Main Photo: Getty Images

By Rob Schaefer

UFC has incorporated technology from NeckCare, a wearable head device that measures neck function through sensorimotor exercises conducted on a computer, into the return-to-play concussion protocols of athletes at its UFC Performance Institute locations.

Heather Linden, UFC’s Director/Sports Medicine, told SBJ that over the past two years, UFC has collected data from 300-400 athletes, which will be used to establish baseline data on its athlete population’s neck function and inform future assessments.

The impetus behind the collaboration for UFC was to add more objectivity into its head injury assessments.

“It’s very easy to prescribe a knee rehab with — the range of motion is lacking, their peak torque-to-bodyweight [ratio] is this, their isokinetic strength testing is this. It’s really easy to say, ‘You’re not ready to return to sport,’” Linden said. “But in the concussion realm, a lot of times you can’t see the symptoms … By having NeckCare and having that objectivity and showing [athletes], ‘Hey, cognitively you’re performing like this normally and you’re not here’ — that now gives that competitive edge to [athlete] buy-in.”

UFC utilizes two NeckCare devices in the physical therapy clinics of each of its Performance Institute locations in Las Vegas, Mexico City and Shanghai. It uses NeckCare’s range of motion and neck position exercises as a part of its head injury evaluation process, and also for recovery/training purposes, Linden added.

NeckCare CEO Orri Gudmundsson said the primary focus for the company, which went to market about two years ago, is to sell into health clinics, but it also works with multiple NCAA football programs and Twin Cities Orthopedics, which treats NFL and NHL athletes, in addition to UFC.

“If you suffer a concussion, the neck is always involved,” Gudmundsson said. “Cervicogenic [originating from the neck but felt in the head] headaches, cervicogenic dizziness — that’s where we come in with technology that’s been in research and development for more than 20 years, to quantify the function of the neck and how your eyes, your brain and your neck are talking together.”

NeckCare’s devices, which are FDA-listed, price at $6,000 per year. The company overall works with more than 250 providers across North America.

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

By Rachel Woodland

Given the recent increase in women choosing to not delay having a family, and the subsequent increase in athletes competing during and after pregnancy, sport systems need to adapt in support of this growing demographic.

Our recent Women’s High Performance Sport Community call featured the UK Sports Institute sharing how organisations can better support athletes returning to performance postpartum.

We were delighted to be joined by:

• Esme Matthew, the Head of Physiology at the UKSI
• Dr Kate Hutchings, a Sports Medicine Doctor working with the UKSI’s leading clinical services for all world-class-funded Olympic and Paralympic athletes
• Dr Richard Burden, who leads the Female Athlete Performance Programme at the UKSI

The conversation focused on the structures UKSI have put in place to support athletes, including the role multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) have, which practices are having a positive impact on athletes, and what was learnt in the most recent Games cycle.

Six core themes emerged around what is involved in guiding an athlete successfully through pregnancy and their postpartum return. We also discussed what can be done where resources are limited.

1. Preparation and planning are crucial

The timing of when an athlete chooses to inform their coach and support team of their pregnancy will vary, but having conversations as early as possible during pregnancy is essential to map out return-to-performance plans. It’s advised that athletes establish support networks and define expectations with their teams before delivery. This could include what they expect in terms of communication from their coach, when they’re hoping to train, and how they’d like to stay connected to their sport or team. The panel recommended putting this in contract form and falling back on the initial discussion when necessary.

In their experiences, Matthew and Hutchings have found that Performance Lifestyle Advisors play a pivotal role in helping athletes navigate logistics like childcare, breastfeeding, and travel. It might also be that the Performance Lifestyle Advisor is the team member the athlete lets know first of their  plans to have a child, and signposted the athlete to the resources offered by the Female Athlete Performance Programme.

Deciding what will be monitored before giving birth will help with this planning process and ensure shared expectations postpartum. The monitoring plan will also help shape MDT support. More on each to come.

2. Multidisciplinary support teams

It won’t surprise you to hear that effective return requires collaboration between many people, including but not limited to:

• Doctors (such as Hutchings)
• Physiologists (such as Matthew)
• Nutritionists
• Pelvic health physiotherapists
• Mental health professionals

That being said, the athlete must be central to all decisions, with support teams adapting to their evolving needs. It also won’t surprise you that no athlete return is the same as any other, even if it isn’t the athlete’s first child. Ultimately it comes down to who they trust to help them make decisions. Even if the goal is to have the athlete make final decisions, they’ll seek input and guidance along the way.

