MMA champion Dakota Ditcheva discusses her use of wearables, their influence on her training regime, and the benefits of playing multiple sports in her youth.
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Ditcheva, 25, is undefeated as a pro (13-0-0 with 11 wins by knockout), including August’s first-round TKO of Jena Bishop in their PFL [Professional Fighters League] semi-final match in Nashville. She is a Manchester, England native known for replicating Man City goal celebrations after winning bouts. Her mother, Lisa Howarth, was a World Kickboxing Association champion, so Ditcheva grew up in a gym and later won a gold at the 2016 International Federation of Muaythai Amateur World Championships before switching to MMA.
Now training at American Top Team in Coconut Creek, Florida, Ditcheva won the PFL Europe tournament in 2023 to claim a $100,000 purse and gain entry into this year’s larger PFL draw. She has rapidly gained a large social media fanbase after a video of her weighing in last December was viewed nearly 19 million times and gained her 100,000 new followers.
On getting started in kickboxing at her mom’s gym…
It wasn’t something that I would say I always wanted to do from being young. I was involved in it straight away because my mum had a gym before I was born. So as soon as I was born, I was in the gym, pushing my little dolls’ prams while she was coaching and things like that. So it was always something that I was around.
I did train when I was, like, four years old. These like videos and photos of me fighting and stuff I did two, three fights when I was four, and then from that point, I didn’t do it at all until I was 13. It wasn’t really something I was interested in. And my mum was never one to say, ‘I was a fighter. Now, I want you to be.’ She actually didn’t want me to fight.
It just so happened that I came back to it myself when I was 13, after trying loads of different sports. I did netball, football, I did basketball, I did gymnastics, I did everything. To be honest, I tried so many different things. My mom and dad are the type of parents that are like, ‘Stay involved in sport. And it doesn’t matter what you choose to do. Just stay active, stay fit.’ So that’s what I did. But then when I was 13, I was, like, starting to train again. Obviously, my mom, still having a gym, I was older, understood it a little bit more, and that’s where it just went from there.
On the benefit of playing multiple sports…
Definitely, 100%, especially in martial arts like this. You need so many different qualities for this sport. And you get that from other sports. [From] gymnastics, you need the balance. You need the weight, the sense of gravity in this sport you need, which I probably got from gymnastics. I got loads of different things from playing sport.
And I think, as well, it just made me realize how much I wanted to do it. That was the main thing. It was something that I came back to myself, so being able to try different sports, see what I enjoyed, what I didn’t enjoy, what I loved. And that’s probably why I stuck to it so much now, because I wasn’t forced to do it. Doing all different sports built me to the person that I am today and showed me what I love the most.
On choosing to sign with the PFL…
When I signed a few years ago, 2022, I was at a point in my MMA career, where I was fighting on different shows, and even though I was winning and getting a lot of exposure from the shows, I didn’t feel like I was building up a set fan base with a promotion. So I felt like it was the right time when they approached me, especially with them approaching about the European season.
First, I wanted to stay close to home and build good support closer to where I’m from, in the UK. So it just really appealed to me at the time. And obviously the tournament money, the format and things like that was good for me because I like to fight quite regularly. And obviously, with this tournament, it’s back-to-back fights throughout the year, so just loads of things that really appealed, and it was lucky for me to get a promotion that said they would get behind me and push me as the brand for myself and not just get me fights.
On moving to Florida and training at American Top Team…
I was going through quite a difficult stage in my career and in my life in general. This is a really tough sport, a very selfish sport. I was probably a little bit lost. I was having great success in my career, but I was struggling to accept the fact that it’s a very different life to what my friends have. A few things at home, like relationships and things like that outside the sport just weren’t working out. I was feeling like I didn’t know what direction I was going.
It was hard to get the balance inside the sport as well. I was traveling a lot to different gyms to get the right training up and down the country. So it was just perfect timing for me to go over to America before I sign with PFL and just find that one base that I really felt at home at. And as well, the sunshine — in the UK, we don’t get much sunshine. Now, this is a tough sport, and people like said to me, ‘You can’t make it easy for yourself just because you’re waking up in the sun.’ And I’m like, ‘But why would I not want to better my life if I’m still working just as hard, waking up in Florida sunshine and still having a few sessions a day and working really hard, like, why wouldn’t I do that?’
On tracking sleep and recovery…
I’ve actually got a Whoop on. I do [track] a little bit. I got out of a bit of a routine because it’s difficult to wear this under my gloves sometimes because it can be a bit hard, but I do like to track it, mostly the sleep and the recovery. I think that’s a really important part for fighters, rather than the actual exercise. We know we work hard and we burn the calories, there’s no denying that — that’s not necessarily what I use it for — but the recovery and how well I’m sleeping and things like that is what I tend to track. That’s why I try and get in a routine of wearing something like this or other monitor [devices]. People just think we base everything off training and how hard we’re working, but, actually, it’s the recovery that we need to get on point as well.
On a habit she has changed based on the data…
Caffeine probably being one of them. My nutritionist has put a cap on what time I’m allowed caffeine now. So I actually see a lot difference in the amount I sleep, and the way I sleep when I’ve had caffeine too late. So that’s quite an interesting one to see. But you can check if I tend to have this [Celsius energy drink] a little bit too late, then I see a little bit of a difference in my sleep pattern.
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CEO Mike Cazer spoke to SBJ Tech about the team’s efforts to bring the ‘Auld Mug’ back to the US.
