Main Image: San Francisco Unicorns

By John Portch

Tom Crick, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government’s Department of Culture, Media & Sport [DCMS], is confident that AI will not wipe out all white-collar jobs.

“You’ll hear things like ‘AI will replace teachers’ or ‘AI will replace doctors’ – no they won’t,” he told an audience at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit in London.

It is more likely, he said, that “AI-enabled or AI-augmented teachers might replace teachers”; similarly, “AI-augmented doctors might be more effective from a diagnostic perspective.”

Crick believes the current discourse that paints AI as either “humanity’s destruction or its ultimate saviour” is “not very helpful for the broader conversation around technology utility and adoption”.

His words were delivered to a room full of coaches and practitioners from across the globe, all of whom have seen AI play an increasingly prominent role in their work; and, as far as Crick is concerned, sport’s leaders must simply get to grips with it.

“There’s no way you can be a leader and be digitally incompetent,” he said. That doesn’t mean one has to train as a computer scientist, but a working knowledge is essential. “I don’t understand how you would see the impacts and the challenges for your business if you just say ‘I’ll delegate that; that’s a CTO or CDO problem’.”

That said, Crick understands the anxiety around AI and tech, which he attributes to a “confidence and capability challenge”. “It can be quite exposing if you’re the senior leader in an organisation,” he continued. “You basically have to say ‘I know nothing about this stuff and it’s a massive gap in my knowledge and understanding.’ It takes humility to own that.”

Over the course of half an hour or so, Crick prompted the leaders in the room to reconsider their approach to AI.

Tom Crick onstage at the 2025 Leaders Sport Performance Summit at London’s Kia Oval.

Don’t deal in blind trust – keep the human in the loop

“Lots of generative AI tools are just statistical probabilistic bullshit generators,” said Crick. “People anthropomorphise these tools far too much. [AI tools] don’t think and they don’t have an intrinsic understanding of things.”

In stating these limitations, he encouraged the audience to not just “automatically trust the system” and to look more closely at both the challenges and opportunities presented by AI.

“AI will not magically remove uncertainty, but it can reshape and augment what that might look like for you as a coach,” he added. An AI tool may help you churn through datasets at inhuman speed, but “we have to be grounded in the dangers of these tools as a shortcut to absolute certainty.”

It comes back to what Crick terms a person’s “critical AI literacy”. “We want to stay curious; we don’t want to be too complacent.”

As such, he promotes “AI with humans in the loop” because AI “augments human capability and does not replace it”; human agency, he argued, is “sacrosanct”.

Get the basics right before even thinking of scaling

Crick believes that organisations should think about the “skills, competencies, behaviours and dispositions” they’ll need in the coming years because if teams are unsure why they’re using AI, if there’s no strategy and no idea of when to invest, when to lead and when to follow, their efforts will be built on a “foundation of sand”.

It starts with the basics. “Think about good data disciplines and make sure the data is high quality,” he said. It is also a question of clarity and alignment, which he revealed is a perennial problem across the various departments of the British Government when it comes to AI.

Your structure will guide how effective your delivery is and will enable you to verify or validate datasets and practices. This is critical because AI is not a “magic black box” where you simply “crank the handle and out comes the answer”. In any case, Crick argued, such an approach would be “disempowering for coaches and people who work in sports performance.”

Design for trust and accountability

AI usage must be rooted in values that promote accuracy and trust. “Values are useful anchors and shouldn’t be seen as constraints,” said Crick, who explained that the DCMS, in defining its AI strategy, will “enshrine high level principles to provide assurance and confidence to everyone who works in the department.”

It comes down to “doing the right thing in the right way and how that comes through in legitimacy, trust, transparency, verifiability; and things such as explainability and understandability too.”

Therefore, when using AI in athlete-facing settings, coaches and practitioners should work in an open and transparent way. They should ask themselves “where’s the feedback loop? What’s the mechanism for co-design and co-creation of shared outcomes? This naturally leads back to the humans in the loop”.

Crick likens technological leadership to an art or craft, one that is particularly important when the going gets tough.

“What does that look like when you bounce human intuition around and the magic algorithm says ‘no’? [What do you do when] the algorithm says you should do x but the experienced coach says you should do y? How do you reconcile such elements, especially under pressure?”

Be curious

“I think you need to have a system and culture that rewards curiosity,” said Crick.

When teams test and learn they will fail often and he argued that leaders must accept that fact.

The key, he argued, is “to fail fast, adapt and refine very quickly”.

It comes back to the leader and those foundations. “How do you have the structure in place to recognise that?”

Crick wrapped up his session with a further series of questions to ponder:

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Moving at the Speed of your People: What The 3×3 Tall Blacks Teach us About Innovation and Change Management

Main Image: Basketball New Zealand

By Paul Downes PhD

Change in high‑performance (HP) sport is rarely resisted because people are opposed to improvement.

More often, it is resisted because proposed change is perceived as threatening what people care most deeply about: identity, legacy, fairness, and standards.

This article uses the evolution of the 3×3 Tall Blacks programme as a case study in applied change leadership, exploring how innovation can be mobilised without destroying trust or fragmenting a system.

Specifically, the article examines how 3×3 Basketball shifted within Basketball New Zealand (BBNZ) from being viewed as a peripheral or competing format to a legitimate, strategically prioritised pathway for international success. Drawing on innovation and change management research, it demonstrates how leadership decisions around pace, protection, communication, and culture shaped the programme’s trajectory. Central to this case is a simple but often neglected principle: organisations can only move at the speed of their people.