A key learning from more recent years has come from athletes wanting to test and push the boundaries of what’s possible when pregnant. For Matthew and Hutchings, the health and wellbeing of the athlete and baby are the first priority. But athletes are not used to that being a default mindset. It’s not that they don’t care about their own wellbeing or the wellbeing of their baby, but they are used to continuously thinking about how they are going to be better athletes. How can they return faster? How can they get themselves in the best possible shape pre-delivery so that their postpartum period is as easy as possible. Alongside this, MDTs will need to come together to help support an athlete through some really difficult questions. For example, ‘can I go on this training camp in warm weather?’, ‘can I still compete at this week of my pregnancy?’ or ‘can I still do  my sport?’ The reality is that you are not going to find an answer to these questions in a research article.

A further reality is that these questions will always be asked, and that a standard FAQ section won’t suffice. Instead, the duo recommend talking through the risk.

Typical questions:

• What’s the risk of falling?
• What’s the risk of impact?
• How far along in your pregnancy are you?
• What risk are you willing to take?

The aim is to have the athlete answer these question for themselves. The MDT needs to be able to provide guidelines for athletes to be able to consider that for themselves, given that some examples, such as ‘can I go on this training camp to Australia, where we know it’s going to be really hot?’ and ‘can I still do a competition while it’s still really hot if I feel OK?’ can’t be answered ahead of time. They have to be able to answer it on the day given how many factors might change. But we should be educating them in how to make that decision.

One way to approach this is to talk through the theory with the athlete. With the heat example, that’s explaining blood flow and where else blood will be directed beyond the placenta. If they understand the theory of it, it can make it easier for them to make decisions for themselves.

Beyond this, a couple of things to definitely avoid were shared too:

1. Anaerobic exercise.
2. No supine exercise later on in pregnancy.
3. No lying on your stomach during exercise.
4. Towards the end of pregnancy, although still up to the athlete, avoid any risk of falling. For example, avoiding contact sport.

The UKSI are also really clear with the athletes that they don’t provide any sort of obstetric support. So they’re not there to be midwives or health visitors.

Then there are additional considerations to think of for who might be part of the athlete’s support team. For example, Hutchings is working with a Paralympian and she had to leave a meeting because she was going to a session where her hearing dog was going to be trained to listen for a newborn baby’s cry. There are situations where the planning for post-natal is even more considered.

Involving a partner can also be an excellent addition to support teams. It gives them more information for when the athlete needs them to fight the traditional athlete mentality to push through. There can also be a discussion about how hard this transition might be and that the athlete is going to need support through their decision making. It can provide another check and challenge for them when questioning if they really need to push that hard today or offer observations such as ‘I can see you feel really tired. Why don’t you just have a day off?’ It’s not an athlete’s mindset. Their mindset is more likely ‘I feel a bit off, but I’m going to carry on anyway’. Matthew shared that, “having someone that’s there with them on a day-to-day that can really help with that has been really useful”.

It’s also important to train staff. Matthew added that ahead of the Paris cycle, the learning module for staff across the UKSI was rewritten. Para athlete support was interwoven across the module rather than being a separate section, as it had been previously.

On the call, we also spoke about any instances where an athlete might prefer to talk to Matthew or Hutchings about her pregnancy, rather than her MDT in her sport and her coach, and everything that goes with it. Both have found this to be quite rare. If it has happened it’s normally been where they are the only female support they have, or when the team haven’t known about the pregnancy yet. In response to this,  they’d focus on brining  everyone together to be aligned with the initial message to the athlete being a reminder that Matthew and Hutchings are there as an extra layer of support for both the athlete and their support team within the sport. This is usually followed up with an MDT webinar. This would cover what their training and pregnancy would look like. Talking through training plans postpartum with all of their support team with the athlete in the room. Typically this gels and brings everyone together.

Matthew and Hutchings were quick to point out that some of the best examples of support teams have been all male apart from themselves. They’ve been incredibly understanding, and couldn’t do enough for the athletes. It’s just trying to bring everyone together and get them on the same page.

The other time this can happen is before an athlete is pregnant, but they would like to talk about what training might look like during pregnancy or what return  timelines might look like for them in their sport, and they might not want to talk to the sport about it yet because they don’t feel comfortable.

So Matthew and Hutchings would always encourage them to tell their sport as early as possible, but it does at least give like a bit of a safety net for that.

