Archive

Twelve months ago this series opened with a claim that sounded modest: high-performance sport does not have a data problem, it has an interpretation problem. Everything since has been an argument about what follows from that. The coach as designer of the decision environment. Context ...

Ask a coach what they want from analysis and very few say another dashboard. They say they want to ask a question and get an answer, in the language they already use, without waiting three days for someone to build a report. Natural-language interfaces promise ...

Every coach knows the arithmetic. Thirty athletes, one of you, and a finite number of hours. The honest consequence is that a handful of athletes get genuinely individual attention and the rest get a good group programme with their name written at the top. Nobody ...

The next useful step in sports analytics is not a more sophisticated chart. It is the ability to look at a physical output and see the sporting moment that produced it. Coaches do not think in accelerations per minute. They think in the phase of ...

Personalisation in sport is mostly a marketing word. What is usually sold as individualised training is an athlete being compared with a population and told where they sit against it. That is a useful starting point and a poor finishing one, because the population never ...

Adding a dashboard almost never changes behaviour. Most performance departments have proved this to themselves at least twice. A new platform arrives, the reporting improves, everyone agrees the visualisations are excellent, and eight weeks later the same five decisions are being made the same way ...

High-performance sport does not have a data problem. It has an interpretation problem, and the two are routinely confused. Add another sensor and you add another column. Add another column and you add another meeting. Somewhere in that sequence the original question gets lost, which ...

Golf's problem is not a shortage of data. It is that almost none of it accumulates into a picture of a player. Stand behind a launch monitor for an hour and you will watch something strange. A player hits 60 shots. Each one produces a ...

Triathlon does not have a shortage of measurement. It has a shortage of coordination. Three disciplines, a gym, recovery, fuelling, equipment, environment and the rest of an athlete's life have to be reconciled into one week, and no product on the market holds all of ...