What is 3×3 basketball?

3×3 Basketball was formalised by the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) in the late 2000s as a condensed, high‑tempo version of the game designed for urban environments, broadcast appeal, and global accessibility. Played with three athletes per team on a half court, a 12‑second shot clock, and first‑to‑21 scoring, the format demands rapid decision‑making, tactical clarity, athletic versatility, and exceptional individual skill under pressure.

Since its inclusion as an Olympic discipline at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, 3×3 has moved decisively from an alternative format to a mainstream high‑performance sport. It now operates with its own world rankings, qualification pathways, professional circuits, and national team competitions governed by FIBA. Crucially, success in 3×3 is not achieved by lightly adapting 5×5 systems; it requires distinct preparation models, athlete archetypes, and tactical identities.

Who are the 3×3 Tall Blacks?

New Zealand competes in 3×3 Basketball through a clearly defined international competition pathway. The men’s senior programme, known as the 3×3 Tall Blacks and, known on the FIBA circuit since 2025 as #2PointNation, contests major national team events including the FIBA 3×3 Asia Cup, the FIBA 3×3 World Cup, and, where applicable, Olympic or Commonwealth Games qualification tournaments. Athletes may also compete in FIBA‑sanctioned professional events such as World Tour Challengers, World Tour Masters, and selected Pro circuits, which contribute to global ranking points and qualification status.

These competitive realities require BBNZ’s 3×3 programme, across U21, U23, and senior team, to be innovative by necessity. With constrained resources and limited margins for error, the Men’s (and Women’s) programme has had to identify where competitive advantage is possible, how learning can be accelerated, and how athletes can be developed into genuine 3×3 specialists rather than part‑time participants (through also prioritising 5×5).

3×3 as a strategic opportunity, not a threat

Within the New Zealand basketball landscape, historical emphasis has understandably sat with the Tall Blacks (men’s 5×5) and Tall Ferns (women’s 5×5) programmes. These teams carry deep cultural significance, reinforced by landmark performances such as the Tall Blacks’ fourth‑place finish at the 2002 FIBA World Cup and the Tall Ferns’ participation at the 2004 Olympic Games. However, podium finishes at pinnacle 5×5 events, and consistent Olympic qualification, have become increasingly difficult in a global ecosystem shaped by professional leagues, deep talent pools, and significant financial asymmetry.

Within this context, 3×3 has emerged not as a replacement for 5×5, but as a distinct strategic opportunity: a format in which New Zealand can plausibly compete for medals through deliberately creating an identity, strategy and specialisation by targeted coaches and athletes. Yet recognising opportunity was not sufficient. Elevating 3×3 within a 5×5‑dominant system required leaders to manage legitimate fears that resources, attention, or cultural value would be diverted.

As 3×3 Tall Blacks Head Coach Piet Van Hasselt said:

Resistance to 3×3 didn’t mean disloyalty. It often meant people cared deeply about 5×5 and felt responsible for protecting it. 3×3 is still the new kid on the block in basketball terms and is very different to 5×5.

This framing was critical. Resistance was interpreted not as obstruction, but as a signal of attachment and responsibility. That distinction shaped how change was approached: not through mandate, but through dialogue, clarity, and deliberate pacing.

Three roles that support successful innovation in HP environments

Across HP sport and other expert systems, innovation research converges on the importance of leaders occupying multiple complementary roles rather than relying on individual charisma or isolated expertise (1,2,3). Three roles are consistently evident in successful innovation initiatives.

1. The System Architect

The ‘System Architect’ role is grounded in organisational ambidexterity and strategic leadership research. Scholars such as Tushman and O’Reilly (1, 2) demonstrate that breakthrough innovation depends on senior leaders designing separate but integrated systems, protecting exploratory work from short‑term performance pressures while integrating it at the top through strategy, resourcing, and authority. Mintzberg’s work on “designing the organisation” (3) reinforces this view in that effective leaders shape structures, decision rights, and power flows rather than running experiments themselves.

In HP sport terms, the architect decides where innovation sits, how it is protected, and how it is judged. Without this role, innovation becomes personality‑dependent and fragile; with it, innovation becomes institutional.

2. The Technical Champion

The ‘Technical Champion’ is one of the most empirically supported roles in innovation literature. Research by Howell and Higgins (4, 5) shows that innovations outperform when championed by credible insiders who persist under resistance, mobilise informal networks, and translate abstract ideas into legitimate practice. Subsequent work clarifies an important dependency: champions burn out or are marginalised (6) without organisational protection from architects.

In HP sport, champions are domain‑credible leaders for example coaches, senior athletes, or tactically fluent specialists who are willing and able to absorb resistance on behalf of others while legitimising change through performance.

3. The Cultural (Learning) Enabler

The third role of ‘Cultural’ or ‘Learning Enabler’ is supported by Amy Edmondson’s (7) research on psychological safety. Innovation fails less often due to lack of ideas than due to fear. Leaders who frame their strategic initiatives as learning problems, without lowering standards, create environments where experimentation, respectful conflict, and early failure are informational rather than punitive. This role ensures innovation does not collapse into compliance or defensive behaviour, particularly in high‑stakes environments such as elite sport.

