MedStar Health, the team’s medical provider have partnered with the Orioles to deliver a fully in-house initiative.
Housed on MedStar’s campus in Bel Air, Maryland — around the corner from the franchise’s High A minor league affiliate in Aberdeen, only 30 miles northeast of Camden Yards and about an hour’s drive from the Double A team in Bowie — the tech-laden lab will help the club assess and monitor their pitchers for delivery efficiency and injury prevention using 10 Qualisys markerless motion-capture cameras, TrackMan’s optically enhanced radar and three force plates embedded in the mound.
The Orioles’ pitching lab uses 10 high-speed cameras, force plates in the mound and advanced ball tracking technology.
“It’s something that any modern, cutting-edge player development system needs. It’s sort of a baseline requirement at this point,” says Orioles Director of Player Development Matt Blood. He adds, “The competitive advantage lies in how you actually use the information that the labs produce because I think just about every team is acquiring this information, but then it’s what do you do with it from there to help the players get better?”
Since the new executive team took over in November 2018, led by GM Mike Elias and AGM Sig Mejdal, the Orioles have built out a robust group of coaches and analysts to modernize the franchise’s then-lagging baseball operations. Now, they’ve assembled a management team can interpret and apply such data sources, rather than contracting out some of that work to biomechanics consultancies such as provided by Reboot Motion or Driveline Baseball.
“Fully in-house. We’ve hired the people that we feel are necessary to process the data at every step of the way,” Blood says. “And then we’ve got coaches who are hungry for that information and will put that into play on both the pitching coach side and the strength and conditioning side.”
The cameras and TrackMan are portable, enabling most of this set up to be moved around, including to the Orioles’ player development complex at their spring training facility in Sarasota. Only the force plates are fixed in place, but Blood says a second sensor-laden mound is slated for construction there. One force plate is placed at the rubber to capture a pitcher pushing off to start his delivery, and then two more are installed side by side down the mound to evaluate the landing force of righty and lefty pitchers.
The idea, he says, is for pitchers to get a spring training baseline and then receive follow-up assessments every four-to-eight weeks. In a video interview shared by the team, Orioles starter Jordan Lyles discussed throwing one of his between-start bullpens at the lab, which opened to the team in July, while seeking better efficiency with this throwing motion.
The pitching lab will serve as an evaluation destination for Orioles pitchers at every level.
“We feel like we have gone about this in a responsible and organic way,” Blood says. “Instead of just rushing to acquire the data, we rushed to acquire the people who could help us and build out the proper system and process and technologies that were most practical and productive to use.”
Previously, the Orioles sent players to the Wake Forest Pitching Lab, owing to a good working relationship they have with both lab director Kristen Nicholson and baseball coach Tom Walter. The Wake lab is identical to what the Orioles built — 10 Qualisys markerless motion capture cameras, TrackMan, three force plates — and is open to the university’s baseball programs as well as the public.
“I have a particular interest in creating 3D simulations to enhance performance in both sports and medical rehabilitation and then also to figure out and define pitching efficiency,” Nicholson said. “We want to limit throwing arm stress and avoid injury without sacrificing velocity, and that becomes the real core of our lab and what’s driving our research in player development.”
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The neurotechnology company’s Pro-Sync software contains a series of video-based eye movement tracking tests accessed through wearing a virtual reality headset
NeuroSync (formerly SyncThink) is calling its new software product Pro-Sync and it contains a series of video-based eye movement tracking tests accessed through wearing a virtual reality headset. The setup is similar to Eye-Sync, the company’s signature eye tracking product released in 2016 that’s used by college football and NBA teams to test athletes for concussions.
“We’re using a different measurement tool that essentially takes you through a battery of eye movement tests, some are similar to what we have in Eye-Sync and some are different and new,” says Scott Anderson, NeuroSync’s chief clinical officer. “We look at different aspects of how well you focus, how well you can sustain your attention, or how well you can maintain your working memory or your inhibitory control.”
Cameras in the VR headset follow the user’s eyes while NeuroSync’s algorithm quantifies how long their eyes are moving to the appropriate location. NeuroSync then provides an instant score from 0 to 100 (100 being best) to rank their results though a machine learning model that compares their performance based on NeuroSync’s cognitive assessments data of more than 20,000 patients. Some of those patients are NBA players from NeuroSync’s work with teams such as the Warriors, Wizards and Hawks, who all originally leveraged the company’s Eye-Sync concussion product as a makeshift solution to monitor fatigue amid the rigors of an 82-game schedule.
“Teams are making are making arbitrary decisions on load management, based on what’s happening physically, but what people don’t realize is that the brain’s central nervous system controls your entire body. We just look at all the physiological parameters that help us understand what the status of the athlete is,” Anderson says. “I think there’s a better way. If you start at the source, you’ll understand why physiological changes happen and cardiovascular changes happen — it’s because it’s all being run by the central processing computer in your body.”
The brain has long been neglected by sports scientists and team physicians working with athletes, according to Anderson, who notably also serves as a medical observer consultant for the NFL. He often sits in the replay booth during games and shares specific video angles with on-field team doctors to help identify and diagnose player injuries after plays.
Earlier this spring, the NFL mandated players’ use of wearables to track load management during all preseason practices. While football has been a main target of Eye-Sync, Anderson expects Pro-Sync’s fatigue evaluation to be most applicable in continuous-play sports such as basketball, soccer and rugby.
“People spend a lot of time talking about reaction time, but actually visual processing happens before reaction time. And so you have to move your eyes to the right place, so that your brain can interpret what it is that is in front of you, so that you can formulate a reaction,” Anderson says.
Anderson says NeuroSync has conducted “unofficial studies” over a couple NBA seasons with the Atlanta Hawks that affirmed a relationship between slower eye movements and sustained physical injuries. “They had several players who as soon as these markers showed up, soon after that they got injured. And so we want to be able to predict when somebody is at risk for decreased performance or potential injury,” he says.
The Hawks and Wizards have also worked with NeuroSync to deploy eye-tracking tests on college prospects before the NBA Draft, to assess their cognitive abilities. The process served a similar role to the Wonderlic Test used for scouting evaluation in the NFL.
“We screened 60-plus [NBA] draft prospects and then ranked them according to risk,” Anderson told SportTechie. “We identified the high performers and those we thought were risky investments.”