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The defending champion of the America’s Cup is given wide latitude to establish the design parameters for the next competition’s sailing yachts, with strict limits on testing and prototyping. That “can limit your ability to take big technology risks, because you’re going to make sure that you’ve got a boat that works,” said Mike Cazer, CEO of the American Magic, the US entrant in the global regatta.
In order to explore new ideas within those confines, American Magic contacted a dozen engineering firms specializing in AI and simulations and partnered with Altair to build a digital twin of the AC75 yacht to serve as the basis for prediction models on how the boat will perform and how it can be sailed most effectively.
“Coming out of the last America’s Cup, we saw a huge opportunity in the area of advanced simulation, high performance computing and AI,” Cazer said. “We had some experience, particularly on the on the simulation side, but it was really more rudimentary. We thought that this could be a big part of this campaign and especially going forward.”
Altair has deep experience with the America’s Cup, dating back to 1995 — it most recently supported the Italian boat, Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli, in its runner-up finish during the previous competition. Altair technical manager of simulation and design Julien Chaussee said the inputs are “all-encompassing” and include historical data from prior America’s Cups, design tools, fluid dynamics, structural analysis and also digitally-generated simulation data. (Altair has also done significant work in golf manufacturing, among sports ventures.)
Cazer noted the complexity of the challenge with the sailing yachts that must contend with the environmental conditions of both wind and water, which requires pulling from the fields of both aerodynamics and hydrodynamics. The AC75 can hit speeds of 55 mph and briefly become airborne.
American Magic has a simulator at its training site in Barcelona, (where the races began last week), which enables the sailors to test the boat in all conditions. They can complete an entire race in the simulator under the precise details of that day’s weather and that opponent’s typical strategy. The simulations can also help brainstorm new tactics through artificial intelligence.
“When we use the AI bot to sail 24/7, it’ll start exploring areas of data that the sailors may not intuitively go to, and it’ll start recommending, ’In this condition pattern, here’s a way for you to sail the boat differently and potentially better,’” Cazer said. “A lot of times it’s wrong because the algorithm doesn’t quite have it exactly right, but a couple of times it’s pushed their thinking on how to actually control the boat and maneuver differently. And so then we start exploring that on the water, and ultimately it helps us get to be a better sailing team.”
The Preliminary Regatta was last weekend in Barcelona and it will be followed by the Challenger Series and final, best-of-13 series taking place between October 12 and 21.
“From a technical point of view, I always like to say, ‘There’s only one way to find out if you’re the best, and it is to go measure yourself with the best.’ You can’t just hide in an environment like the America’s Cup,” Chaussee said. “It’s really enabled us to push the tools and push the technologies and, in some cases, uncover limitations that we were able to overcome.”
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The IOC’s pilot scheme was another branch of its holistic support for the athletes competing in Paris.
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In April, the IOC launched its Olympic AI Agenda, an initiative full of innovation that could dramatically affect future Games.
A pilot project in Senegal is using AI to identify athletic talent and improve access to athletic opportunities for future generations. Judges for sports such as gymnastics can use computer vision that will bring more structure to the scoring process.
But at the Paris Games, one such AI effort was of immediate benefit to all the world’s best athletes — a monitoring system to protect them from abusive comments on social media. Kirsty Burrows, the Head of the Safe Sport Unit for the IOC, told SBJ this is part of the organization’s greater mental health efforts, and its constant evolution helps creates holistic athlete support.
“We know the enjoyment people get from competing and participating in sport,” Burrows said in July. “But ensuring athletes have a positive, healthy experience where they can thrive on and off the field of play requires specific actions to be taken to support that and to make it so.”
The service, provided by a third party the IOC declined to name, scanned all major social media platforms to flag potentially abusive or harmful messages — an immediacy that hopes to address them and have them taken down before athletes can even see them. Specifically, Burrows said, the system uses AI to look for posts that are either criminal in nature or conflict with community guidelines — for example, guidelines on X include stances against abuse/harassment and hateful content. This service can also pick up emojis and other imagery while navigating more than 35 languages for the 206 delegations (10,000-plus athletes and 2,000 officials).
Burrows highlighted that the IOC wanted to be helpful with this protection but not overly intrusive. It didn’t scan athletes’ DMs, maintaining their privacy. They can opt out of the service as well.
This tech was tested during Olympic Esports Week last March, with the IOC saying that more than 17,000 social posts were analyzed from various platforms. Of those, 199 were highlighted as potentially abusive, flagging 49 of them.
Burrows pointed to the need for social media monitoring around esports because online abuse can be endemic in competitive gaming. The positive learning that came out of that, though, was the flexibility of the system — Burrows said the IOC tried to anticipate issues while also having the capability to swiftly respond to a situation, such as when a player suddenly starts receiving a barrage of targeted abuse.
She feels that this will be an evolving protection that hopefully improves with time and more data. And the need for this learning is only growing — when unveiling the AI monitoring system in April, Burrows estimated that the Paris Games would produce roughly half a billion social posts.
Kirsty Burrows (r), who heads up the IOC’s Safe Sport Unit, speaks with Lindsey Vonn about protecting athletes online.
A former athlete’s take on this system
Emma Terho is uniquely positioned to talk about the need for athlete protection from abuse. She is the chair of the IOC Athletes’ Commission, as well as a two-time bronze medalist (and five-time Olympian) with the Finnish women’s hockey team.
