{"id":1114,"date":"2019-08-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-29T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/reports\/does-your-data-benefit-athlete-and-coach-alike\/"},"modified":"2025-12-15T05:12:30","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T05:12:30","slug":"karl-cooke-data-analytics-wais","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/leadersinsport.com\/performance-institute\/articles\/karl-cooke-data-analytics-wais\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Your Data Benefit Athlete and Coach Alike?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
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\n Aug 29, 2019 <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>Articles<\/a>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t

Does Your Data Benefit Athlete and Coach Alike?<\/h1>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n \n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Category<\/div>\n Data & Innovation<\/a> <\/div>\n
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Karl Cooke of the Western Australian Institute of Sport explains that an evidence-based approach can complement athlete and coach intuition if everyone is comfortable saying their piece.<\/p>\n \n \n \n

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\u201cI try to facilitate an environment where coaches feel comfortable with conventional ideas being challenged,\u201d begins Karl Cooke.<\/h4>\n

A Leaders Performance Institute article brought to you in association with our Supporters<\/p>\n

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By John Portch<\/h6>\n

\u201cBut equally, the scientists and performance staff are also challenged around their ideas. They may be coming with data to support their ideas but that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s always 100% true.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cooke is the Performance Team Director at the Western Australian Institute of Sport [WAIS], a position he has held since joining from British Swimming in April, and his current remit sees him work across a variety of sports, each with their own ideas of what it takes to win and the metrics to get them there.<\/p>\n

That presents its own challenges, as he will proceed to tell the Leaders Performance Institute, but having an evidence-based approach, based on the increasing sophistication of data collection, is not only promoting greater alignment across the team but helping to evolve notions of what it takes to win.<\/p>\n

He says: \u201cWe\u2019re trying to create a space where people are comfortable with questioning and challenging our pre-determined ideas and checking whether they are still accurate. Over time, our data management systems have allowed us to evaluate those.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cooke explains that one of his primary aims is to make data interpretation intuitive for athlete and coach alike, which requires education, understanding and perseverance. The \u2018Holy Grail\u2019, as he describes it, is for honest and open conversations that circumnavigate any tendencies towards groupthink in favour of pursuing the better-informed ideas around high performance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing I say to the guys here is \u2018let\u2019s not make assumptions, right? Let\u2019s not assume that because one of us has been looking really closely that everyone is interested or fully aware\u2019.\u201d And so, we continue the conversation with the question of making data intuitive.<\/p>\n

Karl, how do you and WAIS work to make data intuitive for athletes and coaches alike?<\/strong><\/p>\n

KC: <\/strong>I think there\u2019s a really interesting field around learning preferences and personality preferences and then customising your data visualisation around your key performance areas, whether that involves the more visual learner or the person who is happy to read details. It\u2019s still early days here, but if it\u2019s not intuitive then under pressure and under stress that\u2019s when people start to get frustrated with it. The goal, whether someone is working in tennis or swimming or different sports, it\u2019s just trying to make that visualisation of the data intuitive so that almost anyone can pick it up and say, right, I get that this athlete needs to do something different or \u2018that\u2019s going really well\u2019.<\/p>\n

How have you coped with the challenge of moving from a single sport environment [swimming] to a multisport environment at WAIS?<\/strong><\/p>\n

KC: <\/strong>Every sport has its own technical requirements and every sport I\u2019ve gone into you\u2019ll have the conventional metrics for measuring performance; in racing sports it\u2019s relatively straightforward in terms of times and splits and that kind of thing, but in team sports it tends to be more varied based on position and role in the team. You have to flick between those different technical requirements in sport and then align your core performance areas with them. That\u2019s not easy in a multisport environment where you try to support a whole bunch of different sports but that\u2019s the challenge and we have enough expertise to put the people around them to do that. Each sport will have its own unique performance metrics, when it comes to analytics and stats that\u2019s the challenge; and it\u2019s the challenge for the technology providers as well. You build a data management system and how do you make it flexible enough to work across all these different areas where each sport or team might want to measuring different metrics and relating and understanding the relationship between different metrics.<\/p>\n

How significant is the education component of your work around data?<\/strong><\/p>\n

KC:<\/strong> We work continuously around making sure that everyone on the team is aware of the developments that are going on in each department. Culturally it\u2019s really important that everyone on the performance staff is contributing; so it\u2019s listening and questioning, being interested in what\u2019s happening. We\u2019re still aware that the whole team has different parts of it that are still evolving and it\u2019s keeping everyone up to speed with that because actually there\u2019s a lot of work going on in all sorts of areas. I might see it as the person who sits above a lot of it but we\u2019re always working on coach vision and athlete awareness for sure.<\/p>\n

What are some of your observations about athletes\u2019 level of trust when it comes to data?<\/strong><\/p>\n

KC:<\/strong> One of the things that I really love about Olympic sports, and British Swimming was exactly the same, is that the commercial aspects of the sport are obviously dialled-down and they\u2019re not such a limiting factor. But you still have to work on trust, you still have to work on creating a culture and environment of trust and transparency. That\u2019s an ongoing thing because every athlete is mindful of how their information is shared, managed and stored and the protection around that.<\/p>\n