Devices from Kinexon and Catapult are among the most used wearables in NBA and college basketball for load management, and the NBA is also testing Nextiles’ sensors in apparel. Pro-Sync’s cognitive function assessments would provide a complementary perspective for evaluating athletes whose schedules include cross country flights and games in different time zones.
“We have data from NBA players before they went on a five day road trip, in the middle of that road trip, and when they get home from that road trip,” Anderson says. “And the difference in their cognitive abilities at those three time points is remarkable. They’re trashed when they get home, and nobody knows it.”
Pro-Sync’s software roadmap for 2023 includes adding training protocols for athletes to practice improving their cognitive deficits in virtual reality. NeuroSync has more than 20 sports teams in the NBA and college football, including its league-wide deal with the Pac-12, but it’s been a few years since the company announced a new team partner as teams don’t want to publicize a potential competitive advantage.
While NeuroSync’s Eye-Sync concussion product is a registered medical device with FDA approval, Pro-Sync is considered a nonmedical device and thus not seeking those certificates. What began as a “passion project” for Anderson, he now thinks is on the precipice of changing the way sports view fatigue and cognitive function.
“I think it’s the next frontier. I wrote an article about it for Leaders in Performance in 2016, talking about the potential to measure real time brain performance, how it could change sport,” Anderson says. “I’ve been obsessed with it ever since.”
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Sports teams and organisations have spent the best part of a decade collecting data on athlete performance, but what does the next decade hold? Zone7 believe that the answer lies in making sense of it all. In fact, they refer to this as sport’s next ‘arm’s race’. This is just one of the themes touched upon in this Special Report, which is brought to you by our Partners at Zone7.
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The American swimmer is working closely with Orreco and is witnessing first-hand how the company’s performance platform is deepening the understanding of female physiology in athletes and coaches alike.
Born in Pittsburgh and raised outside Detroit, Schmitt later starred on the University of Georgia swimming team where she was a four-time individual champion and leader in helping the Bulldogs win the 2013 NCAA national title.
Schmitt initially retired after the Rio Olympics in 2016, at which point she began pursuing a master’s degree in social work at Arizona State. She reduced to a part-time load when she began swimming again in 2018 and now is on track to graduate in May. Schmitt recently joined the Female Athlete team at Orreco and is an ambassador for its FitrWoman campaign.
On her medical history . . .
I was diagnosed anemic in 2010, and the only really cure for that, I was told, was on an IUD so that I would bleed less. That’s all I knew, and I was on an IUD for eight years. I came off of that into the end of 2018. I just wanted to see how my body reacted. The myth is that the only thing we really know about female health is that our body changes every seven years. So I figured that maybe my hormones have changed, and I wouldn’t bleed as much.
That was my thought process. Coming off of birth control essentially was—I mean, I didn’t know what exactly an IUD was—my only question was, ‘I want kids some day. Is this going to stop me from having kids?’ They were like, ‘No, as soon as you stop, you can have kids.’ I didn’t really realize the severity of the synthetic hormones and what it does to your body. So when I came off it, my body was adjusting to it for quite a few months because of the synthetic progesterone was being produced for those eight years, and now all of a sudden, my body’s trying to produce it.
On using Orreco’s platform. . .
I didn’t really know what was going on with my body, which is when I got connected with the USA Swimming Director of Sports Medicine, Keenan Robinson. He connected me with Dr Georgie [Bruinvels], and I have been working with her ever since. I was very involved. I talked with Georgie almost daily. I would be on mostly weekly calls with the whole team. It was like a team. We would talk just to check in, make sure everything’s going right.
For what was needed, we would have blood work. So going towards Olympic trials, from probably October of 2020 through May of 2021, I was going through a lot of health things, and they helped me through that. And by the end, when I was actually into full training again, I was getting blood tests every Monday to check on my cortisol levels to see how it was in response to training.
On applying her Orreco results to training . . .
We had a plan of nutrition, recovery and training. But on Mondays if that number came back extremely low, I would have to adjust the training for that day or for that week. That was a different type of challenge, I guess for my coach, Bob Bowman, in just adjusting that based on what the scientific numbers are. I love that about Orreco: everything is proven and scientific-based, and it’s not just opinion.
We needed that change because of my performance at a time. I wasn’t able to finish practices. I wasn’t able to do practices at the level that I needed to do them at. The whole Orreco team helped us through that process. And, I mean, it was kind of like hands up in the air. Bob and I don’t know any information on the female health side, so teach us what we can [learn] and what’s going to be beneficial. It ended up working—all of us working together—and results started improving. From where I was in March and April to where I was in Tokyo was a drastic difference, and I don’t think that we could have got there without the help.
On training men versus women . . .
I come from a mostly male training environment, and my mentality, which in that environment has gotten me a lot of success in sport, is, ‘Okay, put your head down, push through, you can get through it.’ But I think just now learning the difference between pushing through something, and getting the right help in this situation, is a big difference, but also the difference between men and women.
Why are we training females like males? And why is all the research on males when females and males are different people? How our bodies are made up is completely different. It’s critical to treat your body how it’s made up, understanding that [females] can use those hormones and the differences to their advantages, and they can be more powerful than what they already are.
On pairing training with monthly cycles . . .
We look at it as four phases in a female athlete, and yes, there’s different modalities that are ideal for them. But, at the end of the day, yes, we have our goals that we want to accomplish and adjusting to your needs and your period is not asking for less work. I’m still putting the same amount of work in, I just need to be more conscious and educated on ways that I can perform better. So whether that be nutrition, whether that be more recovery, whether that be more warm up—whatever that is for that day, I as an athlete have to be educated in that. But also, from a coach standpoint and pushing their athletes, I think there’s a lot of times where athletes are hard enough on their selves as it is. And they’re gonna want to do better week after week.
On other wellness monitoring . . .
I did use Sleeprate which [paired with] a disc under my bed. And when it first came out, I used Whoop. And then I started using it again at the end of my career. And still today I use those modalities just because it’s interesting to me to see how much our bodies can adjust, and even seeing between the different phases, the quality of sleep I have. It kind of affects my performance, not only in athletics, but in your everyday human interactions.
On now working for Orreco . . .