In her playing past, coaches suggested avoiding all outside messaging — whether that was media coverage or, later, social media platforms — during the team’s biggest competitions. “Reading the wrong comment can be detrimental to your self-confidence,” she said.
But so much has changed about social media and the way athletes use it for personal branding and fan outreach. It’s not something that they can brush off. Quite frankly, it’d be detrimental to do so, especially for an athlete who only gets to compete on such a large stage every four years.
Terho’s online experience includes interactions with negative comments. She remembers harsh responses after losses that featured her mistakes on the ice. There’s also the experience of teammates and fellow athletes, some of whom were attacked based on their appearances.
Her recollection resonated ahead of Paris, the first Games with full gender parity. Earlier this year, England’s Loughborough University released an IOC-commissioned study showing that social media abuse toward athletes is rising.
More troublingly, a third of social media posts observed during the study featured negative content directed toward athletes after triggering events (which can be performance-based, social issue-based or reactive-based, according to the Loughborough research). It also discovered that female athletes were especially targeted by “hateful, discriminatory and emotional forms of harassment.”
Factor in the broader conversations about the recent mental health battles of the biggest female star athletes — like Naomi Osaka’s withdrawal from the French Open in 2021 or Simone Biles’ experience at the Tokyo Games — and the need for this AI rings even more clearly.
“Our main goal is to make sure that the Olympic experience is the best possible for the athletes,” Terho said, “and allow athletes to focus on the performance and that they’re not going to get abuse in the wrong moment.”
Burrows mentioned that the IOC has steadily built out its mental health support since 2016. The Summer Games in Rio were the first Olympics to feature safeguarding officers, providing human resources on the ground.
The Safe Sport Unit was established in 2022, and the support effort has continued to grow. Another new tech-bolstered feature of these Olympics was the Athlete365 Mind Zone, an activation sponsored by Powerade that will utilize VR mindfulness exercises in “disconnection pods.” The space, which was in the Olympic Village’s fitness center, was also staffed with members of the Safe Sport team.
“We want people to experience the broad benefits of sport participation,” Burrows said. “And that means ensuring a healthy and safe environment through which they can participate in sport.”
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.
The Canadian also relied upon a metabolic cart and EMGs to ensure she is best-equipped going into next week’s race.
Main image: Saucony
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Saucony staff affixed 80 motion capture markers to her body and shoes to detect her movement to sub-millimeter accuracy in front of two Vicon camera systems. They placed a mask and air tube over her face to measure oxygen intake and exhalation. And then they asked her to run 11 miles per hour on an instrumented treadmill that can collect force data — and do it four times, each while wearing a different pair of sneakers.
Ultimately, the best fit for Elmore proved to the Endorphin Elite 2, which Saucony bills as its “most aggressive race-day performer” thanks to a carbon fiber plate and responsive foam cushioning.
“We saw how her body reacts, and we saw how much of a percent decrease in energy she uses per shoe,” Saucony Product Performance Analyst Andrew Lynch said.
Saucony Performance Engineer James Allen described that as her “metabolic savings” and explained that the preferred shoe was determined by a combination of Elmore’s biomechanics and physiology, her subjective feedback and the shoe’s mechanical response.
“One thing we try to do here a lot is trying to match subjective opinions to actual objective measurements,” Allen said, with Lynch adding that, in Elmore’s case, the two lined up well.
Ultimately, the best fit for Elmore proved to Saucony’s Endorphin Elite 2, which features a carbon fiber plate and responsive foam cushioning. (Photo: Saucony)
The eight Vicon Vero cameras track the motion of the reflective markers. That data is processed by Vicon Nexus software and syncs to the force data from the treadmill, which is considered alongside the VO2 datapoints of energy expenditure — which quantifies the effort needed to sustain that 11-mph pace. EMG wearables monitor muscle activation.
A separate markerless motion capture system from Vicon is easier to use and, with advances in computer vision and processing from Theia3D, its accuracy and usefulness is growing closer to the gold-standard marker-based mocap.
Elmore, a Stanford All-American who competed in the 1,500 meters in the 2004 Games and will have run the marathon in the 2020 Tokyo and 2024 Paris Olympics, holds the Canadian national record in the marathon with a 2:24:50, which equates to a pace of nearly 10.9 mph for the full 26.2 miles.
“Testing shoes is really a fun and rewarding process, seeing the changes over time and getting on the treadmill,” Elmore said in a video shared by Vicon. “You’re trying to understand the nuances between the different shoes and what the small, subtle changes are that could make a big difference over the course of a marathon.”
In this case, Saucony used its Innovation Lab to fit Elmore, a service available to all its brand ambassadors, although she is the lone Olympian among the group. But the high-tech data collection is also used to make improvements in shoe design.
Allen and Lynch noted that innovations in foam to reduce impact and preserve energy have been a big focus for the Wolverine Worldwide-owned company. That’s been beneficial as they ensure the sneakers serve all wearers and not just the elites.
“In testing those foams and trying to match and see, if we exert a certain additional amount of force, does that change the foam’s mechanical property, looking at the duration of that force, trying to match it to how much time the foam is under compression during a gait cycle,” Allen said. “Of course, that’s going to be different for everyone. But just testing these various things to see how the mechanic properties will change for different variables.”
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.
Former Seattle and Montreal running back Kerry Carter and his company Atavus is using technology to change the game.
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The Stanford grad went on to work for business-to-business mobile solutions company Viva Vision before starting a pair of consultancies. The first, JumpIt Media, Carter began with former NFL teammate Joe Tafoya, and the second, Apex Agency, he started on his own.