The blended roles within BBNZ 3×3

Within the BBNZ 3×3 system, Nikolay Mikhalchuk (High Performance Manager, 3×3 – hereafter HPM) and Piet Van Hasselt (Head Coach, 3×3 Tall Blacks) can be viewed as functioning as deliberate amalgamations of all three innovation roles, in part due to the realities of scale and resource constraint.

Architectural leadership

As system architects, Mikhalchuk and Van Hasselt emphasise structural protection and integration, explicitly designing daily training environments and pathways for learning rather than forcing premature exposure. Mikhalchuk explains:

Decisions are made to take a step back, spend more time… align yourself, the coaching staff, and then prepare, rather than throwing athletes in the deep end before they understand the system and role expectations.

This reflects programme ambidexterity through protecting exploration (learning the 3×3 system) while gradually integrating it into the national pathway across U21, U23, and senior programmes.

Champion and cultural leadership

As technical champions and cultural enablers, both leaders are able to translate strategy into daily training behaviours while safeguarding learning. Van Hasselt captures this when he notes:

We’re trying to find a gap we can exploit based on our strengths… We have forged an identity, with clarity, and our players have bought into it.

He further explains how culture and learning interacted:

Great leadership and athlete ownership has meant we’ve been able to build through younger players, and now these players are becoming specialists.

Through deliberate ‘test and learn’ cycles, particularly in the Under-21 and Under-23 Nations League exposure and targeted senior competition, 3×3 specialists have emerged organically rather than being imposed.

Managing change in a 5×5-dominant culture

At a technical level, the transition from 5×5 to 3×3 can present genuine challenges. Mikhalchuk notes:

There are a lot of nuances and rules around 3×3 which would drive 5×5 players mad… The transition from a 5×5 star to the 3×3 court is close to impossible.

Yet once athletes choose to engage, the experience is often transformative. Van Hasselt observes:

Every time a 5×5 player comes in they absolutely love it… We have found players who are courageous and ready to take a leap of faith to this exciting new challenge.

These insights reinforced a core leadership lesson that people cannot be rushed through change they have not yet made sense of. Progress depended on aligning belief, understanding, and competence. Indeed, moving at the speed of people, not planning cycles.

 

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Applying Kotter’s 8‑Step Change Model

Recognising the complexity of this transition, BBNZ have applied Kotter’s 8‑Step Change Model (8) to structure and evaluate progress. A central insight of Kotter’s model is that sustainable change is built deliberately, sequentially, and with reinforcement. This model, and its contextual application is summarised here:

Concluding remarks

Within the global FIBA 3×3 landscape, the 3×3 Tall Blacks’ #2PointNation identity signals strategic clarity and a commitment to playing to New Zealand’s strengths rather than mimicking others. The Men’s programme accelerated once 3×3 was framed, and accepted, not as a format that could rely on occasional 5×5 participation, but as “our game, our way.”

An aligned approach to innovation, grounded in organisational values and supported by deliberate change management, has enabled the programme to become a respected and emerging force internationally. As Van Hasselt reflects:

Our programme and players strong commitment to improvement has helped us perform better game by game.   The commentators tell us we can beat anyone in the world… they like us because we’re different.

Mikhalchuk adds:

We’re quick, we’re strong, we’re consistent and tough… We feel we can build those twos, and when opponents adjust, we can drive and create uncontested shots.

Ultimately, what gets funded gets celebrated. With increased High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ) investment toward the 2028 quadrennial, the Men’s 3×3 programme has moved from experimentation to embedded strategy. As Van Hasselt summarises the ambition:

We’d love to medal at LA 2028… We are continuing our exciting journey and improving every game and event as a team.

The broader lesson is clear. Successful innovation is not a hero story. It is a role system, paced deliberately, anchored culturally, and led with respect for how people actually change.

References

1) Tushman, M. L., & O’Reilly, C. A. (1996). Ambidextrous organizations: Managing evolutionary and revolutionary change. California Management Review, 38(4), 8–29.

2) O’Reilly, C. A., & Tushman, M. L. (2004). The ambidextrous organization. Harvard Business Review, 82(4), 74–81.

3) Mintzberg, H. (1983). Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall

4) Howell, J. M., & Higgins, C. A. (1990). Champions of technological innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35(2), 317–341. [jstor.org]

5) Howell, J. M., Shea, C. M., & Higgins, C. A. (2005). Champions of product innovations: Defining, developing, and validating a measure of champion behavior. Journal of Business Venturing, 20(5), 641–661. [researchgate.net]

6) Shea, C. M. (2021). A conceptual model to guide research on the activities and effects of innovation champions. Implementation Research and Practice, 2, 1–13.

7) Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383

8) Kotter, J. P. (1996). Leading Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press

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You Don’t Arrive Strategic: How Leaders Grow Into their Role

Main Image: NBA / Theia

By Joe Lemire

The SBJ Tech Sandbox series is where we share our experiences testing products, gear, solutions and more in the sports tech space.

I first dunked a basketball during a JV game on my 16^th birthday. Following a steal and a breakaway, I rather gently placed the ball through the rim, but the varsity team happened to be watching, earning me what was some scarce social currency at that point in my life.

Over the next few years, as I got stronger, my vertical inched up further, and I could dunk with a little bit of style — no one was inviting me to dunk contests or narrating my And1 mix tape, but it was still an epic feeling.

You certainly wouldn’t know it now.

