Main Photo: Getty Images

By Joe Lemire

You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.

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Andrew Steele, a 400-meter runner for Team GB, was initially part of a fourth-place finishing 4×400 relay team in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games — only to eventually receive a bronze medal after a member of the Russian team was later disqualified. “I ended up winning an Olympic medal, even though I didn’t know it at the time,” he said.

Steele, 41, later began a career in genetics and how that science affects fitness, nutrition and performance. He led product at DNAfit and then Prenetics (which had acquired DNAfit) before starting his own digital health firm, Stride, in 2023, which this summer made strong inroads in North America through a partnership with Unity Fitness Canada. It provides multiomic testing: wide-ranging diagnostics on genomics, the microbiome, protein profile and more.

On his vision for Stride…

Previously, we’d had a lot of products which are point solutions: Here’s a DNA test for this, here’s a blood test for this. With Stride, I’m trying to bring it all together. So we’ve got a range of multiomic lab testing. We do a DNA test, a microbiome test, a blood draw, a biological age test, and an oral health test will be in the future too.

We knit all that together to see a holistic picture of your internal biology in a way which is pleasant to see and understandable — not a bunch of PDFs to download from the lab, but actually a really engaging digital dashboard. Your DNA doesn’t change, but you test everything else every six months and see how that’s tracking. And then we make a tailored supplement based off those results for you.

In 2008, Steele competed in the Olympic Games held in Beijing in the 4 × 400 m relay. AFP via Getty Images

On the cold outreach that changed his life…

I’m actually glad I didn’t get [my medal] at the time because it forced me to be very open to opportunities about what came next in my life.

There was one email that came into my inbox one day from a guy who was working with a genetic scientist and looking to commercialize this test and looking for research subjects to help them understand how genetics affected exercise response. And if my [running] career been going better, I would have just forwarded it onto my agent and said, ‘Hey, see if there’s some deals to be done here.’ I was, at this juncture in my life, when I was 27, I had zero higher education. I had zero work experience, and I certainly had not even zero money. I had minus money.

So I engaged proactively on this, and thank God I did because, long story short, [I joined] a health tech business called DNAfit in 2013. That business went well, I learned a bunch, and I became a co-founder there. Five years later, we sold the business for $10 million as bootstrap founders. Then I went into the next thing [Prenetics] as Chief Product Officer, eventually being part of the leadership team that led to a billion dollar NASDAQ IPO. So it changed the path of my life, not winning that medal — but probably for the better. And, along the way, they awarded me the medal anyway.

On his current business life…

I still sit pretty close to sport. I founded a business called Stride, which is in the similar space of diagnostics and preventative health. But I also have one other thing, which is a big passion of mine. Sport First is a venture studio, which helps people that come from a sports background navigate the transition into becoming a founder and entrepreneur.

On his science and tech interest as an athlete…

If you’d asked my teammates, I was probably always known as the guy that was [following] the latest nutrition science or supplements. It was always a passion of mine — and tech. I was always super interested in startups.

Steele founded personal genetics company DNAfit before going on to become part of the Prenetics group. Now, he’s building Stride for personalized supplements tailored to an individual’s unique genetic makeup and personal health goals. Courtesy of Andrew Steele

On what he learned about his genetics…

DNA is just one of the things in the picture, right? There’s a genetic variable called ACTN3, and there’s a version of this gene which is basically the C version of this gene. So with every gene, you have two copies of it — you have one that you got from your mother and another that you got from your father. And then basically there’s a version of this gene that is often colloquially called the Olympic gene, or the sprint gene, and it’s basically extraordinarily over-represented in elite-level power.

Everyone who’s generally an Olympic level power athlete has either one copy or two copies of the C variant of this gene. This is me completely oversimplifying the science, but that’s basically the lay of the land. And I found out, fascinatingly enough, I didn’t have even one copy of this. I was an absolute outlier from an Olympic-level sprint athlete who just didn’t have this gene, which was considered almost table stakes to be a sprint athlete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.