3. Pelvic health as a game changer

When asked around practices that have a positive impact on athlete return postpartum, pelvic floor education and support before and after birth was repeatedly described as transformative for any female athlete, given its impact on incontinence and strength training.

From research around the Commonwealth Games in 2022 one in five athletes reported urinary incontinence. They were planning for adapting to this through kit changes or fluid restrictions. The stats for urinary incontinence postpartum, regardless of mode of delivery, is at one in three athletes; and faecal incontinence is one in 10. “It’s such an important area for us to get right and that’s why we always work very closely with pelvic health physios,” said Hutchings. “If you keep up and do all your pelvic floor exercises, if you’ve got good pelvic health antenatally, you reduce your risk of urinary incontinence by 40 per cent postpartum, regardless of the method  delivery.”

Athletes are encouraged to use tools like the NHS Squeezy app and see a pelvic health specialist pre- and postnatally if something bespoke is needed.

As a group we also discussed being careful with the interrelatedness of symptoms of pelvic floor weaknesses and REDs. With it being important to stay diligent around REDs given changes to nutritional needs, if breastfeeding; plus changes in bone density linked to giving birth. All with the added complexity that athletes remain on the register for drugs testing in their sports and will need to be sensible with supplements.

4. Individualised return plans

Given that no two athletes’ journeys are the same. Plans must be flexible and responsive to daily changes in health and energy. Monitoring will play an important role here, with the likes of readiness scores, subjective wellness, sub-max testing guiding training and return.

It’s important to have awareness about each athlete’s training environment. Especially as each athlete will stop full training at different stages antenatally for a variety of reasons. That could also impact when they reengage postpartum too. This awareness, allied to open communication, is even more important if they’re the only pregnant athlete in a squad or sport.

This is important for thinking about athletes feeling disconnected, and how we can continue to keep them in the same spaces as other athletes, but with a different programme, for example in the gym, or continuing to attend squad meetings, even if they’re not training at the same capacity.

As mentioned earlier, having some really clear markers as part of an athlete’s individualised plan is also helpful. This would include discussing what you would like to measure postpartum before you get there. This can useful for the coach too. Matthew and Hutchings also always work hard on helping the athlete connect with detraining while accepting that some of the markers that they would keep track of normally are going to go down. There are also conversations about things like blood volume and endurance levels. For example, some endurance athletes will panic about losing fitness and when these conversations happen, Matthew and Hutchings talk about the physiological principles that sit around pregnancy that actually support a maintenance of economy and supporting systems. So having those markers lets the athlete and MDT talk through the pregnancy, what are you expecting to see, and managing those expectations and then, postpartum, what would you look to be monitoring when you come back and when would you look to do that?

An example where this work well, is in rowing and Jack Brown’s work with Olympic double sculls bronze medallist Mathilda Hodgkins-Byrne. They included clear physiological markers and sub-max testing to guide return. Together they put some good markers in place around sub-max testing to look at economy. They had some clear markers in the sand that the sport wanted the athlete to meet but did some nice monitoring around that. This included morning monitoring, which is quite tricky to get done when the athlete is having to get up and look after her child. Her first thought is to talk about what can work and potential practical solutions that you can look at. It could be that starting with just a readiness score for training for the day can be tracked and then over time you can start to build others back in. For example, resting heart rate in the morning when that feels really important, say, six months postpartum.

We discussed options to support training, including blood flow restriction. However, there are other things that can be done that are just really sound training principles around muscle hypertrophy postpartum that could be harder to implement than previously; therefore focus could be on those first. It could be as basic as doing good training and recovery. It can be quite difficult for athletes to do the training postpartum when they’ve got so much going on, like getting to training, being able to take the time out to do it, finding childcare, sorting all of their nutrition. So that’s a really big focus for the UKSI postpartum, the planning and organisation. With nutrition, this might be have you got something in the car that you can eat on the way home? Because once you get home the baby is back to you and you’re in full-on Mum mode.

Further, if an athlete or coach wants to use methods such as BFR because they want to accelerate their return, it’s known that from a pelvic floor point of view the UKSI doesn’t get people running much before 12 weeks anyway. Thus, you could accelerate other areas such as muscle development, but it’s the pelvic floor that you want to engage. And that takes time.

5. Mental health and identity

Both Matthew and Hutchings advocate for mental health support, and work with a psychologist for pregnant and postpartum athletes. The change they face is vast, likely moving from a very regimented and structured training life to one full of unpredictability and many unknowns and firsts. There can be a struggle with the dual identity of being a new mother and an elite performer. As Hutchings said: “I think that’s really important for us to recognise and have those conversations and then feeling comfortable to say to their team. Actually, I don’t feel all right today or I’m a bit tearful, I’m struggling or I don’t feel like I fit in.”

