Sports science and technology have come an extraordinarily long way in a short period of time. Thanks to these a series of leaps in our ability to track athlete movements with greater accuracy and in increasingly dynamic ways, our understanding of human biomechanics and best practices in rehabilitation, training and game strategy is in a state of continuous growth. Compared to just a few years ago, teams, coaches and practitioners now have access to more player movement data than they may have ever imagined possible.
But one side effect of this development is worth noting: the difficulty in communicating these new capabilities across an organization (particularly to the players themselves) to achieve a collective trust and alignment of purpose. Athletes and coaches tend to be creatures of habit, so their natural inclination might be to balk or struggle to accept any new technology that might be construed as a potential disruption of their routines.
In the long run, the introduction of next-level sports tech has the potential to optimize player and team performance, help prevent injuries and accelerate return-to-play timetables. But without buy-in across an organization – most importantly from the athletes themselves – any club’s return on its tech investment is at risk of falling short of expectations.
How Tech Advances Have Improved Tech Acceptance
We’ve grown accustomed to sports clubs and leagues testing new technologies and incorporating them into their venues, competitions and broadcasts, often with the goal of enhancing fan enjoyment or freshening up a staid product. But when it comes to tech related to player performance, athlete health and data capture, sports organizations are a bit more skeptical of change. Particularly when there was a perceived risk of interfering with established practices, past efforts to onboard new player-tracking technologies were in many cases met with pushback.
Said Bill Styles, lead first-team strength and conditioning coach at Southampton FC: “Very much, the idea of collecting data and information, practitioners were seen as being a bit busy or a bit keen to want to know that. 'Just let us get on and play the game, and let's just do our thing.'”
Perhaps in part because of the rapid pace of recent technological progress, expectations within the realm of sports have been reset and quicker, more willing acceptance of new tech has become more the norm. But according to
Scott Guyett – technical director at Olympic Football Club, a former head of sports science at Crystal Palace and a veteran of English professional football as a player – this adaptation can also be attributed to the ubiquity of technology in the everyday lives of players and other team staff.
“I think players, having been exposed to so much technology in recent years, are more accepting of it now,” Guyett said. “The key for me is to ensure the player understands what you are measuring and why you are measuring it. If you can help educate the player, make them feel part of the process and get them to understand that what you are doing is going to improve them as a player, then I think you get more buy-in.”
The Perfect Marriage: Technology and Human Decision-Making
Styles points out that, in addition to technology, data (and the processes behind its capture) is a familiar concept to players. Athletes don’t need to know every bell and whistle on the brilliant new device your club has installed to better evaluate their movements, but they are more interested than ever before in the feedback these technologies can provide and, perhaps most important, understand its role in optimizing player and team performance.
“Now players, staff, coaches and managers, they expect it – they want to know it,” Styles said. “They know that you know what you're talking about, and they understand why decisions would be made around it. But what's never changed is that the best decisions are made with data informing the decision and helping guide it. Always dealing with that human being, it's a huge part of that process.”
Guyett goes so far as to say a club might lose the confidence of players due to an overreliance on data.
“I think where players become skeptical is when sports scientists and coaches base all their decisions on numbers,” Guyett said. “This opens the possibility of distrust between players and the coaching and sports science staff. There needs to be a degree of subjectivity when you are evaluating performance. Just because a player runs less in a game or has a lower pass completion rate than they usually do doesn’t mean that he or she hasn’t performed well. There could be several other factors that help explain it, and coaches who are empathetic and exercise a degree of subjectivity will usually gain more trust from players.”
Technology can provide new insights, but it cannot think for a coach or match the intuition of a player. No matter how convincing the data, tech should always be used as a guide to inform human decision-making. All data projection is theoretical, and at the end of the day, even world-class athletes are beholden not only to the limitations of their bodies but also their minds.
Said Styles: “When you're the guy who is doing the workout or you're the guy who is coming back from the injury or you're the guy who needs to feel ready, how does that sit with where you've come from and where you are? I always link it into the process. Players build trust in the data because they trust that – how they feel.”
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