More from Sport Wales:

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

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

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

By John Portch with additional reporting from Joe Lemire

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Be honest about existing limitations

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

2. Embrace the subjective…

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the full conversation with Ellie Maybury below:

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By Joe Lemire

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out episode two:

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

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Paige Bueckers’ stellar performances at this year’s March Madness proved that her ACL injury is long behind her.

She returned to action in November 2023 after 15 months out and drove UConn all the way to the Final Four of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament.

Behind the scenes, Andrea Hudy, the Director of Sports Performance (Women’s Basketball) at UConn, was critical to Bueckers’ convalescence and is working (while pursuing a PhD) to ensure there are fewer such occurrences in the future.

“My passion is trying to understand why people get hurt or the story behind their injuries and keep them strong and resilient for what’s unexpected or the challenges ahead,” she tells The People Behind the Tech podcast.

Andrea speaks from her own experience of injury as a varsity volleyball player. Indeed, when anyone says she “played without an ACL” for six years – as Andrea told Joe Lemire and John Portch – it makes you sit up and take notice.

In the first episode of this new series, we discuss the questions that still need to be asked about female injury occurrence rates [18:00]. We also touch upon Andrea’s career in college athletics, which took in tenures at Texas and Kansas before she returned to UConn three years ago for her second spell [8:40]. Then, we broach her willingness to experiment with new technologies while concurrently seeking better insights from existing datasets [11:40]. Finally, she tells us why she can occasionally see herself as a modern, real-life Icarus [26:30] and much more besides.

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“Everything is based upon the game for us,” said Ryan Alexander.

“Understanding how the physical demands and fitness is going to be interpreted on the field as it is going to relate to the technical and tactical execution of a certain style of play.”

Alexander, the Director of Sports Science at Atlanta United, was speaking to John Portch and Joe Lemire on the People Behind the Tech podcast ahead of the new MLS season, which began in late February.

He also spoke about the club’s groundbreaking work with i-Brain Tech, a neurofitness training aid that has transformed their skills and cognitive training and led to players having “higher levels of conversations with their technical coaches”.

Elsewhere, Alexander explored:

• Finding the level of confidence in the data to challenge or support [9:30];
• Knowing when to take calculated risks with players [18:00];
• How i-Brain has been integrated into the players’ training plans [27:00];
• His efforts to meet players and coaches at their ‘level’ when it comes to data [35:30].

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By John Portch

What makes the difference in recovery, both in practices and modalities, with your athletes?

Those two are inseparable as far as Skylar Richards is concerned. He says: “As technology has improved, to allow us to have interventions to help the best they can off the field, that has really given us the ability to look into what’s effective, what’s efficient, and how we can individualise those sorts of treatments to make sure we’re as optimal as possible.”

In Early August, Richards who is an Athletic Trainer with the US Soccer Federation, spoke at a KYMIRA Webinar titled ‘The Evolution of Athlete Recovery’ where he was joined by Mark Pavlik, the Head Coach of the Penn State men’s volleyball team, and session moderator Johnny Parkes, the Lead National Coach at the United States Tennis Association.

“So much in sports science and medicine, we worry not so much about the medicine side of things as much as the optimisation,” Richards continues. “And so really keeping people as healthy as possible is the focus with recovery but also then the art of how to do that consistently within their regime.”

Here, we discuss 10 factors raised during the webinar to consider when seeking to establish optimal, consistent recovery practices with your athletes.

1. How do you combine passive and active modalities?

Do you need to prioritise passive or active modalities? Your athletes’ culture of recovery – practices and habits – should tell you. In his time at FC Dallas between 2012 and 2019, Richards noted differences between his younger players, who were happy to visit the recovery lab while they watched tape, and those players in their mid-30s who had families and, frankly, far less time and cognitive capacity. “Those become the tricky puzzles to figure out,” he says. “How can I help them recover in their lives and support them in that? That can be the difference between applying an active modality versus a passive one, a wearable or something like that. It helps them to do it all the time no matter what life throws at them.”