I’m very passionate about getting that education out just because I feel like I learned so much about it. And if I’m learning this—I’m a 30-year-old female and am just learning about my body—how many other females are going through the exact same thing? If we can get this information out to kids at a younger age, in high school and college, there’s a lot of obstacles that they will be able to avoid throughout their career and hopefully have a more successful career.
This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.
The Irish startup PlayerStatData says that their app helps to provide a holistic picture of young player development in soccer.
During the pandemic pause on sports, however, Brett recognized an even greater deficiency in the player development infrastructure, so he pivoted his startup, PlayerStatData, to address the Under-13 through Under-19 population. The target user is currently academy directors and player development coordinators, but Brett says further iterations will likely suit coaches and the athletes themselves.
The PlayerStatData app, which launched in the US and Canada earlier this month, seeks to provide objective performance data culled from video analysis, physical test results, a centralized library of coaching assessments and, crucially, a monitoring system for psychological and socio-economic insights.
“We want to see be a solution for all and to be an all-encompassing solution as well, which means that we want to be accessible, affordable and available to all clubs at all youth levels across the US and Canada,” says Brett, the CEO and co-founder of the Waterford, Ireland-based company. “And we want to give them the full picture of a player’s development.”
Context is critical. Family backgrounds and finances all play a role in player progression, especially in the North American pay-to-play model with costly club and travel teams representing an important pathway. Teenagers’ mental health and perspectives need to be considered, too.
“Coaches have become a lot more open to psychological output because, especially with the age that we’re looking, 13 to 19, there’s a lot going on physically and mentally with them at that age,” Brett says. “There’s a lot of stuff to understand with them too. So that’s where we want to get the best advice, because it’s important to get that right.”
For that, Brett has turned to Laura Finnegan, a lecturer in sport management at South East Technological University in Waterford, as an advisor. Her master’s thesis was in sports psychology, and her Ph.D. dissertation studied the organizational structure of talent development in Irish soccer. Finnegan has done research work on behalf of Uefa and US Soccer as well.
“It’s valuable everywhere to be able to see the player in the round,” she says. That 360-degree view, which PlayerStatData will incorporate piecemeal in future updates, is a novel approach to a market that does have several digital scouting video platforms, GPS wearables and new sensors already. “I really think that’s what’s going to set them apart,” Finnegan adds.
Malcolm Gladwell detailed in his book Outliers that a disproportionate number of NHL players were born in the early months—January, February and March—because the Canadian youth program cutoffs were at the start of the year, thus favoring the slightly older kids. Finnegan has noted similar patterns in academies in the United Kingdom and thus advocates for delayed selection of players because many physical skills don’t manifest until after puberty.
“It’s all stacked with boys that are our early maturers, and in the early years, all born earlier towards the cutoff as well,” she says of the academies. “That was one example of something that we could layer in so that you’re not just necessarily comparing Boy A with Boy B, but actually, you’re comparing boys with someone of the same maturity status as him. You’re trying to be fairer for those kids. For me, it’s just adding an extra lens for coaches.”
PlayerStatData has done some early work with the academy of Waterford FC, which competes in the League of Ireland’s First Division, and has attracted some early clients overseas such as Ottawa University Arizona, a nationally ranked NAIA program. PlayerStatData also sponsored a local Under-14 tournament where it did analysis for the participating teams, which included a team from the Blackburn Rovers, whose first team is one rung below the Premier League. Brett envisions a platform that’s truly customizable so that users can meet their needs no matter the staffing and resources.
“What’s useful is we did some bespoke design,” says Waterford FC academy director Mike Geoghegan. “So Colin sits down and asked me, what information am I looking for? What’s the sort of things that I want to track as a head coach? Because it may not be the same for every head of academy.”
For now, the PlayerStatData staff manually tags video and collects data, but computer vision algorithms developed in conjunction with professors at the local university are being developed. Brett wants that process automated within 18 months so that coaches only need to upload video into the app. “We want to get into a situation where it’s drag, drop, collect, and pick up the reports,” he says.
The Waterford academy, for instance, is staffed by part-time coaches who don’t always have the time to “extract and properly manage the data and draw insights from that data,” Geoghegan adds. “So I’m saying, I’ve got lots of recordings, lots of football, lots of coaches, but I’m not really getting this information in any way because it’s no one’s job.”
Brett sees the US and Canadian soccer systems as needing a tool like his to eliminate subjective coaching bias; the volume of players and vastness of geography make it hard for objective monitoring.
“It’s a bit of a wild west when it comes to pay-to-play and the sheer size of the market,” he says, adding: “There’s an openness to data, there’s an openness to finding that edge, it’s an openness to use a couple of innovations to get ahead, be that as a club or be as a player.”
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Players can train technical elements in the comfort of their own homes and receive instant feedback on their execution.
Tennis legend Martina Navratilova has signed on as an advisor to Sense Arena after seeing a demo and calling it “about as realistic as you can get without actually hitting the tennis ball.”
Founded in Prague by Bob Tetiva—whose father, Jaroslav, was a member of the 1952 and 1960 Olympic basketball teams for the former Czechoslovakia—Sense Arena is a partner of 30 pro hockey teams, including the Los Angeles Kings, New Jersey Devils and Vegas Golden Knights among its five NHL clients. It has begun accepting pre-orders for its tennis product, which costs $300 for a yearlong subscription and, for a limited time, includes a free haptic racquet.
“You don’t have time in any sport to think, you just have to react,” says Tetiva, the CEO. “And to learn that, you can either play hundreds and thousands of matches in hockey or tennis, which will be very exhausting for your body or—here comes the beauty of virtual reality—we can throw you in the same environment in the first person to a controlled place where it’s actually only about you.”
The company, which has North American offices near Boston, Toronto and now Tampa, has raised $3 million earlier this year and $5.2 million in total, with participation from the Boston Bruins’ top scorer, David Pastrňák.
Available now on Meta Quest 2 and soon to be expanded to other VR providers, Sense Arena’s tennis software is currently usable as a one-person training tool, with multiplayer capability likely for the future as well as other updates, including the ability to practice serves and a pro-level strategy feature.
Users hold the proprietary racquet—which houses a Quest controller and vibrates when a player makes contact with a virtual tennis ball—and can replicate shots and volleys as well as engage in other cognitive drills.