In 2016, Carter, now 43, joined Atavus, a tackling analytics company that had roots in rugby before expanding to football. He was promoted to COO in 2020 and to CEO in January this year. He recently spoke to Sports Business Journal about getting his start in the business world and his plans for growing Atavus through AI.
On preparing to transition out of pro football…
I played NFL first, went up to the CFL, and that whole experience offered me a little different perspective on things because of the schedule. At the time I was playing, we didn’t do a lot in the offseason. You were there from June to November, and then you were off pretty much until the next season.
I’m a pretty curious guy. So every offseason, I just tried something new or different. I did insurance and financial services. I did some marketing stuff. I did some event stuff. And the last couple years of my career, I really got into technology. An old teammate of mine, Joe Tafoya, was out here in Seattle, and we reconnected. I was just learning about what they were doing in the technology and mobile space. So that was my first foray into, “OK, what can I do as I transition?”
On his first business job after his playing career…
We put together a group to acquire Viva Vision that was a software development company that already had clients in a bunch of different spaces. They were working with some big brands, but they were transitioning over to smartphones. This was in like 2008, ’09, ’10, around there. Obviously social media was continuing to ramp up in different ways, so I just dug into that. We started to do some work there — learned a lot, but I really wanted to do something in sports.
NFL and CFL veteran Kerry Carter’s path to technology came through other industries. [Photo courtesy of Atavus]
At the time Joe and I decided to step out on our own, we started our own marketing consultancy where we worked with athletes and helped them with technology, digital media, social media, events, nonprofits — we combined all those things. And, man, we did a lot of crazy things. We went for the Guinness record for the loudest cheer in the stadium, and so we actually put that together here for the Seahawks’ stadium. I think we did it first, and the Kansas City Chiefs came and beat it. And then we went back and we did it again. All of that was just learnings around fan engagement and digital and social, and how do you inspire and push fans and players and athletes?
We built up brands like that. We worked with athletes directly. Where it all came together for us, we did this celebrity softball game to launch Richard Sherman’s nonprofit. And this was 2013. We partnered with Richard. We produced the event. We did all the digital and social and website. Coming out of that, we got a lot more requests from athletes, from brands. That was our business, where we were connecting the two on the event side, and there was always a charitable component to it.
For a while, we owned the Legion of Boom trademark, and we licensed that to Nike. That’s back when Richard, Kam [Chancellor], Earl [Thomas], Brandon Browner were doing their thing. I did some of that while I was finishing my [playing] career. I was in Year 9 — my goal was always to get to 10 years — but I had to make a decision back in 2012.
I always say it’s the best decision I made because Montreal had just released me, and we had started to move things along with the company. I had other teams call me. Do I go back [to football] or do I continue what we’re doing here because we have good momentum? I decided this was probably the right time, so I stepped away. And another reason why it’s the best decision I made: A week later, I met my wife.
On getting started with Atavus…
After having our second daughter in 2016, we were doing so much. I actually wanted to slow things down a little bit. A friend of mine was doing PR for Atavus at the time. They [started] in rugby and were making the transition into the football world. I went to an investor event that they had, and I really got to understand what they were doing. I was like, ‘Man, this is really cool, unique, different and adds value to the game that I love and protects athletes and kids.’ It’s funny, I wanted to slow things down, so I joined a startup — that’s not usually the way it goes.
I started on the business development side, and they really gave me carte blanche to be able to explore every aspect of the business. I really love marketing, so I did a lot on that side. Operations, design. I helped us launch our first SaaS product into the market, Digital Tackling Academy. We designed our training for our analysts, and then we built our entire grading and reporting platform. Then I even got to go out and pitch and raise money for the company.
On how Atavus does its analysis…
It’s honestly still a very manual process in terms of our tackling technique. There’s a lot of stuff you can pull from third-party data — you can pull down-and-distance information, yards gained, all those things — but when it comes down to our actual [evaluations], we still have a team of analysts that we bring in every year, similar to what PFF [Pro Football Focus] does. They’re breaking down film, they’re tagging it and then we’re scoring it. We don’t just give data, but we actually give insights by position group, by the entire defense, and then we have a tackle plan. Here are the things that you need to focus on going into the next week, into the offseason, into the preseason.
On what they assess…
On a weekend, we have bunch of high school clients, college clients and we’ve had NFL clients — we don’t have any at the moment. It really only takes about a couple of hours to do it, but we get it back to the team within 24 hours with a full breakdown of every tackle made or missed. Anyone that’s involved in the tackle gets analyzed, and we’re looking at pre-contact and contact. Are they continually moving towards a ball carrier? How are they avoiding blocks? Are they maintaining their leverage? Are they taking a good angle towards the ball carrier, and then, once they get closer and into the contact zone, now we’re looking at footwork. We’re looking at which shoulder they are using. Is your head involved? There are a lot of safety components.
If you involve your head a lot of times, then it’s higher risk. Because of what we do and how we break it down, we’re able to show that performance and safety are not mutually exclusive. You can actually do both. So when you’re in contact, you’re using your shoulder, you’re driving your feet, you’re punching through the ball. The higher incidences of shoulder contact lead to less yards after contact, higher performance on defense — and we don’t say reduction in injury, it’s just reduction in exposure.
On how AI can help…
How do we improve speed, accuracy and all those things with our analysis? We’re looking at, No. 1, computer vision. How can we leverage computer vision to speed up our process? We’d reduce our grading time and efficiencies, which obviously reduces cost for us.