It’s important for the MDT to recognise that an athlete might feel disconnected as they return to their sporting environment. They might be the first (or only current) athlete to be pregnant.

6. Peer support and mentorship

A simple support mechanism has been the creation of a WhatsApp group for pregnant and postpartum athletes to foster peer mentorship and shared learning. This informal network has been highly valued for emotional support and practical advice.

What about those with fewer resources?

Smaller sports often lack in-house expertise. UKSI fills this gap by offering bespoke support and education.

• Practitioners are encouraged to upskill using resources like:
  • IOC Pregnancy Guidelines
  • 6R Framework (Gráinne Donnelly)
  • Greg Whyte’s Bump It Up

How might you take advantage of the UKSI’s experiences in athlete return postpartum?

• If you’re in the GB Paralympic and Olympic system your sport can utilise the UKSI Female Athlete Performance Team through Dr Kate Hutchings.
• If you have research and innovation questions, and you’re in a position to do so, (Paralympic, Olympic or professional sport), you could work with the Centre of Excellence for Women in Sport, which the UKSI collaborate with alongside Manchester Metropolitan University through Dr Richard Burden.

By Joe Lemire

Sprawled across four parking spots outside Wayfair Arena in suburban Miami earlier this month sat a long, white trailer. But this wasn’t part of a TV broadcast production, nor was it for a movie star, although nearly every player in the new Unrivaled basketball league took turns ascending the metal stairs and entering.

Inside, a portable MRI machine needed only 10 minutes to scan the women’s lower bodies, at which point AI algorithms from Springbok Analytics took the 2D imaging and converted them into 3D digital twins that can be used for muscle analysis — establishing baselines that can be used to individualize training and flag latent injury risk.

Unrivaled, the 3-on-3 women’s league that debuted on Jan. 17 in Miami, is the latest league to partner with Springbok Analytics. In the past two years alone, Springbok has collaborated with three of the five biggest North American sports leagues: It graduated from NBA Launchpad; completed data collection on an NFL-funded research project into hamstring injuries; and began the initial phase of an MLB-backed study into pitcher health.

Now boosting Springbok’s rapid growth across pro sports and into broader populations is a newly closed, oversubscribed $5 million Series A led by Transition Equity Partners , which also led a $3 million seed round in 2023. Joining the investment were the NBA, which added to its initial equity stake from Launchpad, and Cartan Capital , a sports tech venture firm led by former pro tennis player CiCi Bellis .

“This is a clear sign that our current and new investors are excited to see us scale all aspects of our business,” Springbok CEO Scott Magargee said, “and from a dollars-in-the-door perspective, it allows us to advance what we believe is our global leadership in the area of muscle analysis for large demographics of athletes and patients across the entire health care landscape.”

The interactive reports Springbok produces are musculoskeletal avatars shaded various hues of red, orange, tan and blue that detail muscle asymmetries, fat infiltration and a proprietary score comparing a person’s muscle size with others of similar sex, size and sport. Springbok recently released sport-specific databases for men’s pro basketball and soccer athletes — a women’s soccer counterpart is planned soon — for more apt comparisons. It received FDA clearance in October on its flagship lower-body scan, and added core and upper-body scans to what previously was lower extremity only.

Such a tool is even more important when the athletes are such physical outliers as in the NBA. More than 100 players are in that database, and in addition to partnering with nearly half the league’s teams, Springbok continues working at the league level during the pre-draft process.

“Their work with us proved that this is a really interesting new dataset in elite sports,” said NBA Senior Vice President Tom Ryan , who oversees Launchpad and all basketball R&D. “Springbok data is starting to become an important piece of the puzzle to help support player health and performance initiatives. That’s really the story: It’s very strategic for us, both at the league and team level.”

The continued strategic relationship helped facilitate the additional funding, NBA Investments Associate Vice President Pat Crouch added. “First and foremost, for companies that come out of the NBA’s Launchpad program, we look for follow-on investment opportunities when there is a continued strategic relationship. We only invest in companies where there’s some type of commercial partnership, at either the league or the team level, that has gained meaningful traction and has upside to continue to grow and expand.”

Notably, Springbok has no true competitor and a 15-year head start on understanding the use of this data, making it “a piece of the puzzle that nobody else is,” said Magargee.

