The professional sports industry has changed dramatically in just the past 10 years. In particular, the way that franchises view the value of the athletes on their rosters and approach the care and investment in those athletes looks very different today than it did only a decade ago.
Variation and outliers have always existed across organizations, but in general, sports teams in the past often regarded their athletes as perishable commodities with finite and unpredictable shelf lives. On some level, this was true: Players got hurt. Some returned as lesser versions of their previous selves. Occasionally, careers were cut short. Especially as sports became bigger business, teams were compelled to take steps to protect themselves against both random injuries and the arbitrary degradation of player performance.
But one of those steps was to begin removing some of the unpredictability and randomness of player health and performance altogether. By collecting and analyzing data, drawing verifiable insights and adjusting training and rehabilitation programs accordingly, practitioners in recent years have been able to take more control over athlete performance, durability and longevity, leading teams – after seeing the results – to invest more in that undertaking. The primary segment of that investment, of course, is: technology.
The Rise of User-Friendly Technology
When considering tech and its broader purpose, the sports industry is no different than NASA or Wall Street. The hope for all is to develop new ways to capture more accurate and dynamic insights or to create on a larger scale – and all of it faster than before. “The application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way,” as one description of technology characterizes it, has enormous and obvious benefits to those who are willing and able to leverage it. But if tech were simple, we would all be Steve Jobs. Everyone wants to build a better mousetrap; not everyone knows how to use it.
And this is where the new frontier of sports technology lies: useability. The more intuitive and user-friendly the tech, the more laymen will be able to utilize it, the faster it will be integrated into operations and the more likely it is to be embraced at all.
Bill Styles, a sport scientist who has been Southampton FC’s lead first-team strength and conditioning coach for a decade, has had a front-row seat to the development of new sports technologies and their importance in optimizing the care (and values) of professional athletes.
“This might sound a little bit strange, but any system that allows me to walk out onto a pitch, press a button and, by the time I pack the equipment up from that session and get back to my desk, I’ve got the data in front of me – that is absolute gold in this environment,” Styles said.
“Because we've got limited time with our athletes to impact them, to affect them, to change their behaviors – to do anything in their company. So anything we can do that helps that process is going to be so beneficial.”
The Importance of Integration and Adaptability
The skeleton key for performance practitioners, says Styles, is productive plug-and-play technology that doesn’t disrupt or force a change to current workflows. He cites the Sportlight system for its benchmarking and efficiency, noting that adaptation to existing operations is at or near the top of an organization’s list of priorities when considering an investment in new technology.
“It's the nature of the environment,” Styles said. “We want the one, good tool and high-quality data at our disposal, but they won’t put up with things that are time-costly and that are going to force them to stress and take their attention elsewhere. So I've loved the nature of that.”
An increased focus on player performance and welfare have proved to be a boon not only for the athletes themselves but also their teams. To that end, the development of technology that can be widely used and quickly integrated into existing operations – and whose outputs are processed in a way that can be understood by all – is the new standard. Plug-and-play is here to stay.
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