In those team meetings you describe, how are you ensuring it\u2019s a productive forum for all?<\/strong><\/p>\n

KC:<\/strong> I think the biggest thing is that your risk is your groupthink; you\u2019ll be in a team, you\u2019ll meet regularly, you\u2019ll talk about your athletes, you\u2019ll check your data across those metrics on your athletes and there will be groupthink like, \u2018yeah, we all agree, for Johnny, this is the most important area for us to keep an eye on and if all of those are flagged green and they\u2019re good to go then Johnny will be fine\u2019. The risk is a bit of confirmation bias, a bit of groupthink, and that\u2019s just human nature. And the beauty of data and some of the systems that are out there evolving now is that they don\u2019t have those human cognitive biases, they\u2019re just like \u2018the data says this\u2019 and that\u2019s where you\u2019re challenging your thought processes because that\u2019s ultimately what it kind of comes back to, at the core of it whether you\u2019re talking about predicting performance in a Moneyball kind of way or whether you\u2019re trying to just optimise physical performance and keep a grip of athletes healthy and on the court it\u2019s the same thing, you use your expertise that you\u2019ve got in your team but you want to challenge it because you know that you\u2019ve got human cognitive biases ultimately that need to be challenged from time to time.<\/p>\n

Where is the balance struck between intuition and data?<\/strong><\/p>\n

KC:<\/strong> Even in a relatively linear, straightforward sport like swimming, you\u2019ve got all the different factors, you\u2019ve got the drag of the water on the swimmer, you\u2019ve got the amount of power that they\u2019re creating from their technique into the water, you\u2019ve got changes in other conditions and other factors around the athlete; you can\u2019t just mentally compute as a coach or a performance staff how all those things are going to interact and so you actually need data and analytics to summarise it and say: \u2018when you put all these different factors together this is what ends up being the most important and this is what\u2019s going to make them faster or slower\u2019 because even the smartest brains in the world can\u2019t compute that in real time and certainly not when you\u2019re in the competitive environment of an Olympic Games or a World Championships or the finals of a league competition.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s theory, and the other thing that\u2019s tricky sometimes, and I guess that\u2019s where roles like mine come in, is the messy emotion and tension and all the logistical challenges sometimes around being in that competitive environment. It\u2019s making sure that the team\u2019s processes and communication strategies are good enough to be able to accept that because if they\u2019re not then that\u2019s where it can fall down as well; we have communication strategies in swimming around when you finish the heat session before you went to final session, how you communicated around any change in the injury or fitness status of an athlete because that affects the coach\u2019s decision on who swims maybe the relay in the evening at the Olympic Games and those are pretty big decisions when that determines success or failure for the next four years, so you need actually really well understood pathways of communication just to make use of the information that\u2019s available to you as well.<\/p>\n

How do you ensure you\u2019re making better use of the data and technology you already have?<\/strong><\/p>\n

KC:<\/strong> I think every team will be looking at their technology kit list and ask the question is this still the best, is this still giving us the information that we want? No one wants to be behind the curve, right? But a lot of teams have been historically challenged by the fact that new technologies have come along and they\u2019ve adopted them without being clear at the outset what they want to get out of it. So best practice in terms of data and analytics is being really clear about what are the questions for you as a team and a staff that you want to answer and you want the data to inform and how and when are you going to use that because there\u2019s so many technologies that try to help and inform that if you\u2019re not really clear about that at the outset you can just get lost in it.<\/p>\n

What does the immediate future hold for the use of data and analytics in sport?<\/strong><\/p>\n

KC:<\/strong> First of all, software, and the analytics available within software, has come a long way. There are lots of good companies out there doing good work to help teams manage their software and manage their data much more effectively as they can streamline their workflows a lot better. A lot of our information is about medical and physical performance, for the future will give us insight into the psychological aspects of performance. The sensors that kind of pick up stress, changes in stress state, arousal, optimal decision-making; these are areas that are ultimately what determines the very best from the good; the great athlete is making good decisions and performing optimally under the most intense pressure and we never to this day been able to create any insight around, certainly not in the competitive environment, and my hope, my view, is that will become realised in the not too distant future. We\u2019ve already seen it in different ways of measuring stress through heartrate variability.<\/p>\n

I think that technology will get miniaturised a bit more and more wearable in the competitive environment and hopefully will be able to give us some insights around the stress that athletes experience or not and how some athletes seem to be able to cope while others crumble under the pressure of competition, so the psychological insight for me is a huge one. Neuroscience and interpreting psychological performance is going to be huge and once we actually measure that area that will make a big difference to a whole bunch of areas, from talent identification to mental practices in the competition environment and supporting athletes with that. For me that\u2019s where I\u2019d like to see that go and I think there\u2019s enough hope there to suggest that technology will develop and will become available over time.<\/p>\n

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Looking for more insight into using data and analytics?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Karl Cooke featured in our recent Performance Special Report: Navigating the Data Maze, in which he spoke alongside the Texas Rangers, Orlando Magic and Harlequins.<\/p>\n