The NBA recently invited me to participate in the same quarterly biomechanics screening that all its athletes started doing this season — the first league-wide program in pro sports. It’s a series of jumps and lateral moves, with some closed-eye, one-legged balancing mixed in.

The video may double as my audition for Blue Man Group — the cyan skeleton is part of the Theia software processing to evaluate joint angles and motion. But it also shows my diminished explosiveness as I move along the aging curve.

Each task has been carefully selected by a collaborative group of NBA and NBPA movement experts to gain insight into individual athlete movement patterns and hopefully build normative standards that can be used to help prevent injuries and improve performance.

One note the league makes clear is that biomechanics usually can’t answer questions in isolation — rather, it’s a notable piece of a larger performance puzzle.

“Biomechanics tells you how someone is moving, but it doesn’t tell you why,” said Courtney Chaaban, NBA Sr Manager of biomechanics and engineering. “So I really like to look at it alongside of lots of other information: how strong they are, what their range of motion is, how they’re moving on the court, what their demand is on the court, what their injury history might be.”

I’ve detailed my injury history in these Sandbox stories before — broken bones in my feet, sprains of muscles and ligaments, etc. — and I’ll share that my knees were oddly sore the day of my evaluation. (Of course I have an excuse ready… )

My single-leg jumps were paltry, just 3.7 inches for my left and 3 inches for my right. My two-legged jumps were a bit better. The countermovement jump (CMJ) — in which I started on the force plates, bent down and then leapt straight up — was 11.8 inches, good for 56^th percentile in the sample of non-NBA players. My drop vertical jump, in which I step down onto the force plates and immediately spring up, was 13.2 inches, at the 49^th percentile.

I was hoping for better. Image: NBA

There were diagrams showing how much I use my ankles, knees and hips to absorb forces as I jump or land. Of particular note was my landing strategy: I know my hip flexors are weak due to a previous Springbok Analytics scan, and my knees were achy that day, so it’s little surprise that my ankles worked overtime to mitigate force.

“It’s not to say it’s good or bad,” Chaaban explained. “Maybe that’s just how you move.”

I didn’t skip all of leg day, just the hip and knee lifts. Image: NBA

While recently chatting with Warriors superstar Stephen Curry about a different topic, we started talking about his recovery routine and the notion of career longevity, when I volunteered that I underwent the NBA’s biomechanics protocol.

“You did all the testing?” Curry asked with a bemused smile. I shared the verdict of my data, which is that I’m very much a suburban dad these days. He laughed and then added, “There’s a lot more data available, but the real art is to figure out how to make that useful, right?”

My testing was done at the Nets’ first-rate facility in Brooklyn, but the experience is intentionally universal and would have been the same in Oklahoma City or Sacramento, too. All the same tech vendors are involved: Qualisys motion capture cameras, Bertec force plates, Theia biomechanics software and Breakaway Data for player and team access to the data.

My primary differential: I received a pdf report (rather than the Breakaway Data dashboard) that largely mirrored what the players get but had a few alterations, mostly because I had no historical data from other assessments. My datapoints were compared not to other NBA players but to a handful of team and league staff who underwent the tests.

The reports convey what each metric represents, which is helpful, such as noting that deceleration during the CMJ is “similar to stopping when coming around a screen.”

That CMJ deceleration was my highest asymmetry: my right side produced 20.5% more force than my left. Asymmetry is generally thought to be a problem and a possible injury risk, but there also need to be some allowances for individuals having their own movement signature.

What Curry also told me about applying such high-tech evaluations is the need to surround himself with “as many experts as possible to understand what the data means and then figure out what that is going to do to impact my routine.”

So, kind readers with advanced degrees and extensive pro sports experience, I ask: Who’s going to help me dunk again?

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.

Main Image: SwingVision

By Joe Lemire

By mounting their iPhones above the court, tennis players of all levels can use the SwingVision app to collect a trove of data and video from their matches. Add an Apple Watch and competitors can press a button and challenge a line call, receiving an animation on the wrist showing whether the ball landed in or out.

More recently, SwingVision has added a beta feature that yells “Out!” if a shot lands beyond the court boundaries. That audible line call takes a split second for the iPhone to process the image and make its determination, a rapid reaction only possible by the computing power of the chips Apple puts in its smartphones, bypassing the need to transmit to the cloud.

“That’s really only possible on device,” said SwingVision CEO Swupnil Sahai. “Because we’re processing 1080p at 60 frames per second, that’s a lot to process. And if you were to send that to the cloud and then have it process it and then run it back, you definitely can’t do that in half a second. And you certainly can’t do that on any court in the world.”

The proliferation of cloud providers and their processing have transformed sports tech for the better, democratizing access to storage and AI models, but there remain key use cases when the cloud isn’t the answer — when requiring speed, managing costs and operating with limited connectivity.

“This is a bit of a trend in my view, is that you see something that really works well in the cloud, but you need it speedier,” said Mike Davies, Fox Sports EVP of Technical and Field Operations.

Davies shared that observation in the context of his network’s IndyCar coverage. Fox and Indy Motor Sports Productions contracted with Lumen Technologies recently to install 10-gig fiber-optic cables at every track to support on-location servers. That enables faster rendering of data overlays on the driver’s eye camera and the use of a product called XtraMotion, which uses generative AI to turn regular footage into high-frame-rate video.