2. What gives the athlete the biggest dosage?

Whatever an athlete’s preferred combination of recovery modalities, there is an important question to ask. “What gives you the biggest dosage of all those things put together in one package, which is easy to manage and to be consistent?” says Richards. “You don’t want them to burn out having to think about stuff all the time.”

3. How are you helping busy athletes to prioritise recovery?

A veteran may have a busy life but, as a cohort of largely self-driven individuals, Richards can work with soccer players to “scratch that itch” around self-improvement. “Something that I’ve found I can do well with my older athletes: I’ll say ‘why don’t we try to instal a recovery room at your house? It gives you an hour away from the kids and the craziness to go in, watch some videos, and now read a book. Whatever you need to do justify it as your job’.” Now, the athlete has a consistent pattern of recovery and doesn’t feel the need to, say, go on an evening run that may well clear their minds but has a detrimental effect on their physiology. “We scratch the same itch by helping you rather than sacrificing something.”

4. Does the athlete know what works for them?

The success of Richards’ approach with his veterans has enabled them to take that message to the rest of the team. “Getting them to talk about that approach to the younger players really helps them to buy-in,” he says. With men’s volleyball at Penn State, it sits with Pavlik and his colleagues to educate the archetypal 18-year-old who “doesn’t know what they don’t know yet from a recovery standpoint”. He says: “They’re coming off of club or high school practices at most three times a week, they’re living at home with mum and dad when they wander into our gym, it’s my job to ensure that the educational points that we’re trying to drive home so they can have a longstanding, successful collegiate career, and those that continue to move on through the professional ranks and international ranks with men’s volleyball have something in their background.”

5. Expert or friend?

That aforementioned education is best delivered by a friend. In that regard, Pavlik ensures that his student-athletes are surrounded by smart and passionate people who make an effort to build relationships. “We do a pretty good job of getting these people around my team early in their career and, let’s face it, the adage of ‘the team doesn’t care what you know until they know that you care’ [is true],” he says. “When you have these types of experts having relationships with our players; coming to practice, just being around the water cooler during water breaks, being able to just say ‘how’s it going?’ Then when the guys are in a position to listen to what the expert is saying they’re no longer experts – they’re friends, they’re buddies.”

6. Game day minus one

Are there opportunities for you around game day? “It’s always been crazy to me that we control every other variable with athletes all the time, but the one day we completely flip the schedule is game day,” says Richards. “Those older guys love those moments of recovery on the road. For them, it’s less chaotic, it’s easier to focus. So much so that we’ve had a lot of success with having players to stay at a hotel the night before a home game or have that option, so that they can get into that rhythm and we change those practice times to the same as game times so they can get that day before the game rhythm into their bodies and their minds.” The benefits are palpable. “Allowing them to get into that rhythm early on, sleep, get out of that chaos, get their recovery mode early and have time to do any modalities that they want is crucial.”

7. What’s the problem we can solve the best?

Customisation is important and, at Penn State, it goes beyond age (i.e. an athlete at 18 versus an athlete at 23). “We look at the age and the experience of the athlete, then we take a look at what their on-court responsibilities are,” says Pavlik. “Some max jump much more often than others on the court during the match or practices. There are going to be some that have to get up the floor a lot more than other guys. What we try to do here is make sure with our training staff and med staff that we understand what we’re asking them to go through.” For Richards, it involves asking better questions. “What is the question for that athlete that we can solve the best? All physiology is too much of a blanket statement,” he says. “Is it overall energy? Is it mental fatigue? Is it truly physical fatigue? Is it something masking as another [marker]? And how can we hit those?”

8. Sleep as a by-product of good recovery practice

As moderator Johnny Parkes says, “With all these physical modalities we can use, I think we sometimes forget about the things we can control the most, which is our level of sleep recovery, hygiene and the effect of resetting the body for the next day.” For Richards, good sleep can be an outcome of a holistic approach to recovery. “That’s when you get the most synergistic effect out of all of them,” he says while asking, “Can we create that cycle of measurements to enhance individualisation and effectiveness?” He once again cites the idea of players staying in hotels the night before a game. “It really ties this together in a practical way in terms of ‘let’s get you good sleep in an environment I can go in early and control, make sure the sleep hygiene is there, giving you the time to implement those things well and then tie-in any other recovery modalities you want at the same time’.”