“The fact that our expertise is the technology, but also in human performance and muscle physiology, we know where to keep going with it in a way that’s meaningful,” said Silvia Blemker , Springbok’s chief scientific officer. She added that one recently devised new metric is an objective injury severity score, which can quantitatively assess a strain or sprain rather than rely on a human practitioner to subjectively evaluate it.

Though Springbok Analytics’ work in sports has intensified in recent years, the foundational technology has roots dating back to 2009 and Blemker’s biomedical engineering lab at the University of Virginia. The company’s headquarters remain in Charlottesville, sitting in a nondescript office at one end of its pedestrian-friendly Downtown Mall. Springbok’s dual recognition in 2024 from SBJ Tech — as a Most Innovative Sports Tech company and SBJ Tech Award winner for Best in Athlete Performance — prominently greets visitors.

In those early days, Blemker was working on solutions to aid treatments of cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy when the lab began developing the machine learning to extrapolate 3D data from MRIs. Those life science use-cases remain a part of Springbok’s mission, while also adding the human performance sector that makes it a highly differentiated product appealing to investors.

“Not only do we really believe in the team, but the technology, we think, is pretty unprecedented, especially with the years of R&D,” Bellis said, “and then the beachhead that they’ve had into the sports market is super interesting, because they can really instantly provide value to these sports teams and instantly give them money back, so to say, by having this preventative health measure for athletes.”

That expediency of the scans — much quicker than what’s needed for traditional MRIs — has helped Springbok amass its large elite athlete databases, including a thousand college and pro American football players, Blemker said. Those were collected to build a hamstring injury predictive index in collaboration with researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Australian Catholic University, and funded by a $4 million grant awarded by the NFL’s Scientific Advisory Board.

It’s that rich dataset, as much as any algorithm or an investment check, that is sparking Springbok’s growth — and the same competitive advantage will only continue to grow the same way it started.

“It’s taken us time,” Magargee said, “and it’s taken us partnerships.”

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

By Joe Lemire

The NBA is launching a league-wide biomechanics program with motion capture labs to be installed at the training facilities of all 30 teams within a year.

The protocols, as explained in a league-wide memo in January, have been developed in consultation with the NBPA as well as sports medicine and performance experts. Provisions for such a screening program are codified in the current collective bargaining agreement, requiring players to participate in up to four assessments per season.

“It’s one of several major initiatives that we have in the works, including with the Players Association, to try to reduce injuries in the league,” NBA EVP for Operations & Administration David Weiss said, emphasizing its scope and ambition by adding, “We’re not aware of anything quite like this league-wide in the world.”

Planning for this project began long before a perceived uptick in the injury rate over the past year, but it remains set against the backdrop of ongoing conversations around appropriate load management and player participation policies.

The NBA is now in the process of installing biomechanics labs with four pilot teams: the Cavaliers, Jazz, Pacers and Suns. The goal is to have identical setups, with the same technology vendors and the same prescribed athlete motions, to ensure standardized data collection.

The four tech companies that won the league’s RFP are:

• Qualisys, which is providing its Miqus Video Plus markerless motion capture cameras

• Theia Markerless, whose software is being used for analysis

• Bertec, which is contributing its force plates

• BreakAway Data, which is supporting the athletes and teams with dashboards and visualizations.

P3, a private facility that independently has evaluated the biomechanics of roughly 70% of current NBA players, will work with the league as a consultant to the program. The NBA first hired P3 to assess prospects at the draft combine in 2014. Individual teams can also contract with the firm for additional insights and normative data.

Image courtesy of P3.

“This relationship between how we move and what happens to us is a strong relationship,” P3 founder and director Marcus Elliott said. “It’s stronger than most people realize, which is why we invested all this energy into all of it. And the more we can start actioning that — and not just waiting for bad things to happen — the better it is for everyone: for the players, for the teams, for the league. I’m super bullish on the potential of biomechanics to make lives better and for us to follow these signals.”

Access to the data collected in these biomechanics evaluations will follow similar guidelines to how the NBA handles medical records. Players have full access to their own reports, which they will retain even as they change teams. Coaches, executives and performance staff will be able to see data for players currently on their rosters. Weiss indicated MDs and PhDs conducting vetted research will also be to connect the data with injury information for studies on potential risks.