“Forehand, backhand, it’s all about reaction, and it’s about repetition,” Navratilova says. “And then you get [to see] what the end result is, so you can fix it. The ball tells you what you did wrong. So you get that immediate feedback in the safety of your home.”
Navratilova has suggested some tennis drills to be incorporated and, even after her first product demo, recommended the inclusion of a pause button to help players visualize the angles of shots better. “Immediately she was intuitive giving us feedback on the existing product,” Tetiva says.
Tetiva plans to market the product to both elite teams—colleges, academies and the like—as well as individual players. B2C is likely to be the predominant sector because of its sheer size, he says, “but the credibility is built through the top tier of tennis.”
Yannick Yoshizawa, a former college player at South Florida who worked nearly nine years at the WTA, was hired to lead the tennis business at Sense Arena. The three main pillars of the sport, he says, are physical, technical and mental training. Physical and technical are more easily isolated in practice, but he has bought in to the potential of VR to train the mental component.
That was the early thesis of Tetiva when he began developing a hockey program. He had played some pro basketball in the Czech Republic before entering the IT industry when his son began showing interest in hockey. Sports training has evolved considerably in almost areas, he realized, with a notable exception.
“One piece is kind of neglected, and that’s your brain,” he says, “which actually controls everything.”
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The tech giant is stepping up through its ‘Strive for More’ campaign.
A two-time All-American at Penn State in 2005 and ‘06, Krieger then began her long professional career. In addition to playing five seasons in Germany, Krieger has been with the NWSL since its inception, spending time with the Washington Spirit, Orlando Pride and now Gotham FC. She and her wife, fellow USWNT veteran Ashlyn Harris, were acquired in the offseason by Gotham, whose general manager, Yael Averbuch West, is a former teammate.
Krieger recently partnered with social sports platform Strava, which launched a new “Strive for More” campaign. The accompanying pledge seeks to garner support and visibility around equitable sport for female athletes and teams. Strava is contributing $1 million over the next three years toward the cause.
On joining Strava’s ‘Strive for More’ campaign . . .
Strava reached out to me and asked if I would be willing to come on board and be an ambassador as a professional female athlete to help spread the word about ‘Strive for More’ and the pledge and their campaign that they’re leading—which has been really incredible for females, for allies, for supporters, fans, friends and family all over the world. As you know, Strava can connect globally and not just within our country, which is incredible, and we all need the support.
I immediately wanted to help and get on board with the pledge and the whole sporting community to pledge their support for more equity in women’s sports. This cross-promotion of me being a footballer and talking about ‘Strive for More’ in other female sports and with other athletes has been pretty incredible.
On her goals for the pledge . . .
I want to see more people wanting to watch women’s sports, supporting women’s sports, putting money where their mouth is and really giving women what they deserve because they endure just as much emotional, physical, mental energy as our male counterparts. We deserve to be seen and be heard and get what we deserve.
On the example of the USWNT’s equal pay fight . . .
It was a great foundation for other sports to get involved and other companies—for example, Strava—to support female athletes and their fight for equity and equality and respect. That was just a great foundation for us to want to help women in general. It wasn’t just about us as a soccer team and our sport specifically and within our country; it was fighting for women in general, across all industries, all sports.
I think we really started this massive wave of female athletes wanting more for themselves and being more confident in those types of discussions. To fight for more equity and money and sponsorships and all the things within their contracts with their employers, but also with their agencies and their teams or clubs or organizations. It wasn’t just a fight selfishly for us, as soccer players and a team. It was a fight for all women, across all industries, to really amp up everyone’s confidence in fighting for what they deserve for doing the same amount of work as anyone else and just getting the resources that individuals need to perform their best no matter what they’re doing.
On how standards are evolving in the NWSL . . .
Slowly. The work will never be done. Most importantly, we have to constantly fight for what we deserve and what the standard is. We actually hold a high standard, both on and off the field, and I think a lot of female athletes do or else they wouldn’t be in the position that they’re in, at the levels that they’re at. Now it’s really focusing on the club level. For the NWSL, it has been 10 years, and it still somewhat feels like we’re behind. So, we do have to continue within our own organizations at each club in the NWSL—there are 12 clubs—and then within our teams and then get our younger players to jump on board and say, you need to have a voice, you need to continue to carry this baton to fight for your generation in order to get more.
I think the club level is definitely still at a level where it could be a lot better, so the standard yet isn’t as high. We’re continuing to do that as a collective group, which you saw in 2020 and last year, as well—coming together as a group in fighting for each other and the conditions that we have and that we have to deal with day in and day out within the organizations and the cities that we play in. Once again, along with the ‘Strive for More’ campaign and being an ambassador for Strava and their strong message; even at the club levels, this will help the equity, the inclusion and the demand to give women more for what work they’re putting it.
On playing for former USWNT teammate Yael Averbuch West at Gotham FC . . .
I feel like it’s so beneficial when you have an athlete that has been through the trenches and has been through the grind and can now be in a position of power to fight for us, to have a better understanding of what we need to, one, keep us happy and, two, to perform our best every single day. And then, on game day, perform in order to get three points and win. So that’s what is needed: former players and people who have been through that experience because some people don’t really understand unless you’ve really been through it. She’s in such a great position for us.
She’s actually a good friend of Ashlyn and I. So I want her to succeed in the position that she’s in. We have a really great relationship in kind of telling her, ‘Hey, things could be this way, maybe we can put this on the list of how we can make this better.’ We’re kind of her eyes and ears as well, and I really enjoy that.
We want to see her succeed and the club succeed, not only ourselves as individuals, the team, but we want to continue to fight. So it’s not just at the national team level that we’re using our voice. It’s now within the organizations that we’re playing at the club level.
On her use of training tech . . .
We all have a GPS tracker, and then we have a heart rate monitor that we wear every day so that they can see the numbers and [see] if you’re maybe running a little too much or a little too hard a few days before the game where you have to be 100% fit. So they’re constantly watching. They have an iPad out there. They watch your numbers constantly throughout the training sessions. So if you need to do more, you stay and you do a little more after practice.