Sahai was a Tesla engineer before founding SwingVision, and the automotive manufacturer processes its Full Self-Driving cameras entirely with on-car hardware. “So that’s how I’ve always thought about this problem, is it should be done on device,” he said, calling it a philosophical decision.

“We just drew a line in the sand from Day 1: We’re doing this on device, we’re not going to use the cloud at all,” Sahai said, adding, “It just felt like it’d be way too expensive for a consumer app to run it in the cloud.”

Financial transparency can help. Gamecode, a soccer analytics startup, includes an upfront estimated cost for each predictive model run on the cloud.

Striking the right balance

Many sports tech firms offer a hybrid approach. Pixellot, whose AI cameras stream and analyze up to 20,000 games every weekend, is an AWS technology parter. Pixellot CTO Gal Oz once told SBJ that his company couldn’t have scaled without the cloud and “making Amazon do the heavy work. It’s not magic. I like the phrase that ‘there is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer.’”

Even though Pixellot CEO Doron Gerstel recently quipped of AWS, “They love us,” he added that every camera has an on-premises server to reduce the cost and expedite the video feedback for coaches and athletes. By the time the game ends, highlights are waiting.

“Now if you are doing it over there on the cloud, one of the most problematic things is you are on queue — if you want to pass the queue, fine with them, pay more,” Gerstel said. “The question is how much attention I’m losing if you’re not getting it immediately after the game. We are dealing with audience that is all about here and now.”

Gerstel added that he believes cloud computing prices will go down in time, and remaining affordable and timely is critical for the user. (Cloud pricing can be very dynamic based on time of day, volume of data, speed of turnaround, etc.)

GameChanger’s app was used to track more than 8 million baseball and softball games last year and is receiving an upgrade to stream in 1080p HD this year. Its President, Sameer Ahuja, said his group has invested in technical talent to optimize the efficiency of databases to minimize cloud reliance and cost. New innovations around video compression help retain quality while uploading faster.

And Ahuja previously shared that, internally, they often say “a bet on GameChanger is a bet on Apple and Samsung” because the smartphone providers are powering more on-device processing. That echoes a point from Sahai about SwingVision which, to date, is only available on iOS devices, but soon will expand to Android.

“A big reason why we haven’t gone to Android so far is because the compute wasn’t there,” Sahai said, saying it will finally be possible later this year. “We’ve started development for that, but even then, it’s only the very latest Androids, whereas on iPhone, you can go all the way back to iPhone 11.”

SwingVision’s electronic line-calling has been used in some junior tournaments as it applies to the ITF for certification that would enable use at higher levels. The audio alerts are, for now, a consumer feature to replicate the Hawk-Eye Live experience enjoyed by professional tennis players. But emitting that seemingly simple audio alert necessitates a huge behind-the-scenes engineering effort.

“Orchestrating all those different models, getting those to run as fast as possible,” Sahai said, “[required] a lot of experimentation and iteration for us throughout several years, honestly, of basically building our own architectures and getting it to run efficiently.”

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.

Main Image: Getty Images

By Joe Lemire

The Unrivaled season is a three-month sprint, but the size of its performance staff and tech stack are robust enough for a yearlong schedule — and they are making an impact beyond their own league.

Susan King Borchardt, who has been a fitness consultant to Sue Bird, Kelsey Plum and Breanna Stewart, joined Unrivaled as its Director of Performance and Recovery. Borchardt’s first call was to Lindsey Elizondo, an athletic trainer and physical therapist with the Magic, who joined as Director of Medical.

“We crafted this idea — her coming from the NBA, me working with some of the higher-level individuals privately in the WNBA — and just saying, ‘This should be the standard,’” Borchardt said courtside before the semifinals in Brooklyn. Phantom went on to defeat Mist for the championship 84-70 in Florida on March 4.

Their department has a headcount of about 25 and is supported by an extensive array of technologies, such as Plantiga insole sensors, Kinexon wearables, Springbok Analytics MRI scans and VALD devices for the weight room. Katie Buria, Head Athletic Trainer at the Dream, is Unrivaled’s Director of Sports Science managing the relationships with the tech providers.

“What we’ve seen is that will raise the bar everywhere else that we go,” Elizondo said. “So if we set that bar here, that’s going to feed upward into the W, it’s going to feed into the NWSL, it’s going to feed into all of these other sports and force the hand of this is what it takes to perform at this level.”

The athletes have full ownership of their data and can choose whether to share it with their WNBA teams and personal coaches. Unrivaled didn’t have exact figures available but indicated that the majority of players opted into using the tech, with Borchardt calling it “part of our culture.”

“This is a very player-driven league, and they care about player safety and wellness. The treatment has been top of the line,” said Breeze G Paige Bueckers, praising both the staff and the tech, such as “the data and what we look like on the court with our Plantigas or our [Kinexons] or our chips that measure our asymmetries — little stuff like that goes a long way in basketball.”

Plantiga has made women’s sports a priority, with its CEO Quin Sandler saying of the work with Unrivaled, “Together, we’re not just collecting movement — we’re helping build the future of applied sports science for women.”

Her teammate Cameron Brink, who suffered an ACL tear in June 2024, had her first Springbok scan — which uses AI to turn an MRI into 3D muscle data — while rehabbing with Unrivaled last year and then again before this season.

“Once you have a big injury, you want to learn how to optimize everything, so all these tools really help,” Brink said. “It is really reassuring to get MRIs done like that and just a full body scan. From here you can see how you’ve grown and improved and what areas you still need to work on.”