You can get to a mass market with that. Right now the NFL, obviously, has wearables, so everybody’s using it. It’s a lot easier to track all those things. You can get the most data. But it’s not everywhere in college. And when you get down to high school, which is our biggest market, you don’t get that at all. So we’ve been looking for a solution that will fit into that market. Where we start with computer vision is using pose recognition to try to identify what’s happening on a play, track where athletes are at the start of a play and the end of the play, how far they’ve traveled, their angles — leverage all those things.
And then the generative AI piece, for me, I want to look at how we future-proof the business. What we call our tackling analytics engine — that’s our grading and reporting tool — as we look at expanding that, it’s, “How can we take in as much information as possible?” Whether it’s our analysts manually putting it in, or we’re getting third-party data, or some wearable data or computer vision data.
So how do you take in multiple input points and use this generative AI process — where we’re training a model specifically on our style of tackling and the way that we grade it and the things that we look for — to produce the outputs of an individual tackle for an individual athlete? Then that just scales up to the position groups and gets up to the entire defense.
The company breaks down a player’s tackling technique and overall performance. [Courtesy of Atavus]
Sportsbox AI utilizes a single smartphone camera to capture, measure, and analyze swing mechanics in 3D.
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Among those DeChambeau identified were his agent, manager and friends before mentioning his swing coach, Dana Dahlquist — and then a tech startup called Sportsbox AI. The company can extract 3D swing mechanics using only a single smartphone camera.
“I’m continuing to use technology to my advantage with my golf swing,” DeChambeau expanded in a Golf Channel interview. “Sportsbox AI has been great. Dana Dahlquist has been awesome helping me figure some things. Just really dialing in — when I’m hitting my best, what am I actually doing?”
While struggling at LIV Golf Houston the prior week, at least by his standards, DeChambeau began collecting Sportsbox AI swing data, which was paired with ball flight data collected by a Foresight launch monitor. (That partnership went live to the public on June 17.) Cause and effect were now tidily married together.
Dahlquist, who has been using Sportsbox as a coach for a couple years, noticed a trend in DeChambeau’s data causing his drives to miss out to the right. In short, DeChambeau’s chest-to-rib cage rotation and side bend were too great.
“I want to make sure that I can give the best possible, simplified answer, so that he can perform as the best athlete as he can,” Dahlquist said.
With several members of the Sportsbox team on site at Pinehurst No. 2 for the US Open — including VP of business operations Paul Park, director of sales Edwin Fuh and, for the practice round, CEO Jeehae Lee — Dahlquist and DeChambeau had support in collecting the data that played a role in DeChambeau’s victorious weekend. Sportsbox had already planned to be on site as part of a brand activation with Lexus even before work began with the eventual tournament winner.
Lee noted that DeChambeau’s practice round and range sessions on Wednesday, as well as first-round score of 67, helped create a gold-standard baseline for the sport’s most data-driven golfer.
“Everything is now going to be compared against his Wednesday and Thursday swings because he literally just hit it perfect,” said Lee, herself a former LPGA Tour player. “Thursday was one of the best ball-striking rounds ever in US Open history. He hit 86% of fairways and 83% of greens, hitting it at 350 off the tee — that’s unheard of.”
After DeChambeau name-checked Sportsbox over the weekend, Lee said inbound interest has already started from others seeking similar support. The company originally launched as a coaching tool, before adding a consumer-facing app, 3D Practice. It then had B2B2C and direct B2C touchpoints. Now, it’s considering an elite consultancy for LPGA and/or PGA Tour players and, maybe eventually, junior golfers and college players.
“We’re already getting a lot of inquiries, so we’re trying to formalize it because what we did for Bryson was not a business that we planned on building so, but I do think it’s the best use case for our technology,” Lee said. “He demonstrated that it can be really helpful for the right athlete.”
A day after DeChambeau hoisted the US Open trophy — and lingered on the course for hours after, signing autographs and crashing interviews — Dahlquist was set to give eight hours of lessons on a public driving range in Long Beach. He said he uses Sportsbox “every day” and that the best part is that his students can use it to monitor themselves when practicing outside of lessons, to ensure they use their time effectively.
“This is where the future of the instruction industry is going,” Dahlquist said.
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.
SBJ Tech’s Joe Lemire finds out in real time why baseball players tend to swing a golf club in a particular way.
Main Image: Joe Lemire / SBJ Tech
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The Sandbox series is where we share our experiences testing products, gear, solutions and more in the sports tech space. Previous iterations have included demoing Apple Vision Pro apps from MLB and MLS, taking the new F1 Arcade for a spin, trialing AiFi’s cashierless checkout at the Prudential Center, using Nextiles and Rapsodo for improved pitch velocity and physiological testing at the Gatorade Sports Science Institute.
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They were smart to do so. I was flatly incapable of hitting a groundball to the right side. (I also usually hit the ball in the air, so I don’t think I actually lost many hits as a result of the shift.)
The irony, it seemed to me, is that my golf swing produces almost exclusively shots to the right. I have since learned, however, that a slice is a common ailment of former baseball players: the left wrist (for a righty batter) needs different positioning for golf — more of a flexion than an extension.
Could an app and an Apple Watch help me overwrite four decades of motor learning? I put Golfshot to the test on a recent evening at the Chelsea Piers driving range in New York City.