One source noted a “vast discrepancy” in the way franchises have utilized biomechanics data to date, praising this new program as a way to ensure consistent, efficient and accurate assessments. Some teams have been investing in biomechanics for years while others have yet to allocate any resources toward it. By implementing his program across the league, the NBA can collect in one year as much data as any team could collect in 30 — hastening the pace of understanding what correlations exist between movement and injuries.

Deployment of this program, which is scheduled to last at least through the end of the current CBA in 2030, has been measured to make sure it is properly communicated and rigorous. Evaluating success will take time, too.

“Certainly whether we can reduce injuries long-term or a particular type of injury — that’s going to be one of [the KPIs] — and whether we can connect certain movements or certain changes in the way an individual moves to injury,” Weiss said.

Image courtesy of P3.

Though the NBA’s in-game tracking system — powered by Sony’s Hawk-Eye — is camera-based and collects data on limbs and joint angles, that solution is only nominally a tool for rigorous biomechanics. Sony’s recent acquisition of KinaTrax, the leading baseball biomechanics technology, might help in the long run, but the current in-game tracking system doesn’t have the same fidelity the new lab-based system will provide.

There is a consensus that biomechanics might be an especially helpful tool in a sport like basketball “that certainly requires you to be a pretty impressive, high-flying athlete,” said BreakAway Data CEO Dave Anderson, a former NFL receiver. “The game is played well above the rim in the NBA, so jumping and your ability to land are critical to your career.”

Weiss added that experts with whom the league has conferred, including on its two biomechanics committees, point to “a number of factors — the size of players, the nature of the game, the number of games in the season, the hardcourt surface — that there’s reasons to think about biomechanics could be as helpful in basketball as almost any sport,” he said.

Image courtesy of P3.

These lab assessments are expected to take about 15 minutes, following a pre-scripted set of “motions that are directly applicable to their sport and health,” Theia CEO Marcus Brown said, describing his company’s software as “an accessible tool that also enables standardization within a vast data set. As a generalized neural network, Theia3D doesn’t require additional data for unique movements, environments or outlier athletes.”

It’s a highly technical distinction, but an important one: other motion capture solutions compare movement to various models, which can add to discrepancies when analyzing data from different sources and different seasons. “Having consistency in data collection over a long period of time on a big group of people is just something that I know our customers are looking for,” Qualisys product manager for life sciences Nils Betzler said, praising the “unified approach.”

“They’re really doing a tremendous job trying to better understand player biomechanics, player movement, and overall player health,” added Anderson about the NBA and NBPA. “They’re really trying to use science and numbers and research to make sure that the players are playing at the highest level. And I really appreciate that because a lot of these leagues are just adding games, changing roster sizes, and changing rules, and they just assume the players will figure it out. The NBA is taking this player-first initiative, and that’s just really cool to see.”

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

By John Portch

The lack of useful data in women’s sport is an enduring problem, but the England & Wales Cricket Board hope its Insight 360 project will be a game-changer.

Insight 360 is a data-driven approach to performance management and athlete monitoring. It was launched in February 2024 by the ECB in collaboration with Ascent, their digital services provider, and includes an app for players (to view their data), a dashboard for practitioners (to view data across the board), and a portal that practitioners can use to input data.

“When you see the little research that’s out there, you’ve not got much to hang your hat on,” said Anna Warren, the Head of England Women’s Science & Medicine, at November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London. “We’re using this platform to better understand in depth the female cricketer; what they look like from the academy through to the international cricketer.”

The rollout has been a success and, as the ECB launches phase two (the wider introduction of injury data and more sophisticated use of match data), we highlight the factors that led to its sport-wide take up.

It reflects the concerns of players

Insight 360, as the name suggests, represents a holistic approach to collating athlete data. There is a focus on availability and performance, but there is also a focus their health, home life, and career progression. “Players come to us and discuss their issues quite openly,” said Dr Tham Wedatilake, the Lead Physician for England Women’s Cricket, who joined Warren onstage to discuss the project. “They want to perform without any barriers.”

It is a co-designed platform

Ahead of the launch, the ECB gathered input from practitioners and coaches across the English game. “This means Insight 360 is bespoke for women’s cricket,” said Warren.  Players, she said, are happy with an app that allows them to review their own data in as much detail as they like. “This is good for player buy-in, which is always a challenge in relation to athlete monitoring.”

There is also the power of a co-designed project. UK Sports Institute have found as much with their Project Minerva. Dr Richard Burden, the UKSI’s Co-Head of Female Athlete Health & Performance, said: “Get the practitioners involved, get athletes, get the teams and bring them along with it because if they’re onboard you get easier access to them and you’re going to produce something that’s more translatable, meaningful and applicable to them.”