Elizondo noted the unprecedented position Unrivaled is in by collecting all of this data since the league’s inception. By having access to data for every player, the performance group can identify trends and understand the demands of the elite 3-on-3 game, which are different than 5-on-5. That helps them train the players with more specificity and develop more targeted treatment and recovery protocols.

Tracking longitudinal data enables Unrivaled to share baseline metrics for each player, and for rehabbing players, it helps reinforce the value of the hard work. Borchardt saw it firsthand with one athlete recently.

“For that athlete to have those two visual pictures to be like, ‘Wow, this is actually really working’ — that was so motivating,” she said.

Unrivaled CEO Alex Bazzell emphasized the league’s player-first, development-minded vision as a reason why it has invested so deeply in the personnel and products to make the performance team what it is.

“These players are thinking long term, and the expectation is not just your compensation but resources of off the court,” Bazzell said. “Our staff and who we hire, those are the ones that the players need to trust. You have to build trust in a 10-week period, too. That’s not easy.”

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.

Main Image: Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment

By Joe Lemire

Larry Bird famously won a three-point contest while still wearing his warmup jacket — after asking in the locker room, “Who’s coming in second?” — so, with the Nets about to play the Celtics, I channeled his confidence and didn’t change out of my hoodie and jeans.

Across the street from Barclays Center, the Nets recently opened the Brooklyn Basketball Training Center where a couple of weeks ago I had been invited to test the Shoot 360 tech its coaches use in training youth players.

Standing in front of one of the baskets outfitted with Noah Basketball’s shot-tracking tech and Shoot 360’s graphical user interface, I awaited the pass, dribbled back across a few lines and confirmed with coach Michael Collins that I was now behind the NBA three-point line. I was. And so I took a shot.

The net swished, and the LED screen lit up green — Shoot 360’s Splash Zone confirmed that my shot’s arc, depth and left-right alignment were just about perfect. Bird would have been proud.

Or at least my fellow ginger sharpshooter, Brian Scalabrine, who looks like family and played for the Celtics and Nets. (My two-time fantasy basketball title team was named Big Scal’s Doppelgängers.)

The Nets have long run free youth basketball programs in the borough, reaching 40,000 kids annually through 235 schools as well as Boys & Girls Clubs and other community centers. But this space now gives them a centralized location to run daily programs, largely targeting children ages 6 to 17. The Shoot 360 tech, Collins noted, offers a range of drills and sills — even passing and dribbling — so kids have a balance of autonomy and structure, so they can “use this technology not only to create a workout, but then also have fun.”

Don’t take just my word for it, but my brother and I brought some of our kids — ages 9, 11 and 14 — to test out the tech. They loved it and didn’t want to leave despite working up a light sweat and pushing close to tip-off an NBA game.

Three stations have responsive, large-screen LEDs that show videos demonstrating technique and then offer interactive exercises. The kids were asked to dribble a certain way and then fire passes at numbered targets. At one point, the screen showed a memory game that also required passing accuracy: players bounced the ball off the card to flip it over.

“One of our main lenses is, how do we help players get better faster?” said Shoot 360 founder/CEO Craig Moody, a former college basketball coach.

The company’s founding story involved Moody seeing his teenage son and his friends prefer to play NBA2K inside rather than go outside and shoot hoops on a sunny day. “If I could build a gym like a video game,” Moody thought to himself, “I’d have it made.”

Just before our family visit, the training center hosted a group of young campers from NBA Brazil, while another international group visited a similar facility operated by the Cleveland Cavaliers. The coaching staffs at the two sites synced up the Shoot 360s at each location and organized a real-time contest — truly the video game ideal Moody had long envisioned.

Marissa Shorenstein, Chief External Affairs Officer at Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, said there’s a dual purpose to the franchise’s investment.

“We do it because we believe in giving back to the community, but we also do it because we know that engaging youth is the best way to engage long-term fandom for the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Liberty,” she said, noting that the Knicks, for example, have decades of inherited fandom whereas the Nets have only been in Brooklyn for 13 years and the Liberty for half that time. “For us, really creating that connective tissue with the community through the youth is what we believe is going to differentiate us long-term to build that generational growth.”

But there’s an appeal for adults, too. Collins said Nets players periodically pop in and shoot on the tech-enabled baskets. Jamal Crawford, Thad Young, Trae Young, Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart are among the former NBA and WNBA players to invest in Shoot 360. And weekend warrior adults (like me) had fun taking shots and getting feedback. It’s akin to what TopGolf, Home Run Dugout and other sport-tainment venues are offering.

“Where you have just the shooting piece, you don’t have to run up and play defense. You’re getting all the competition, you’re getting the social [element],” Moody said, adding, “We want people to play around the world for a lifetime.”

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.

Main Image: AFP via Getty Images

By Ethan Joyce

Turns out at least one medal outcome was wrong at the Milan Cortina Olympics, and officiating and scoring startup Owl AI founder Jeremy Bloom says he can prove it.

The women’s snowboard slopestyle finish prompted immediate criticism for the judges who awarded Japan’s Mari Fukada the gold (with a score of 87.83) and New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnott (87.48) the silver — with notable reactions from NBC analyst Todd Richards and others.