But it’s really beneficial for us, especially after games [when] you see where your heat map was on the field and then the energy that you’ve obviously played in, to be able to mark like, ‘Okay, how many days do you need rest in order to continue to keep that standard just as high for the next match?’ And then they actually have numbers to go off of when we say, ‘Hey, I’m feeling actually really good today, or I’m actually super tired.’ They can check the numbers to see how much you’ve run that past game or training session to make sure that everybody is fully set and injury-free going into every season.
On the importance of recovery . . .
Our job is a 24-hour job because recovery is huge. People say, ‘Well you only work two or three hours a day.’ I’m like, ‘No, I work 24 hours a day because you have to spend that extra time making sure you recovered so that you’re able to be 100% the next session.’ I do have a Whoop to keep track of all that information, which was good because I had sleep [data] on there, too. It was good to compare it with some of your friends or teammates.
On her use of Strava . . .
I downloaded the app right away when they reached out, and I’ve been a participant so far. Because of Whoop, we have our Fit for 90 app, and we have all these other apps that we use for soccer that definitely will be a go-to for me when I’m done playing and I don’t have to report on our NWSL soccer app. And we also have an app for the national team. So there’s a lot of apps, and they know exactly what we do all day. So [Strava] will be on my phone and very accessible for once I’m done playing and retired in the next year or so. And I can use the Strava app to stay active and to stay motivated and to stay supporting women and female athletes all over the world.
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The second in a series of three articles exploring the growth of digital scouting in global soccer.
This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece explores how access to physical data has improved in soccer scouting. The next article will look at the new sets of metrics available to coaches and scouts.
Each of these young players had been invited for the tryout based on data collected by a small sensor suspended between the shoulder blades in a black compression harness. This GPS device from STATSports carried Arsenal branding and enabled anyone who bought the device, which retails for $350, to vie for a spot in this showcase.
Players were judged on the data collected by the Fifa-approved wearable carrying the GPS transmitter, accelerometer, magnetometer and gyroscope. They produce 16 metrics including a bespoke Pro Score, all of which are shared with Arsenal staff and can be compared in the accompanying app to anonymized data of current Arsenal academy players. This provides an incentive for users to train and exposes a Premier League club to potential talent that may have been overlooked.
While the ease of access to digital video has aided scouts in making subjective evaluations of prospects’ playing ability and style, the growth of GPS devices in the consumer and youth markets is helping objective physical data be incorporated into that process—not as the sole determine factor, of course, but as another vetting tool.
“Just to make clear, obviously, the ability to play football is the most important aspect of any player who plays for Arsenal Football Club or any football club in the world,” says Barry Watters, the head of sports science at STATSports. “Even if they’re technically and tactically very good, are they physically capable of performing at the top level?”
This marked a major evolution in scouting standards. Sport scientist Chris Barnes currently consults with Catapult and Uefa but previously worked with several clubs, building what some consider the first sport science department in the Premier League when he took on that role with Middlesbrough in 1997. He notes a clear rise in the adoption of objective data in scouting and recruiting over the past 15 years, which was not the standard practice for decades before that.
“The way that traditionally recruitment was performed, certainly in the UK, is you would have a troupe of middle-aged or elderly men in oversized coats who would stand on the side of a field and make some paper notes on players,” Barnes says. “And if they created sufficient interest in the coaching staff, eventually one of the more senior people would go, and it would be done so subjectively.”
The leading GPS brands have made entreaties in the consumer market. STATSports makes its Apex Athlete Series wearable—with and without Arsenal branding—and Catapult tried first with its PLAYR device in 2018 and then with Catapult One in 2021. Other smaller brands, like Sports Performance Tracking, FieldWiz and SoccerBee are also available.
The Catapult GPS device is used in academies to measure a player’s performance across load, speed, endurance and position.
At the upper levels of the sport, league-wide data-sharing agreements are common. What’s collected by optical tracking systems Second Spectrum, ChyronHego, Stats Perform SportVU, Hawk-Eye and the like are disseminated freely within the clubs of the top leagues. There’s less cutthroat competition at the academy level, so Barnes says there’s some degree of informal data sharing.
But getting one’s hands on that physical data has been “very difficult, historically,” says AS Monaco Technical Director Laurence Stewart. “I’m a big believer that some information is better than no information, as long as we understand the right context around it. [It’s] definitely more difficult the younger you get, and there’s less coverage and sort of openly available information on the younger players.”
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Chris Barnes had never stepped foot in Nigeria until he reported for his first day of work in December 2020 as Sports Science Director at Vandrezzer FC in the second division. There, he introduced Catapult’s PlayerTek device, with Vandrezzer touting itself as the first club in the country to use a GPS tracker and to have a sports science department. It also added Veo’s AI-powered cameras. All of the national teams in the African federation, CAF, have been using GPS for a few years—first FieldWiz and now PlayerTek—piquing the interest of the professional clubs on the continent.
Vandrezzer had a pair of precocious talents, defenders Felix Oloye and Samuel Edoho, that began attracting outside interest from clubs in Denmark and Poland. The longstanding challenge of scouting across countries and leagues has been finding a way to compare contexts of league quality and physicality. That’s where the PlayerTek GPS devices played a role: both players exceeded the physical requirements of the European clubs, although the transfers ultimately fell through for other reasons.
“They wanted the training data that we’ve got on these two young players before they make a decision as to whether they’d take them on trial. So it really was at the center of the recruitment process,” Barnes says. “What the Danish and the Polish teams were interested in was essentially tempo or intensity. So, within the games themselves, they’re looking at what we would call a relative data—can they can they maintain high-intensity actions, accelerations, decelerations, sprints, and repeat them consistently over a period of time?”
The enterprise optical tracking systems such as Second Spectrum, ChyronHego, Stats Perform SportVU and Hawk-Eye have been available in top leagues for several years with data-sharing agreements so that each member club had access to everyone else’s match data.
Increasingly, such systems are trickling down to smaller leagues. Second Spectrum, for instance, reached a deal with the Danish League in October 2021 to install its solution not only in the first-tier Superliga immediately but also in the country’s second division in the near future. Similarly, the recent MLS deal with IMG Arena includes a provision for tracking to extend down to MLS Next Pro next year. And companies like Track160 have entered the market to offer more affordable alternatives.
