applicants worked with data. “Sports science: your understanding of physiology, psychology, biomechanics, all those components are nothing to do with data science,” said Mackenzie. Whereas the data scientist’s ability includes “[collecting] data, clean data, and understand multiple programming languages as well as the ability to clearly express what your findings are – they are completely different disciplines.”
Should you outsource your data science?
To illustrate a point around using consultants, Benjafield spoke of his ability as a handyman around the house. He is adept at certain task but draws the line at electrics. At LAFC, Zone7’s forecasting services and AI fulfil the role of the electrician. “If you’re just going to absolutely outsource everything then you’re just going to be an organisation with a ton of consultants running around you. You’re actually not going to have any identity,” said Benjafield. “We’re not going to become a consultant circus, we’re going to strategically pick those that we believe are the electricians that we feel comfortable doing that by ourselves, but we still want to take ownership and do a lot of the things ourselves otherwise we become spectators in our own department and I don’t think anyone wants that.”
As Mackenzie said: “A sentence that is thrown around at Zone7 quite a lot: we are a weapon the practitioner’s armoury. You have the tool box, we are just the hammer. There are many other tools that can get jobs done or can be used for other jobs. It is up to the practitioner to use their skill, their interpersonal skill and their skills in other sports science disciplines, combining all those elements and information provided by Zone7 for them to come to an informed opinion and not data-led.”
Creating actionable steps
Actionable steps are essential when using data, as 100 metrics cannot be manipulated by someone in Benjafield’s shoes across 25 athletes. Minor adjustments and corrections are a good start. LAFC worked with Zone7, who retrospectively analysed a season of data, to hone in on five GPS-related metrics. “Three of those we were already monitoring closely, two of them were not, so I think that just helped us to get actionable items,” said Benjafield, who is mindful of the challenge of pleasing coaches who want as many players as possible available.
The future
Mackenzie and Benjafield wrapped things up by pondering where the future relationship between data science and sports science. “People are fearful of losing jobs or being overtaking by data or AI,” said Mackenzie of the sports world. “I think it requires a change of mindset, a change in appreciation of different skillsets, and an understanding that a different skillset offers different things. That’s where it needs to start. Mindset, openness and willingness.”
Relationships are important for Benjafield too. He said: “I’d like to still be in an industry where we are wearing fewer external devices but we are collecting more data and richer data; and that is translated. I don’t want to lose the relationship with the athlete.”
The former wide receiver discusses the use of data in the NFL and his work with Breakaway Data, the holistic data platform.
The Bills drafted him in the third round of the 2012 NFL Draft. Graham played two seasons in Buffalo, catching 54 passes for 683 yards and three TDs. He went on to play regular season games with the Jets and Saints while also logging time in training camp with the Titans, Eagles and Panthers and spending parts of three seasons with the CFL’s Montreal Alouettes.
Graham, now 32, completed his playing career in 2019 and turned his attention to coaching and data. He’s mentored numerous elite athletes in the Raleigh-Durham area while becoming a data advocate. For a spell, he also worked in Sportlogiq’s business development office on American football projects.
Graham has spent the past two years at Breakaway Data, a holistic data platform co-founded by the leaders of the Gains Group sports consultancy to monitor and improve their own fitness and performance. He is currently its head of performance and on-field application, but also just started a two-month stint with the Green Bay Packers as part of the NFL’s Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship.
On when he realized the importance of data . . .
It started a little bit around the time I interacted with Philadelphia Eagles—that was in 2016—but the best and realest time I had a connection with data and analytics in football was definitely with the Panthers. And I’ll give you the story: we had always worn GPS devices, but we didn’t really get that stuff given back to us. It was just measured, tracked, probably used more against us than for us—but also to tailor our workouts to fit us, personalized.
Other than that, it wasn’t to the degree of… I call it ‘athletic expansion.’ Just for me in my athletic knowledge and IQ, there are things that I need to know, and I need real-time feedback to adjust. I wasn’t getting that until I was with the Panthers.