The frustration focused on the inconsistency of scoring on jumps — specifically Fukada’s high scoring on the 720s (two full rotations) in her routine, while Sadowski-Synnott’s attempted more difficult 1080s (three full rotations) as part of her set. And it hit the exact reason why Bloom founded the tech startup to begin with — and in this case, the difference between silver and gold after a rejudging from Owl.

This graph shows the data sets utilized by Owl AI to determine that the women’s snowboard slopestyle at the Milano Cortina Games should have likely flipped the gold and silver finishes for the event. (Graphic used courtesy of Owl AI.)

“I don’t think much needs to be said about how important these moments are for the athletes,” Bloom told SBJ. “They’ve worked their entire lives to just make an Olympic team, let alone put down the best run and either miss the podium or have the wrong color medal for whatever reason.”

To check the medal finish, Owl AI created a data set to look back at the past five years of judging for both 720s and 1080s. What it discovered: The two scores Fukada earned in Milan Cortina on her 720s (7.7 and 8.3, respectively) stood out drastically. The scores on Sadowski-Synnott’s 1080s were also near the peak of scoring for the moves but still very in line historically with the judging from which Owl pulled.

Owl rejudging still slates Kokomo Murase as the bronze winner. But it flipped the finishes of Fukada (with an 86.67 adjusted score) and Sadowski-Synnott’s (89.13).

“This is where we really think we could augment the judges,” said Josh Gwyther, Owl AI’s CEO. “Because if you, as a judge, are putting in a score and immediately saw this deviation, you might be like, ‘Okay, let me see, Is there something there?’ And maybe notate that anomaly.”

Both Bloom and Gwyther have often shared that Owl is not meant to replace judges but to be a helpful tool to set everyone (judges, athletes, fans) up for success around an event. But because judges can vary in their experience, background, and biases, Owl becomes guardrails of context. For example, Bloom pointed out, 720s won the men’s version of this event in the 2006 Olympics. It’s no longer a cutting-edge move, which should be reflected in the score.

Because Olympic moments happen at a four-year frequency, it adds extra pressure to make these decisions as correct as possible.

“On one hand, you want to honor those who won,” said Bloom, a former world champion and two-time Olympic skier. “You want to say, listen, on this day, given this criteria, that’s your gold medal. And any sort of commentary beyond that shouldn’t sort of diminish you because that was their day.

“But at the same time, if that athlete or any athlete would agree that there’s a lot of subjectivity to these sports and everybody would like to push for a more objective world.”

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.

Main Photo: Courtesy of the NBA

By Joe Lemire

NBA Launchpad has selected five startups for the fifth cohort of its innovation program, choosing three related to basketball performance and two tied to league business priorities.

These companies will be paired with various league properties for six-month pilots culminating in a final Demo Day pitch session at NBA Summer League in Las Vegas.

This year’s batch of startups for NBA Launchpad in 2026 consist of:

• Atlas (S.F.): Atlas is a brain-sensing wearable quantifying cognitive readiness through its proprietary metric called Clarity. NBA SVP and Head of Basketball R&D Tom Ryannoted the impressive founding team led by “two world-class neuroscientists from Oxford and Cambridge” and two commercial executives with a track record at Oura. Atlas will be made available to NBA and WNBA team staff as well as referees on an opt-in basis for testing.
• Cred (S.F.): Cred is a predictive intelligence platform for sponsorship lead generation, which considers internal data as well as external market signals. Jason Bieber, NBA SVP & Head of Corporate Strategy, explained that it can ingest geographical considerations, such as where companies are opening new offices, or personnel such as new executive hires or consumer data, like team loyalties. Bieber said Cred already works with a few NBA teams and will be piloted at the league office.
• Diddo (L.A.): Diddo offers an API so that digital platforms, ranging from live streams to social media and apps, can integrate retail directly into the experience. Whether it’s apparel, tickets or other items, the goal is to keep users engaged in whatever content they were already consuming. Diddo is a graduate of the Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech accelerator. Bieber indicated it would be tested within the NBA app and NBA League Pass.
• Peripheral Labs (Toronto): Peripheral Labs is a spatial intelligence firm, taking autonomous vehicle technology to generate tracking data and recreate live sports in 3D by using dozens of sensor-enabled cameras. The founders had stints working at Tesla and Huawei. Ryan said it could have applications across officiating, player health and performance and fan engagement. Peripheral Labs, which raised $3.6 million in seed funding last month, is already installed in one NBA arena and will be further tested at the new G League R&D facility in Salt Lake City.
• Swish Basket (Tel Aviv): Swish Basket uses cameras and lidar sensors to track players’ shooting success and form while offering AI-powered training and gaming. Unlike similar tracking apps like Homecourt, which required players to set up their own smartphone for tracking, Swish requires a more permanent installation but removes that friction and uses additional tech for more detailed metrics. This product will be tested at NBA owned-and-operated international basketball schools.

For the second year, Launchpad’s selection criteria is loosely based on five league priorities — Future of Officiating, Youth Basketball, Player Health & Wellbeing, Future of Media and Fan Connection — without necessarily adhering to those exact categories. Ryan told SBJ the goal is to find products that live outside the daily core business but could be relevant within the next five years.

“In the first three years of Launchpad, we were really focused on putting out specific, almost DARPA-type of challenges, and then finding companies that map directly to those,” Ryan said. “Where we are in year four and five is just broadening up and always staying true to our big five priority areas around the game and our business, and then really just focusing on finding world-class founders and making sure that the problem they’re solving is a high-risk, high-reward type of bet.”