In the absence of in-venue cameras, companies such as SkillCorner are generating similar datasets of physical performance using only broadcast video. Liverpool was its first customer, and now it culls footage from 50 global leagues to retroactively produce tracking data, which clubs can then import to existing systems such as Catapult’s SBG MatchTracker and Hudl’s Sportscode.
“If you’re looking at a player in Uruguay, historically there was no way to get data on that player,” SkillCorner GM Paul Neilson says. “Well, guess what, now we’ve got SkillCorner tracking data, bring it into SBG and you can really understand that player and the decisions they make, their movement profile, how they respond to different triggers, different situations, how aware are they of their teammates and X, Y and Z.”
To date, SkillCorner primarily works at the top end, informing clubs’ decisions in the transfer market, but it is working to adapt the product for different video sources to accommodate lower tiers, such as academies. Compatibility across systems so that video and physical data can be reviewed in tandem is important, too.
“We see a very similar thing happening in human performance as we did in recruitment a few years ago when we acquired Wyscout, which was more and more match analysts were moving from just analyzing games to recruiting players, and they were using the same tool sets,” Hudl SVP of elite sports Sam Lloyd says of acquiring Wimu, the wearable tracker used by FC Barcelona, the Spanish national team and all of Liga MX. “So it just made total sense for us to have both tool sets under the same umbrella and make them easier to use.”
Youth soccer players were given the same tech as the pros, and if their stats were high enough, their data could get them recruited to academies.
StatsBomb is an analytics provider that has devised its own proprietary metrics, combining computer vision techniques with some manual input. It serves more than 150 team customers while ingesting data from more than 90 leagues, helping create those league benchmarks.
“Part of it is baselining the whole league and how physical something is, so that you know, ‘Where can we recruit from?’” says StatsBomb CEO Ted Knutson. “That’s something that scouts always talk about, ‘Oh, that’s a physical league, so they’ll do fine here.’ And you get proxies for it. But you won’t need proxies anymore.”
Before Track160’s entry into the US market, the Israeli company held a number of focus groups, using its system to track players and then sharing that data. Many of the young players immediately started getting competitive, comparing top speeds and other metrics. The parents were all eager to garner more exposure for their children and, in time, they’ll be able to make relevant comparisons and projections.
“They’ll be able to benchmark players between the same age group, same gender, compare it to other regions,” says Track160 CEO Eyal Ben-Ari. “They could even tell the player, ‘Look, if you want to play in the Bundesliga 3, that’s the level that you’d have to get to. And if you want to be recruited to Division I in the US, that’s the threshold.’ Eventually, we’ll see more of that, but that will require some time to collect historic data.”
Barnes used to work at West Bromwich Albion of the Premier League when they used event data from sources such as Opta that quantified matches based on granular detail of shots, passes and touches. Barnes and the WBA data scientists created models based on their own clubs’ wearable data and the event data to find, say, the best fit at right-side midfield for their tactics. It would share percentage matches and also, crucially, compute financial value of the players to guide the targeting of realistic options for a smaller club. But that had limitations.
“The biggest challenge you’ve got as much as anything else, though, is probably 90% of the meaningful event data is when you’ve got possession of the ball, and that’s probably great when you’re trying to recruit midfield and attacking players,” Barnes says. “But of course, a little bit more difficult when you try to recruit defensive or strong defensive midfield players. But here’s where, if you can access the wearable data—and it’s becoming increasingly possible with league-wide deals because then it’s shared—you can actually build timestamped and time coded pictures, which will give you information related to events.”
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The largest undertaking in elite development soccer is beginning this fall. US Youth Soccer, a nonprofit affiliated with the national federation, announced plans for its new Elite 64 league, which will include 64 boys teams and 64 girls teams at each of six age groups for teenage players. Assuming 23 players per roster, that’s roughly 17,500 soccer prospects from Bangor to Burbank, all competing for national trophies and recognition.
Each participant will receive both qualitative and quantitative data, from USYS partners ProScore and STATSports. ProScore uses its own evaluation metrics to assess key moments of the match while STATSports will be providing the same GPS technology that the Arsenal invitees used. In this case, instead of being tethered to just one pro club, the users can share their data with any college coaches or pro scouts.
“That’s where we can see the consumer product overall going as well—the ability of the individual user themselves to be able to share that data with whatever third parties they want, be that scouts or coaches so that they can see what they’re physically capable of,” says Watters, the STATSports sport scientist. “They share everything else already. They share video reels, they share anything. There’s a lot of data.”
This remains a largely new frontier for wearables in the US, so building appropriate benchmarks will take time for each MLS academy and college program to gain an appreciation of what they’re looking for and what physical output is appropriate. “So that we can see what good looks like, but it all must be put in the context of the type of team they play for,” says Watters, adding that eventually the STATSports app can use those recommendations to serve as a “virtual coach” for players without access to top club programs.
“Most actual high schools don’t have the budgets to do that, [but] lot of the youth clubs do,” University of Pittsburgh women’s soccer coach Randy Waldrum says of GPS device. “It’s not where it needs to be yet, but we’ve certainly—over the last five, six years—seen it start to grow.”
US Soccer signed its own major partnership with STATSports back in 2018 to incorporate the devices through the federation, including the youth national teams. The US Soccer High Performance Director at the time, James Bunce, previously held that role with the Premier League and was a proponent of bio-banding, a concept of grouping players on teams based on physical maturity and age rather than sorting strictly by birth year.
GPS devices can help play a role in determining those selections, along with other inputs of physical data. US men’s national team Coach Gregg Berhalter says that his pool of players are receiving regular assessments from his own staff and their respective club staffs to formulate a holistic view of each athlete.
“Everything. Body screens, motion screens. The breadth of data that we’re collecting on these players is pretty impressive,” Berhalter says. “Not only that, we’re working together with their clubs to import data from what they’re doing at their club level into our system. So we can piece together where a player is at physically when he comes into camp.”
Over in the UK, STATSports outfits Rising Ballers FC, a youth club for unsigned players. Several of its alumni have gone on to sign with pro clubs and academies where there’s greater maturity of physical data. That’s where the Premier League and other overseas circuits are ahead, Barnes says, because the academies have been “running in a structured way for 15-plus years.”
New avenues of entry remain possible, such as through Arsenal’s partnership with STATSports. Of the first 22 players to trial at Emirates, none has yet signed, although one of the female players continues to be closely scouted and the Arsenal staff says it saw “flashes of brilliance” from the prospects.