SBJ Tech’s Joe Lemire puts his swing to the test. (Ash Gilbertson)
And this wasn’t just any Apple Watch but the Ultra 2, whose myriad features include a high frequency motion API that can collect data at 800 hertz and dual-frequency GPS. The former allows the accelerometer and gyroscope to sample at four-to-eight times the precision of what Golfshot used to receive of 100 to 200 times per second from the motion sensors.
“As hardware gets better, we can also get better,” Golfshot CTO John Hawley said. “So Apple Watch Ultra and really this high-frequency motion API that came out is something that was a gamechanger for us. These metrics just get much cleaner, much more accurate.”
The enhanced GPS permits more accurate shot lengths, locating where each shot was taken and calculating the distance between them, though on this day the focus was the driving range.
At Apple’s invitation, a select group of reporters tried out Golfshot’s new Swing ID On-Range experience. The app, which is developed by a core group of about 25 people within a larger company called Golf Genius, has been around since 2008, with Apple Watch features introduced in 2015.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 and accompanying watchOS 10 both were released in September 2023, helping power Swing ID, which is the ability to track swing mechanics. Golfshot first offered that feature on courses where the number of non-putted shots can be about 40 or 50 for competitive players. The range was a scale problem, requiring a new data architecture and storage plan with ardent players logging 10 times as many practice shots.
I only took 34 shots recorded in the app — eight with a six-iron, nine with a driver and then 17 with a three-wood — but that was a sufficient sample to realize that, yes, I do swing with a wrist rotated too far open and, mercifully, the issue seems to be somewhat corrective for me. And I’ve been told I have the raw tools for golf, even if my technique remains barely molded clay.
There are nine key metrics generated on every swing by Golfshot. Some, like tempo and backswing arc, could be improved, but they don’t appear in critical red coloring in the app the way wrist path and wrist rotation do for me. (Of note, the Apple Watch is obviously affixed to my wrist, not the club face, but it’s a helpful, albeit imperfect, proxy.)
On the watch, I was able to select a metric of focus and, after every shot, that datapoint and a visualization of the swing — showing, for instance, my swing path versus the suggested path — would appear on my wrist. It was a helpful way to track progress (or lack thereof) without fiddling with my phone each time. A tripod nearby held the device, where I could use the app for more detailed review of my metrics.
SBJ Tech’s Joe Lemire was able to review his swing metrics on Golfshot (Ash Gilbertson)
Golfshot’s app only offers normative datasets in broad strokes (pun intended), because it has found that swings are too individualized for hard guidelines to be helpful. But reviewing what data I saw — plus a short consultation from PGA professional Jonathan Doctor, the Northeast sales director for Golf Genius — helped mitigate my wrist supination, at least for a few fleeting moments.
My wrist path, which should be 0 degrees for straight contact, usually ranged between 15 and 20 degrees out-in; again, that can work in baseball, but less so in golf. And my wrist rotation, which should also be around 0, instead averaged around 30 to 40 degrees.
As Aristotle should have once said, the whole shot can be greater than the sum of its poor component metrics. In my case, I hit a handful of good golf shots interspersed between a larger number of bad ones. But at least I felt encouraged when, near the end of my session, I hit back-to-back three woods on a straight line into the netting 200 yards away.
It’s a helpful start, but I’ll need more monitoring and instruction to keep it up, which, conveniently is on the Golfshot road map.
“Going out and practicing is one portion of it, but making a plan to practice is really the greater aspiration here,” Hawley said. “Part of this developing practice plans is also going to be integrating with apps like [Golf Genius-owned] CoachNow, where you can communicate directly with your coach. Your coach could even get alerted after you play a round. ‘Here’s the round, let’s review his shots.’”
Hopefully alerts of my play include trigger warnings, but maybe someday I’ll work up the courage and play on a course. I take solace knowing that the Apple Watch Ultra 2 is chockfull of safety features — Emergency SOS, Backtrack GPS, siren and international orange action button that can be used for compass-based wayfinding — so no matter how deep my slice goes into the woods, I won’t get lost.
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.
Orreco.AI can plan training sessions based on expected workload, model injury risk automatically and even guide return-to-play protocols with an auto-pilot drone.
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It became a leader in supporting women athletes through its pioneering free app called Fitrwoman. It developed a holistic athlete management system called Recovery Lab and devised machine learning algorithms to identify injury risk based on an athlete’s movement signature.
All those modules and have been built in-house from the same data architecture, laying the foundation for its newest innovation, Orreco.AI, to improve efficiency for performance coaches. They can now interact through voice and text prompts, plan training sessions based on expected workload, model injury risk automatically and even guide return-to-play protocols with an auto-pilot drone.
“We built it from the ground up so that the AI layers through it all,” said Orreco CEO Brian Moore, whose company won SBJ Tech’s Best in Athlete Performance award in 2023. “It’s the operating system, really, for the body.”
Built under the direction of Orreco’s Head of Engineering, Matt McGrath, the new AI products rely on custom-built large language models that can generate its own recommendations of athletes who need additional attention, complete with relevant video clips, datapoints and relevant research to guide the practitioner. Educational resources can then be sent to the relevant player via his or her use of the accompanying @thlete app.
“It’s surfacing that information for you in real time, and it’ll tell you what to look at,” Moore said. “So rather than having to go into each of these different systems, now it’s just telling you this is the athlete to look at, these are your priorities and this is why. It’s also giving you suggested outcomes for the player.”