Alumni from the first four years of the program include seven startups to receive funding from NBA Investments and several who have gone on to work directly with NBA teams, such as insole sensor provider Plantiga, MRI-based muscle scan analysis company Springbok Analytics and broadcast tracking data supplier SkillCorner. Others have collaborated with the league on projects such as nVenue, which creates micro-betting markets, and SportIQ, whose ball sensor is being piloted for automated officiating use cases.

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.

Main Photo: Airo

By Joe Lemire

Speedskating team pursuit debuted at the 2006 Olympics, with three-skater teams racing in sync, taking turns leading the pack to absorb the wind.

At times while looping the course, because the skates don’t have brakes, one athlete might incidentally bump a teammate from behind. Back in 2018, Shane Domer, US Speedskating Chief of Sport Performance, wondered if those pushes were beneficial and how to optimize the number of exchanges at the front of the line.

Domer contacted the Chair of the governing body’s Sports Science Commission, aerodynamics expert Ingmar Jungnickel, to build a projection around these ideas. Jungnickel concocted what he called a “napkin math kind of model” that immediately showed a savings of about a second and a half, Domer recalled.

A week later, however, Jungnickel called back and told Domer, “Shane, I think we’re doing this thing all wrong. What if we don’t exchange at all?”

Jungnickel proposed that the two trailing skaters, who benefit from the energy savings of drafting, use that to push the leader forward rather than take the time to sprint out in front, likening the concept to bump drafting in NASCAR.

“The model showed that pushing was so clearly advantageous that you shouldn’t sometimes push,” Jungnickel said. “You just should abandon taking turns at the front altogether, and this should replace the old strategy.”

After years of testing — both through advanced computational fluid dynamics models and on-ice training — that revolutionary technique has propelled the American men from also-rans to both the podium and the record books. The US, which finished eighth at the 2018 Olympics, won a bronze at the 2022 Games and gold at the 2025 world championships while setting the world record in the event.

Internally, it’s called Project Slippery Fish, but to the world, the technique has come to be called the American Push.

Jungnickel had worked with Olympic cyclists in his native Germany, as well as with Tour de France teams, but at the time of this discovery, he was leading an innovation team at Specialized bicycles. Given the success he had in speedskating, Mike Levine, USOPC Senior Director of Performance Pathways and Innovation, suggested he apply for a grant from the donor-backed Performance Innovation Fund.

That funding enabled Jungnickel to start a sports tech R&D consulting firm, Inspire Gold, which then built an AI-powered aerodynamics spinoff — Airo — that replicates a wind tunnel by creating digital twins of athletes that can be manipulated in 3D to determine the best posture and formations. US Speedskating was the first client, but Jungnickel said he has also worked with national teams in ski and snowboard, cycling, luge and triathlon.

Without the grant, Jungnickel said he likely would not have started the company. Now, the core IP remains proprietary to US Olympians, but related use cases are helping support Inspire Gold. Levine emphasized that many Olympic sports don’t have technological support because they lack a large enough commercial market.

“Airo is selling the technology to bike fitters and bike shops, but there’s a speedskating version and the ski version that we will never sell to anybody but the US Olympic Committee,” Jungnickel said. “That’s our core business model: Essentially develop technologies that help Team USA win, and then commercialize them and long-term fund these businesses.”

The 26-member Performance Innovation Advisory Committee is chaired by Apple’s Eddy Cue and includes members from disparate backgrounds, such as team executive (the Spurs’ RC Buford), athlete (NFL lineman Kelvin Beachum), investor (Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon), business analytics (KAGR’s Jessica Gelman) and medicine (Texas Children’s Dr Jeff Shilt). The fund has raised about $50 million to date.

“It’s really a talented and generous group who provides us this risk capital, strategic guidance and network connections to invest in and execute bold ideas that can create competitive advantages for Team USA and elevate the performance, health and wellbeing of Team USA athletes,” Levine said, adding that the scope is “agnostic. We’re not defining what lanes we’re playing in.”

Founding committee member Geoff Yang, the managing director of Redpoint Ventures, explained the goal in 2015 was to combine “data, applied technology and ingenuity” to support and identify talented Olympians and Paralympians.

“The United States is home to the most innovative technologies in the world,” Yang said, “and Team USA should be a leader in applying those technologies.”

There are four main allocations:

• An international competitive analysis that uses machine learning to develop medal expectancies, helping drive high-performance planning;
• Athlete 360, a custom management system available to NGBs for free;
• Monthly online forums and an annual performance innovation summit “to create the collisions and spark a shared learning and cultivation of ideas,” Levine said; and
• Grants, such as the one utilized by US Speedskating and VAMA, a motion capture technology used to great effect by USA Track and Field.

“Without the funding to get these projects going, we lose steam on the innovation side,” Domer said. “Some of them fail, and these guys are OK with that. And that’s awesome because that helps us create the lack of fear of failure that we’ve had in the past.”

The speedskating team happens to be full of engineers who understand the underlying concepts. One skater, Emery Lehman, even spent time as an intern with Airo’s athlete engineering project. The willingness to experiment from the athletes and coach Ryan Shimabukuro has been critical.

“I give him and our athletes a lot of credit because they didn’t know what the payoff would be,” Domer said, “and to commit to doing this thing — well, as a speedskater, you’re not taught to skate pushing someone. So it took a lot of work to get them to adopt the technique.”

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.