9. Gamification as a motivator

According to Richards, both younger and older athletes are interested in the gamification of recovery, but in different ways. “Younger players thrive for the most part on comparing what they’re doing and being effective versus their peers,” he says. “For an older athlete, I’ve found they’ve passed that point in their life, they’ve been saturated by that already and what you come to is the gamification comes from comparing them to themselves. Can they get a high score? Can they see what’s most effective for them? What patterns help them to be the most consistent over time? Scoring that on a streak becomes the better motivator for them.”

10. The blind spots in athlete recovery

What don’t teams consider as much as they should in recovery and how do we overcome them? “Anything is better than nothing,” says Richards. “We have a huge market for recovery tools and methodologies but I haven’t seen a huge move towards a blend of that. That’s where I’ve been pushing a lot of companies on their research. Can we let the monitoring devices drive the intervention; the duration, the velocity, the frequency and occurrence? Can we use measuring sticks to drive it for individuals; its appropriateness, effectiveness and sufficiency on an individual level? Until we do that I don’t think we’re doing the best we can do to figure out the puzzle, which is an athletic body.”

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By John Portch

Where are the gaps in human workflows in high performance sports?

“Broadly, one of the gaps is cultural,” John Wagle, the Associate Athletics Director of Sports Performance at the University of Notre Dame, tells the Leaders Performance Institute.

“Highly competent, well-intentioned people who are tasked with providing best-in-class support to athletes in development or preparedness mistakenly use time spent as a proxy for the value of their contribution.”

“If you have a high performance team all operating in that manner you can appreciate quickly that the athlete’s time becomes limited; and that loss of autonomy, that loss of educational opportunity, that loss of ownership leads to a lot of sub-optimal outcomes.”

Athlete recovery is a potential casualty and the situation can be compounded in team sports, as Carwyn Sharp, the Head of Human Performance at Italian Serie A side AS Roma, explains. “Implementing change in a large organization  is much more difficult than going to an individual athlete and individual coach,” he tells the Leaders Performance Institute. “Here at Roma, we’ve got to think about how it affects numerous players.”

Sharp currently works with a larger staff than he did during his time working at the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee between 2018 and 2021. “With the Paralympics, I could just go downstairs and talk with medicine. Here, I’ve got to talk to many individuals in many departments, even though they’re all under my umbrella. Take something like compression wear, I’ve got to talk to IT about how we’re going to implement and monitor its use. As well as the kitmen who will manage handing it out and washing it, as well physiotherapists that will note if the Players are wearing it, and obviously the Sport Science staff and Players.”

The NCAA is a world away from Italian football, but Sam Marsh, who recently finished playing with the Pennsylvania State University men’s volleyball team, had access to a similar array of recovery modalities and needed similar advice, particularly as a student-athlete balancing playing and studying. “It would be wrong to say I knew exactly what to do all the time in terms of preparation and recovery,” he admits. “We have a lot of guidance, resources. The help is there if you need it.”

Here, we explore the steps taken by Notre Dame and Roma to create efficiencies in workflow management, while providing athletes with education and development opportunities around recovery. We also reflect on Marsh’s recent experiences with Penn State as a varsity athlete.

Victory by a thousand conversations

When it comes to recovery modalities, “it tends to be the older or younger guys to engage the most actively in the process,” says Sharp. “We have a number of guys who come here from the primavera, the under-19s. They know it’s tough to get in so they’ll do everything. They’re in the gym doing extra weightlifting, the prehabilitation. I talk to them and they ask ‘what else can I do?’ Then it’s most of the older guys who are at the point where they’re thinking they want to stay as long as they can.

“For these people, we can improve our processes because we’re getting the feedback and it’s easier to monitor them, collect the data, and make sure it’s accurate.”