“For us, the golden ticket obviously is if someone does get picked up,” Watters says, “but I think even the ability to allow these end users to be able to get in front of these people was absolutely brilliant and all the kids and everything loved it.
This article was brought to you by SportTechie, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SportTechie content in the field of athletic performance.
The first in a series of three articles exploring the growth of digital scouting in global soccer.
This story is part of our series on digital scouting. This piece explores the growth of digital video in soccer scouting. The next article will look at how access to physical data has improved.
Those top-line results, however, obscured a hidden talent. A hemisphere away, French Ligue 1 side AS Monaco received a midseason alert about a young Grêmio defender. A one-named wunderkind named Vanderson, who plays right back, was starting and logging significant minutes at the age of 19, while contributing tackles, pass interceptions and goals on some brilliant free kicks. Such production triggered an alert within Wyscout, the Hudl-owned scouting service widely used in pro soccer.
AS Monaco employs a scout in Brazil, but it’s a massive country that was still contending with Covid travel restrictions. The scout couldn’t get there right away, but the club had access to plentiful data and video resources to some preliminary vetting before the AS Monaco scout—and, subsequently, Technical Director Laurence Stewart—got on a plane to see Vanderson play in Porto Alegrense.
“That’s an example of a player that it would be a lot more difficult for us to sign if we’ve not been able to do a lot of that prior work [before we travel] and see them play in different contexts and in different scenarios,” Stewart says. “So we have quite a diligent process that we have to go through, in a way to tick as many of the boxes as possible before we look to recruit a player.”
Monaco ultimately completed a $12.1 million [£10.4 million] transfer for Vanderson in January and, by February, while still four months shy of his 21st birthday, he became a regular starter on a club that finished third in Ligue 1.
The recruitment of Vanderson is a perfect case study of modern digital scouting in soccer: a quick, data-infused process to sign a young talent.
“What is becoming more prevalent after the pandemic, after Covid, we’ve seen that a lot of organizations are shifting their demographic of players that they recruit, so the average age of players recruited is dropped,” Stewart says. “What that does is brings a pressure around there being a time sensitivity to the way that you work.”
The global pandemic gave clubs a rare respite long enough to step back and re-evaluate processes, all while cutting into revenues from diminished match revenue. One trend that accelerated as a result was the speculation on younger players. Stewart says the window to evaluate prospects has shrunk, on average, from two seasons to one and now, at times, only half a season.
Getting players younger allows a mid-sized club to reap the benefits of a few productive seasons before, as the player reaches his prime, transferring him on to a mega club for an increased profit. Prospecting earlier also lessens the financial risk. It’s little surprise that one of the other rumored suitors of Vanderson was Brentford, well known for its hearty embrace of analytics.
“We have to be agile and ready to know our assessment and know our profiles in a shorter period of time,” Stewart says, “so that’s where we need technology to help us be more intensive in that process.”
The pandemic forced teams to embrace online scouting
Victoire Cogevina, a former player agent and now the Founder/CEO of Gloria, began the company a half-dozen years ago with an intention of using the app to aid scouting. She’d partner with leagues who would subscribe to gain access to new recruits. The idea, she says, was that the players matter most, so if you build a product they want to use, the clubs and leagues will follow.
Before the pandemic, the foothold data analytics had gained in the tactical decisions of many elite clubs has been well documented, but that embrace lagged behind in scouting, which largely remained a bastion of older, more subjective methods. (Gloria has since pivoted to a larger purpose, serving more as a social and community-drive app centered around the beautiful game with grand plans to become titular sponsor of the new women’s league in Spain.)
“The pandemic was this kind of a slap in the face for clubs understanding that a vital piece of their business, which was finding new talent, and also a vital piece of their revenue share [from transfers] was something that they can do in a much more efficient way than they had done,” she says. “And they were so closed off because, by the way, in 2018 when I was speaking to clubs, they thought I was an alien.
“I remember having conversations with clubs that were forefront, big brands—obviously smart in their decisions—and they were very much against the idea of online scouting. And when you told them, ‘Hey, it’s going to be just a few years when you’re going to change your business dramatically. They were like, ‘No.’ They had a ton of excuses around it. So when the pandemic happened, immediately I got a ton of phone calls from all of those clubs that I had once been in their boardrooms and offices and, ‘Hey, remember what you pitched me? What are you doing now?’”
For a national federation like US Soccer, whose remit is to monitor professionals across the world and millions of youth players across a sprawling country, the centralized collection of video and data at its headquarters in Chicago has become essential. Men’s national team Coach Gregg Berhalter says he can keep tabs on his player pool—collecting video and performance data—for every match they play, no matter the league or country. Much of that infrastructure helps scout the players.
“Very similar,” Berhalter says. “We’re able to watch our youth teams through the platforms that were created that houses video, but also youth scouting, sharing methodology—all that stuff, technology makes it a lot easier.”
Some clubs shifted toward digital scouting more organically than as a result of the pandemic. Two years after Monaco won its first Ligue 1 championship in 2017, the club finished 17th, staving off relegation by a mere two points, and churned through managers like a tipsy tourist burns through chips at the Monte Carlo poker tables. In 2020, Monaco modernized, investing in data, a new training facility and key hires, such as Stewart, Sporting Director Paul Mitchell, and two key US Soccer Federation personnel, Performance Director James Bunce and technology guru Tyler Heaps. The club is now significantly younger and more fit.
Monaco has been a fairly prolific spender since a new ownership group took over a decade ago, but the trend lines toward data, video and youth can be seen throughout the sport. Hudl SVP of Elite Sports Sam Lloyd says that, historically, recruitment was the product of scouts and agents. But now a “golden triangle” has emerged, and “data is as important as scouts and agents,” he says, noting that the Wyscout usage skyrocketed during the pandemic.
Wyscout provides data regarding performance, patterns of play and tactical strategies for coaches, teams and players to analyze.
“The biggest change that’s happened because of Covid is it’s mobilized the much smaller organizations to become literate with data and data scouting,” adds Lloyd, noting that the bigger clubs were already investing significant resources in the practice. Tools like Wyscout narrow the funnel of players for more targeted scouting trips. “The rest of the football pyramid,” he says, “it’s opened up ways in which they can scout not just from where they can drive to in a single day.”