Image: Orreco
The generative AI also enables someone to type or dictate a command such as “show me Player X’s high-speed running as a bar chart” and see exactly that rendered within seconds. Add prompts for inflammation levels or number of decelerations, and those lines get superimposed over the graph to help connect trends.
A new Drill Planner enables users to select any number of athletes from a roster, select the focus for training, the number of sets, duration, field size and other variables to predict the expect load for each player and the group, to help create an appropriately targeted session based on the club schedule.
The most dramatic application of AI is in the use of drones to help rehabbing players. Current RTP plans can’t fully replicate an athlete’s distinct movement patterns, but the drone can be programmed to mimic his or her typical running based on position and preference — and all done with ascending intensity. As the drone flies, the athlete tries to keep pace, cutting and pivoting to stay close.
“The return-to-play [protocols] are typically in a straight line, but we haven’t been able to understand the twisting and the turning,” Moore said. “So it’s basically being able to hyper-personalize and say, I think you’ll be able to get more efficient with your training. You need to do these very specific moves at these very specific times. It’s like an inoculation dose.”
By combining inputs from wearables, biomarkers, in-game tracking systems, medical notes and more, Orreco.AI is seeking to personalize at scale by marrying an understanding of an athlete in context with advances in computing power, cloud storage and generative AI.
While the sports industry is grappling with future uses of AI, Orreco, is deploying these new products as a way of signaling what can be possible now with its human operating system.
“This is real, and it’s live,” Moore said. “We just wanted to show what’s possible. And what we’re showing is just the tip of the iceberg.”
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.
Gemini has partnered with professional and college sport teams across the NFL, NCAA, European football and beyond.
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QPR soon turned its season around, however, after a change in leadership. The club won 10 times and added five draws over its final 19 matches to secure its spot in the second tier of English football another season. Most estimates suggest that relegation from the Championship to League One is a financial hit of more than $10 million (£7.9 million).
Right around the time of that upset over Leicester, QPR onboarded a new AI-powered predictive modeling tool, Gemini Sports Analytics, to make optimal use of the massive datasets they’ve compiled. Gemini is a “force multiplier,” CEO Jake Schuster has said, by simplifying the process of building machine learning algorithms catered to each club’s specific needs.
“What I really liked about Gemini was they didn’t have an ego in trying to solve every problem,” QPR Director of Performance Ben Williams said. “They created a tool where you can solve your own problems.”
Around the time of QPR’s on-field nadir, CEO Lee Hoos retired from that role, while remaining as chairman, and hired Christian Nourry as the new chief executive. Nourry was 26 and a managing partner at Retexo Intelligence, a data analytics and advisory business that worked with Real Madrid CF, AS Roma and the Mexican national team. (He became the youngest CEO in English soccer, with one European executive describing Nourry as “the Lionel Messi of the football business world,” according to the Independent.)
Nourry wanted to implement market-leading solutions to upgrade the club’s tech stack. QPR asked itself, according to Williams, “Are we able to interrogate that data optimally, to forge outcomes that are positive for the long-term future of the football club? Our answer to that was ‘no.’” That prompted the search that led the club to Gemini.
The very thesis of Gemini is to empower analysts, coaches or “anyone with a dataset,” as Williams put it, to take action with data. He noted that it can be used for everything from tactical match plans to traffic probabilities on bus trips to road matches.
Founded by Schuster, a longtime sport scientist, Gemini leverages the tech infrastructure of cloud and AI partners Snowflake, DataRobot and Databricks with data sources such as StatsBomb, SportRadar, Genius Sports, Sports Info Solutions, SkillCorner and Infinite Athlete.
As an example of what’s possible, Shuster explained that Gemini users can apply clustering algorithms to match stats and tracking data to create passing trees to identify how opponents like to create scoring chances of their own or concede them to others.
“The early lift was certainly centered around pre-match and post-match reports,” Schuster said. “So, opposition analysis — how do we approach this game? And then, post-match, what happened and what are the implications for future events? A big part of the early work with them was helping them automate those reports. And then the next step was approaching the summer transfer window.”
But it also remains an area of exploration, as QPR onboards more staff members over time.
“The power comes from our curiosity,” Williams said. “We’re in a phase of play and learn and discovery.”
Other Gemini clients include the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts, the SEC’s Texas A&M and Italian soccer club Parma Calcio, which just claimed a Serie B title to earn promotion back to Serie A. The Raleigh, North Carolina-based company also raised two investment rounds north of $3 million in the past year. There are now 27 sports franchise owners either directly invested in Gemini or through recent round-leading investor Will Ventures. QPR’s owners individually own minority stakes in two MLS clubs (LAFC and FC Cincinnati) as well as MLB’s Cincinnati Reds.
That financial backing has led to Gemini’s first customer success hire, former Arizona Diamondbacks Director of Operations Sam Eaton, and a budget allocation to hire a CTO, a role Schuster is actively recruiting. The company is also in the testing phase of some new generative AI features it hopes to roll out soon.
“The whole idea behind going with this tool was we can be really broad in our thought process of what we think helps our performance,” Williams said, “rather than be penned in by somebody else’s thought process of what is important to performance because they’ve created a tool that solves a problem that they once had.”
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.
The Australian spoke to SBJ Tech about his cognitive training, using the simulator, and the data he seeks before and after a race.
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The native Australian driver spent 2022 as Alpine’s reserve F1 driver, while also testing with McLaren and then joining McLaren’s Formula 1 team as a full-time driver in 2023.