Warren is on the same page with Insight 360. “You can link loads of different data sources together and start to answer some key performance questions – we’re not looking at everything in isolation.”

It provides a single source of truth

Collaboration can be easier said than done. “When you have so many people pull data together it becomes almost impossible for the human brain to comprehend and then deliver effective, unbiased solutions to players’ needs and expectations,” said Wedatilake.

Insight 360 is the single reference point and it provides continuity. “As soon as one person leaves and another is working with the players, that record gets lost,” said Warren. “We’re really trying to create a joined-up system.”

It is future-proof

Wedatilake explained that Insight 360, as part of its next phase, will include injury data. He said: “It will be a game-changer for us in terms of load and injury risk and other factors such as the menstrual cycle and wellness.” The platform is primed to integrate future sources of data.

He does, however, also temper his excitement with a note of caution. “We didn’t want to get greedy too early,” he added. It was critical to have the right structure and means of integration before adding different elements, whether they are rooted in stats or video.

One of the next steps is further automation, particularly with regards to match data. “That’s the beauty of this system,” said Warren. “It’s so much quicker for people.”

She and Wedatilake wrapped up their presentation by setting out their ambitions for Insight 360:

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Lachlan Penfold’s time at the Golden State Warriors was eye-opening in numerous ways.

Chief amongst them was his realisation that joy is crucial in a high performance environment.

“Joy in a professional sport? That’s a bit strange,” thought Penfold, but it was one of the team’s trademarks and no-one embodied it better than their Head Coach Steve Kerr and illustrious point guard Steph Curry.

“The player that embodies it better than anyone in world sport is Steph Curry in terms of just the absolute joy he gets from playing the game, from training the game,” Penfold continues, “not only from his perspective, but from seeing his teammates have success and do great things, the joy that he gets really invigorates a sporting team.”

It has fed into his work with the Melbourne Storm, who reached the NRL grand final in October. No doubt they’ll go again in 2025, inspired by the family environment described so vividly by Penfold [10:00].

We also spoke about his approach to training and recovery [17:30] and the importance of individualised work [22:30]. Last up, we discussed the year ahead [28:10].

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Predictably, when Sport Wales formed its Female Health & Performance team, some asked why there was no male equivalent.

The truth is that male physiology and psychology has long been viewed as the default across sport.

“For so many years we haven’t thought about females as being different,” says Esther Goldsmith, who works for Sport Wales, on the latest episode of the Leaders Performance Podcast.

“When you think about it, it doesn’t make sense because it’s obvious we’re different.”

This lack of understanding or consideration makes one ponder just how much potential is being left on the table by female athletes. The menstrual cycle, for example, was seen as a taboo and was historically not taken into consideration when female athletes trained, performed or recovered.

In seeking to redress that imbalance, Sport Wales is empowering female Welsh athletes from the grassroots through to podium potential with the support they need to succeed.

“We’re just trying to open up some of those conversations and improve the comfort and awareness of the athlete in order to help,” says Dr Natalie Brown, who works alongside Goldsmith.

Both spoke of Sport Wales’ efforts to normalise conversations about a whole range of female health issues (10:00) including pelvic floor health and stress incontinence (36:00), while busting common myths along the way (21:00).

Goldsmith and Brown also discuss the importance of encouraging behavioural change through meeting the athlete where they are in their beliefs and values (15:00); helping coaches with any potential discomfort as they learn and become aware of the needs of their athletes (31:00); as well as the question of sports bras in a market without universal standards (26:00).

They offer useful tips for any sports organisation regardless of their budget or level of resource but the important thing is to start having the conversation. Now.

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More from Sport Wales:

How Sport Wales Is Enabling Female Athletes to Succeed on the World Stage

‘Female-Specific Considerations Should Be Part of Normal Practice’

Female Athlete Health: Five Top Tips When Discussing the Menstrual Cycle and Other Issues

By John Portch with additional reporting from Joe Lemire

Ellie Maybury, the Founder of the Soccer Herformance consultancy, has spent two decades working as a sports scientist in the women’s game.

She cut her teeth at the Football Association and Birmingham City Women in her native England before crossing the Atlantic in 2015 to join US Soccer. She served the federation in several roles and would spend four years as the Head of High Performance for the USWNT between 2019 and 2023.

In June, she came on the People Behind the Tech podcast to discuss the gains made, particularly during her time with the USWNT, but did not attempt to mask the problems that face female players in comparison to their male counterparts.