One day at practice, one of the strength coaches came by and said, ‘Dude, you ran 23 miles-an-hour on the GPS.’ I’m like, ‘What does that mean?’ He was like, ‘That’s the fastest we’ve ever seen recorded on the GPS units.’ I’m like, ‘OK, I really don’t know what that means.’ I mean, I’m a track guy. So I understand that we’re moving, but in my mind, I’m like, ‘When did I do it in practice? What did I do in preparation for that practice or even that data point to hit 23 miles-an-hour? What did I do to lead up to that? And then how do I replicate that? Or was it so high and so fast that I need time to recover?’
On the evolution of data in the sport . . .
It definitely has improved as coaches have gotten younger and the more that the data providers have created education around the space. It started with some [analysts] calculating some and then being like, ‘Hey, this is beneficial.’ And then a coach saying, ‘I don’t know what the heck this is,’ then a coach saying, ‘I kind of know what this is.’ I started between the two of them. Football has always been statistical and analytical. We do down and distance. We do stats. So we know stuff. We want to keep track of stuff.
I have a heavy track background. My dad was an Olympic track coach. I was around Olympians forever. And I’m at practice listening to splits, listening to times for reps, I’m listening to technical feedback for mechanics. And then, after a while during the summer, I’m seeing them run 9.7, and you’re like, ‘That makes sense now.’ If you don’t hit these different points within your 10-meter splits, 20-meter splits, 30-meters splits, you’re not going to achieve the end goal time. So within practice, within a rep, with your warmup, you have to start tailoring yourself and have an understanding what specifically you need to do to obtain a 9.7 because you’re measuring against the clock, right?
That same thing can be applied to football with analytics. Coaches have used GPS load to justify if a player is exhausted or done too much and how they go into recovery and how they plan their scripts and their practice plan. That’s high level. That’s way more objective than a subjective view of basically, ‘We ran around today and did this.’ Now we’re having hard data to justify that this guy, compared to this guy, is gassed. So we have tailored practice for this guy specifically but not the whole team—compared to not resting this guy and pushing the whole team and now we hurt this guy. And we really need him. So analytics and data has definitely helped out.
On how he coaches with data . . .
I coach as a performance coach but also as a receivers coach with analytics. Specifically, I’ve worked with a lot of the NC State football players in the area and some pro guys, definitely some other colleges and the HBCUs and some high-level high school recruits in the area. I put GPS units on my guys when we run. We start with running technique. It’s important to be efficient within route running so that you can hit every point on the field efficiently, right? No part of the grass is off-limits because you know how to move your body in the most efficient way to that point on the field.
[I look] at the technicalities of biomechanics. Now I’ll put that in front of video, and then we break it down there. But then we take that and put it on the field. We go from the track or another surface to the field. Now once it’s on the field, it needs to be applied within sport. And I use GPS units to [monitor] change direction, acceleration, deceleration acceleration, average speed, top speed, of course, and just [overall] load. So the quicker that our younger generation can understand it and take the ownership of it off the coaches, the higher level football will be in quicker. Breakaway is doing that right now.
On whether he would have used data had it been available earlier in his career . . .
As a young player, I would have had to be receptive to this information, and I might have just been ignorant to the fact that it was even around, or it was just so early on that it wasn’t around. But I think it would have definitely added a year or two onto my career, just knowing how to be more strategic in my preparation.
Right now, we’re in the NFL offseason. So prior to showing up for OTAs, I was very calculated as an athlete. It was a chance to really hone in on or own the thing that you really good at, really work on that craft. So, for me, I always had to work on my top-end speed. I could not show up to an NFL camp and be anything less than that. And that was important to me. So in order to either maintain or to increase my top end speed, we have to measure, we have to run, we have to be consistent, we have to, like, run to the point of exhaustion. Understand that that point and that wall is going to be pushed further the next time. But we have to know where that wall is to even push it further.
On the infusion of sensors in the sport . . .
Sports and football are getting there. We have sensors in our helmets. There are sensors in the ball. There are sensors in our shoulder pads. There are sensors now in our tights, our girdles, to see what strains or what muscles are activated in our legs and seeing how they are strained or stressed. Next up will be shoes, right? That would measure stride length, frequency, force—almost like a force plate in your foot. Next will be your hands and gloves. You have your visor being able to do some digital overlay. There’s a way to make this whole thing work.
On joining Breakaway Data . . .