In his rookie season, Piastri claimed two podiums — third in Japan, second in Qatar — and he claimed a further second-place in Monaco last month. Piastri, 23, currently sits in sixth place overall in the driver standings, and he spoke with SBJ last month just before the Miami Grand Prix, at which he finished in P13.
On what makes the Miami Grand Prix unique…
It brings a lot of star power to the calendar. Now that we have Vegas as well, we have two American events that are in pretty prime locations. We have Austin as well, which is, let’s say, a more traditional circuit. But yeah, having Miami on the calendar is very cool. It’s a place where a lot of people want to go. There’s a lot of celebrities and stuff, and it just adds a lot of stardom to the event, really.
On the start to the season…
It’s been a pretty good start to the year, I think, for the team. It’s been very positive. We’ve established ourselves as the third-quickest team at the moment on average. And for me, personally, it’s been a pretty good start. The last couple [before Miami] were a little bit more of a struggle in certain areas. But on the whole, it’s been a nice, clean start to the year. Definitely a much better place than we were 12 months ago.
On being teammates with Lando Norris…
You always utilize your teammate to try and go quicker. With Lando and especially his experience knowing how to drive a Formula One car in the best way and knowing how to drive a McLaren F1 car in the best way as well — because all the cars are going to be a little bit different across the grid — he’s been very useful for that. There’s certainly been things I’ve learned from him along the way.
We’ve been both pushing each other to become quicker, and that’s what you want out of out of a teammate, really, is to be able to push each other and find little bits and pieces here in different corners. Every driver on the grid is going to be looking at their teammate’s data. It’s how you go quicker, especially if there’s corners where they’re there quicker than you. It’s a good idea to look at what they’re doing and try and learn from that.
On the data he checks first after a race…
The first thing is you just look at where everyone’s finished in the race because you often don’t really know how exactly it’s gone. We make a graph of how everyone’s race has gone, so there’s a bunch of different lines, and you can see where people have been quick in their stint, where they’ve been slow in their stint, what their tire degradations look like. And the next thing is then looking into the data itself. You’re looking into what you do in every session like in practice and qualifying the race, looking at which corners you’re better in which corners you’re worse in, looking at how the tires are being used and stuff like that.
On his points of emphasis in development…
It can change a bit from weekend to weekend. For me, managing tires is probably the biggest thing I’m working on at the moment, which is difficult because you need to go as fast as you can but use the tires in a way that’s as friendly as possible for them. So that’s probably the biggest thing I’m still getting to grips with.
On simulated race time…
We do a lot of dedicated simulator work at McLaren trying to prepare the weekends, so the track is as close as possible to the real thing. We’re trying stuff with the setup, trying to get used to the track again, build up some references. I play some iRacing every now and again, as well, but more just for fun, because I enjoy driving racecars. So that’s more what I use that for, rather than actually using it to train or anything like that. It’s more just for a bit of fun in my free time. So yeah, mainly the sim work at McLaren to get a bit of a starting point for the race weekend.
On his fitness training…
Data certainly influences it, for sure. There’s certain metrics that you want to improve, which is, I guess for everyone, trying to get your muscle up and your fat down. But there’s some specific things as well. The biggest strain for us as a driver is our neck, so trying to build that up. And it’s not just your neck muscles that you need but the supporting muscles around it as well, to try and to build that up and see progress in the numbers that you can sustain when you’re training it.
We always log that and monitor that and see where I’m at. Same with my running and cardio side of things, always trying to improve your VO2, trying to get your pace down for a similar heartrate. We monitor all of that kind of stuff, just trying to improve your general fitness because you use a few weird muscles that you wouldn’t normally use in everyday life. But even just with the schedule, with all the jetlag, having a good cardio base is also important. Just so you stay healthy, and you’ve got to get to be able to concentrate for a long time.
On cognitive training…
Everyone’s a little bit different with that. You train your reflexes just by driving in some ways, and we drive so often that you’re always keeping it topped up. I do a bit of reaction training before the session, with tennis balls or whatever, just keeping your mind and hand-eye coordination switched on. We always try to improve our reactions for the start as well, but for me, a lot of that is the state of mind that you’re in, rather than actually training for it. You gain more by knowing whether you need to be revved up or relaxed, or whatever you need to be.
On help from McLaren’s partners…
All of our partners are pretty incredible. To be working with the likes of Google, with Coca-Cola, Dell, just to name a few, working with those kinds of big brands is pretty special. It’s good fun. Of course, they support us in going racing, in all kinds of ways — through financial support, of course, but especially with a lot of our tech partners, with a hands-on approach to helping us, whether it’s through computers or better ways to analyze our data, quicker ways to analyze it. That’s all very important to us. I always enjoy that side of things, the data and, and tech side of things. So yeah, being able to work with some of those big companies like that is very special.
We rely a lot on our partners, especially for our simulator, which we completed not that long ago in the grand scheme of things. Having all the computing power for that, being able to run the graphics well enough, being able to update the model quick enough in real time — I know exactly how important that is when I’m driving it because you know, when you’re lacking in that area.
On Netflix’s Drive to Survive…
I’m still pretty new to Drive to Survive. So I think people are still catching up with me on that. But it’s cool. The benefits it has brought to the sport are pretty incredible. All the sort of new fans that is brought in is very, very cool and positive for the sport. They’re not particularly intrusive on our weekends, so it’s OK. At the end of the day, it’s a good way of getting our sport out there more, and it’s exciting to watch as well.
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.