“Female athletes want to be equipped with the information that’s going to help them succeed,” said Maybury, who now works with a multitude of players, coaches, clubs and federations. “Quite honestly, the way in which we can deliver information at the moment is very grey.”

The ‘grey’ stems from the male bias in sports science research. Females have tended to be lumped in with males and so there is limited understanding of what female athletes require when it comes to training, preparation and recovery.

Maybury mitigates the grey on a daily basis and we return to our chat to lift three quick wins for any practitioner in women’s soccer.

1. Be honest about existing limitations

There are numerous unknowns in female athlete health so it’s better to take control of that narrative. “[Players] want a black and white answer where really a lot of our knowledge and research in this area is still limited,” said Maybury, who stressed the importance of building trust and managing expectations. She may have an answer tomorrow, in six months’ time or she may still be searching in a year. “I’d rather be comfortable saying ‘hey, I’m going to hold on this. I can’t give you everything you need right now’, than rely on something that maybe has come from a different environment or, deep down, looking at the information, I know isn’t going to give them the most accurate, honest answer”.

2. Embrace the subjective…

You may have fewer resources than you like, but don’t dismiss what you’ve long been doing. Subjective data is critical. “It’s something I will always rely on and have always relied on,” said Maybury while explaining that tech supports were scarce when she first worked at Birmingham in 2007. “Although the game has transitioned and technology has transitioned, I really try to hold onto some of those key lessons and experiences I had when we weren’t as fortunate and lucky enough to have technology at our hands.”

She added: “Our intention is to know enough about the athlete and their trends so that we can get ahead of any negative effects, whether it’s a bad night’s sleep or whether it’s issues with menstrual cycle symptoms”.

Maybury’s emphasis on the individual is shared by Richard Burden, the Co-Head of Female Athlete Health & Performance at the UK Sports Institute. At last September’s Leaders Meet: Driving Step-Change in Female High Performance, Burden observed that case studies are undervalued in the hierarchy of evidence due to their small sample size. “I don’t care what the mean for the whole group is – I need to know why athlete X is different from athlete Y,” he told the audience at Manchester’s Etihad Stadium. “Case studies are really impactful for us – if you can collect case studies then you start to build an evidence base. When trying to understand things like the menstrual cycle, generalised approaches just aren’t going to cut it.”

3. … and build a bigger picture of female athlete health

Female athletes have long been overlooked in the tech space. “A lot of the technology we have absorbed into the women’s game has come from the men’s game or from men’s sporting environments,” said Maybury. “Maybe some of the processes and metrics that we use with the associated technology get transferred as well.” That picture has to change, but never stop leaning into your relationships with athletes. “It really was about those side conversations and those continuing conversations,” said Maybury of her time with the USWNT. “Then [it was] the individual capacity to gauge buy-in and just continue those education messages.”

Listen to the full conversation with Ellie Maybury below:

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By Joe Lemire

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Harjiv Singh, a performance and development scientist at the Orlando Magic, is another example of a practitioner who suffered their own debilitating injuries.

Hot on the heels of Andrea Hudy, who recounted her own story of ACL troubles in episode one, Harjiv told the tale of a pickup basketball game that ended with him tearing his ACL and meniscus while also suffering an avulsion fracture.

The 16 months of rehab stoked an interest in sports science that not only led him to the NBA but, since January, roles at the Grand Rapids Rise women’s volleyball team, as Director of Performance Science, and the University of Michigan, where Harjiv teaches out of the Human Performance and Sports Science Center.

John Portch and Joe Lemire could not have wished for a more engaging guest on this finale to this People Behing the Tech podcast series, where Harjiv delved into the sports science principles that define his work.

He also shared his thoughts on training drill design [15:39] and the transferability in competition – a relatively new area of enquiry. “It could be as simple as, in basketball, you’re putting a defender in front of you,” he says. “But it can also be as complex as the angle and the approach of that defender, the people in the vicinity of the athlete, where the athlete is starting from, their position on the court. And that’s merely the introductory part of this.”

Then there’s his thoughts on the “neglected” cognitive component to ACL injuries [6:41]; the need to know your audience when visualizing data [27:38]; and his ability to ask applied questions in the lab at Michigan.

Check out episode two:

Five Years on from the USWNT Introducing Menstrual Cycle Tracking, Sports Science for Female Athletes Remains Under-Developed. So What Can Athletes and Practitioners Do about it?

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