Tonsser gives scouts access to larger pool of players
Four years ago, a group of teenage strangers gathered in Paris. Each was summoned on the merits of the videos and stats he had uploaded to a Danish soccer app called Tonsser, borrowing the local nickname for a gritty, high-effort player who maybe succeeds in spite of some technical deficiency. This group—from disparate backgrounds and no experience as teammates— played a Paris FC youth team to a 2-2 draw.
That result was “very motivating for us,” recalls Tonsser Co-Founder and CEO Peter Holm. It led to a more formal showcase program called Tonsser United, an ever-changing roster of previously overlooked players who would gather and compete in tournaments against organized club teams.
“That started actually as an experiment, maybe to challenge ourselves bit,” Holm says. “It was more like a question, ‘Can players from outside the academies, found through an app, compete with established academies?’”
With a user base now of 1.4 million players, mostly aged 13 to 19 and living in Europe, Tonsser subsequently entered a squad in the Vinci Cup, an under-15 tournament later that year. A photo advertising the event shows the logos of all 16 participants, including the storied crests of European powers like Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, FC Porto—and a turquoise circle with a soccer ball centered the middle, a logo looking like it had been hastily selected from a clip art catalog.
Tonsser United acquitted themselves well, winning or tying its first several matches and drawing distinction for its surprise performance in the tournament recap, noting how the players all met each other on Thursday before playing four matches together on Saturday.
The concept of the club has continued, with a new roster each time, and Holm reports that 40% of its alumni have gone on to sign with professional academies through this alternate route, at least in part because of this new exposure.
“That helped us incubate the idea of how can you create a concept of a football club that is born out of values, born out of a vision, rather than born out of geography,” Holm says. “Because football clubs today, they have a stadium, a physical presence, and usually you have fans out of legacy, because where you are born or you fall in love with it from afar. What we wanted to create was a more of a concept of a football club that anybody can support because they want to support the underdog.”
A product like Tonsser helps players at the beginning of their scouting journey. While the use of Wyscout and other tools are used to identify a match with a single pro prospect like Vanderson, Tonsser works in the reciprocal: select a whole roster of players higher up the talent funnel and make it easier for scouts to see a larger pool. It integrates with national federations to ensure player identities and data quality, but an integral part of its methodology is to seek the “wisdom of the crowd” in which peers vote for those who turn in the best performances, Holm says.
“That’s really the trenchant analogy that we use for football,” he adds. “So instead of asking the coach or experts in football, we flip it to the community to help them generate data points.”
The app has been in the market long enough that some professional stars used it in their youth, most notably Erling Haaland, Manchester City’s newly acquired prized striker. Holm quickly notes that “we can take no credit” for helping the upward trajectory of his career, though “it’s just fun and inspiring that he’s used the app,” but there are a few case studies where Tonsser seems to have played a role.
Frankfurt’s Jesper Lindstrøm was a heavy user as a teen. In four years, he went from Tonsser’s Player of the Season to Bundesliga Rookie of the Year. After a friend played a match with the Tonsser United showcase team, a young French player named Alexis Kabamba downloaded the app and fared well in a friendly. That led to a contract with Ligue 1 club Stade de Reims and subsequent appearances with France’s U17 national team.
“My experience is that so many players that we don’t know just fall off the edge of the cliff, for one reason or another, because they don’t have the opportunities, they lose motivation, think they’re not good enough,” Holm says. “They don’t have the right environment to bloom. And that really what we’re trying to provide with Tonsser United. There’s always a second chance.”
Affordable video opens more global opportunities
Some aren’t afforded a first chance. Africa has been underscouted, but the proliferation of quality, affordable video—and the platforms for distribution—is granting the continent’s players more exposure. Lloyd says Hudl has begun contracting more frequently to record tournaments and then upload the footage to Wyscout.
Hudl’s focus camera was installed at Rio Tinto Stadium, home to the Real Salt Lake soccer club.
After Hudl shared video from a tournament in Cameroon, for instance, and club scouts were able to compare the analysis with the benchmarks of players already in their academies. Several then flew to Cameroon to recruit those young players. The same was true for some matches in Zambia, which led to interest from elite clubs like Villarreal and Porto.
“There’s more justification for the travel expense, whereas sending a scout on a whim to Zambia—it seems crazy, doesn’t it? Who’s going to do that?” Lloyd says. “But if you’ve watched him five times, you’ve got the data to verify he’s above and beyond what you currently have. That becomes an easy trip, doesn’t it? Because now it’s, ‘Let’s get him before these other teams work it out,’ rather than, ‘I hope to go and find a good 15 year old in Zambia.’ That’s not a good trend.”
Chelsea FC star midfielder Kevin de Bruyne, a recent Premier League Player of the Year honoree, sponsors his own youth tournament, the KDB Cup, in his native Belgium. The event already invites many of best U15 players, gathering them for elite competition—and easy scouting. But whether it’s due to Covid or budget concerns, travel still isn’t easy for everyone, so the KDB Cup began a two-year partnership with automated camera company Veo to provide coaches and players match analysis and broadcast the matches for free to 104 countries.
There are several AI-powered camera systems in use—Veo, Hudl Focus, Pixellot, Spiideo, PlaySight, Trace and more—but more manual efforts remain the norm.
“Some of it is automated capture, but the vast majority is still one guy standing on a scaffold with a video camera,” Lloyd says. “Times haven’t changed that much, unfortunately, but the automated capture is definitely making it more easy and more available.”
Wyscout users can view related videos for a team, player or game as well as download clips and make their own analysis.
Longtime UConn men’s soccer Coach Ray Reid, who won a national championship in 2000, used to employ video and scouting services such as InStat and Wyscout was the beneficiary of several impact recruits from Europe he otherwise never would have recruited. Kai Griese and Bjorn Nikolajewski arrived from Germany, and Mateo Leveque matriculated from France. Reid calls Leveque—the 2021 Big East Freshman of the Year—“one of the best guys we’ve ever recruited.”
“It helps you figure out if you want to go there, if you want to fly to France to see a young man,” says Reid, who recently retired from coaching and became a Senior Strategic Advisor for optical tracking company Track160. “It’s a good first step.”
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