At astute programs, there are opportunities for education. “We start by identifying student-athletes at higher risk of being fatigued. Using a variety of data from different disciplines, we have processes that help us classify the student-athletes accordingly,” says Wagle of Notre Dame’s approach. “If fatigued, they are directed to a recovery points system that scales up based on severity. We assign more point value to modalities that are more rooted in empirical support and less point value to those that are not as well-studied or have a small effect. We can build systems that simply nudge behavior rather than prescribe in a more transactional or passive manner. That’s a lot more powerful and sustainable because it creates productive conversations. If they ask ‘why is getting eight hours of sleep more points than something else?’ then you get an educational opportunity around sleep hygiene. Maybe prior to that they didn’t have a realization of its impact. It fosters more victories by a thousand conversations than this one-time transaction that happens in many environments.”

At Penn State, Marsh and his teammates understood the value in recovery but favored modalities often depends on your peers. “It generalizes around which guys live together,” he says. “The guys that I came in with, we all lived together. So when we decide we’re going to go into our facilities and get in the contrast tubs or stretch for a little bit, we all go together. It was like a group mentality in that regard because other guys that lived together may do different things.”

Familiarity was not a barrier. “I came here and was using things for recovery that I’d never done,” Marsh adds. “Contrast tubs, compression boots, stretches that our strength & conditioning coach gave us that feel very good in the long run but hurt when we do them. It was new but we were willing to try a lot of things just because of the amount of stress and pressure that we put on our bodies.”

To provide scalability in its processes, Roma introduced its ‘One Roma’ concept across all of its age-group and senior men’s and women’s teams. “We are big believers that the health and viability of our first team doesn’t just sit with our first team,” says Sharp. “We’re going to have a much bigger impact on the health of this club if it’s something we can scale for.”

It also helps with player education and is gradually shifting the culture around recovery. Sharp adds: “With ‘One Roma’, when players move up towards the first team, we want them to know that what they’re doing at 17 or 18 is very close to what the first team are doing. It’s not a big jump and it’s easier to make that transition.”

For the 2022-23 season, Roma also introduced its own internal athlete management system. “We’re now much better at monitoring our recovery strategies on a daily basis and in real time.” This has facilitated better conversations with players, with data complemented by their subjective feedback. “With a better relationship we can ask more of the players and they are willing to do more too.”

Managing trade-offs

Of the potential trade-offs, Wagle returns to the idea of incentivizing athletes. “We’ve been very careful to evaluate the recovery modalities that we deploy alongside the commitment they require,” he says. “Just as we try to incentivize those things that have a greater impact or the most empirical support, when all is equal, we will then prioritize the tactic that takes less time as a secondary feature of sorting for student-athletes.”

However you approach workflows within your organization, Wagle stresses the need for “personal humility and shared ambition”. “Those ingredients together are really going to be meaningful to our athletes because they let you achieve excellence but they also let you sustain it.”

Sharp concurs. “It gives us an opportunity to look at ourselves and say ‘we’ve done a good job educating this player or athlete, because maybe their sense of whether it’s working or not depends on how well we’ve educated them’.”

Are there other metrics of success? “Finding out what the question is,” says Wagle. “Too often we skip ahead and think that we know the right question to ask and the impact ends up being smaller because it was misdirected.”

Sharp believes it comes back to how Roma players feel. “If an injury takes 7-14 days to recover from, based on the literature, and the player recovers in three, we’re beating the average so that’s meaningful,” he says.

“Whether we quantify this with them in some way or not, part of all of this is how they feel about and the job we’re doing. If they feel like they’re improving and getting better, they’re going to have trust and faith in us in the things we’re asking them to do.”

Marsh, for his part, placed his trust in his Assistant Athletic Trainer at Penn State, Brianna McDuffie. He says: “The amount of times we can just go in and say ‘alright Bri, my shoulder’s hurting again. Can we do some rehab?’ And you’ll end up spending every day for the next two weeks with her.”

The messaging was always clear for Marsh and his teammates. “If you put the work in that’s all well and good, but you have to do the other stuff that some people don’t want to do to be able to reap the benefits.”