When I first heard about the idea around Breakaway, I was sold immediately because I was like, ‘Excuse me. where the [heck] was this my whole career?’ I’ve been waiting to aggregate all my stuff in one place. It’s just been me by myself, and I cannot do it, and I need something to help me make it all sticky.
The part about it that is really cool is that it incorporates your recovery outside of football, your lifestyle outside of football, with your lifestyle within football. If I can figure out if I walked too much in the mall and figure out how much energy I would have for practice, it would definitely on the next day be like, ‘Don’t go walk around the mall that much.’ Without that, guys were doing this pregame ritual when you go to a new city—for instance, we would stay at the Galleria in Houston, and it was right across the street from a nice big designer mall. All I saw was just steps and steps that I need to recover from prior to tomorrow. They’re going to ask a lot of me, and I’m going to run a lot tomorrow. So let me not use that energy over there at the mall.
One of my guys [that I coach] is coming back from an injury. We’re not doing as many reps with him, but his GPS load and output and overall energy exertion was just as high as one of other guys. I’m like, ‘So what were you doing if you weren’t in the workout?’ Then you start looking back at the video, and he’s having fun behind the line. He’s moving over here. He’s dancing. He’s doing this, he’s doing that. And all that plays into it. I’m measuring it, and I’m getting it. I’m like, ‘Well, you need to just sit down somewhere. You need to be a little more detailed and fine- tuned.’
On empowering athletes through their data . . .
Breakaway is knocking on the door of owning that data. Own your data. The team’s tracking it for their own good, but it’s going to be on your own personal self to go take advantage of that and read it and understand it and ingest it and figure out how to become a better player yourself to even help your team. A football roster is 60, 70-plus in the NFL. Colleges are 100 deep. That’s a lot of bodies to assess. I have 12 players, and it takes me three hours to go through some lines of code and lines of data and statistics.
I cannot imagine doing a full team on the daily, but an individual player can go in read his line off in maybe 20 minutes—see what they did, how they did—and now they can justify their day after that. For linear speed, I like to see average sprint speed and average time spent sprinting. Now if you have a long time sprinting, now you’ve got to understand the mechanics of sprinting. You put a lot of high stress on those body parts. It’s like you’re a driver, and you need to go check the tread on your tires.
Sure, your tires are worn. You’ve got to go refresh your tires. The same thing happens to your body. You have to know what you’re doing—not just go and feel it, but you’ve got to know exactly what you’re doing and have a plan in place. And once you start justifying creating a schedule a routine that you know, satisfies your output, now you’re going to be a consistent Tom Brady type player, right, like longevity type stuff. We can’t just grind it out like we used to in old-school football. And that’s where the younger class has to get on board and be able to read what is being measured, but also understand who to go to and where to go to manipulate the outcome or output on the other side. So, that’s Breakaway.
On getting players to lean into data . . .
Building trust with data is tough, right? It’s almost like building trust with the court system. It’s got to be fair. No bogusness, no BS. It is for you, and it can be used against you. It’s a weapon and a shield. Some teams do a good job of taking care of their athletes, but the uniqueness of it is that it can be used as a shield to keep away the BS. A team is going to try to justify your reps, your pay, your position, your whatever, by whatever they collect. But you need to know, as if you were in courtroom, what they have on their side, to even combat it. And it has to be an open forum. And you can’t be intimidated by knowing that they know.
It’s just an understanding that it’s something that’s going to happen, like our iPhones are tracked but that doesn’t stop you from using your phone, right? We’re ahead of the game, in the sense of we are so early that every time we meet a person, we have to explain its usefulness or benefit. But you still need a place to put [the data]—so insert Breakaway and its app. It’s definitely why I’m here and why I’ve been so passionate in the space because as much as it’s annoying to try to get data released to us, it’s necessary. The sooner that all the data could be sent and delivered back to an athlete, the better, and it’ll lessen that feeling of being scared about the new technology.
It starts with owning your own shit. That was one of my slogans I pitched to Breakaway— own your shit. You have to own your stuff, like listening to the Panthers tell me it was I was running at 23 miles an hour. That was just the tip of it. That was just throwing a pebble in my pond, and the ripples started going. They’re cutting and signing people based off of expenditure of GPS loads and movements and all sorts of craziness. You need to know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and what they’re tracking and why they’re tracking it, to even fight against that.
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