That is the bad news. It is more difficult to improve athletes and make them better at their desired sports. But there is some good news. It won’t always be this way. Eventually the situation for players, coaches and teams will get better. And there is just one reason for both: technology. Make that two reasons: technology and usability.
Look at what is going on at the NFL combine. According to Pittsburgh Steelers General Manager Kevin Colbert the team comes to the combine having done 90% of the work to evaluate players. The player physicals are valuable in a this changes everything-way but most of the information gathered by Colbert and colleagues is marginal. The stakes will go up for athletic talent as the combine continues to offer the opportunity to display athletic potential on a big public stage.
Good reasons for athlete combines are plentiful. Evaluators can make apples to apples comparisons, and they can assess both the athlete and the person with their own eyes. It is efficient to do it all at once, but congestion makes that efficiency go away at some point. The congestion comes in two forms: too many athletes and too many tests.
Military academies sometimes do thousands of fitness tests per day. Scaling up the number of people undergoing tests is mostly a matter of planning and logistics. If military-grade planning and logistics are available, thousands of tests is doable. Elite athletes differ from elite soldiers in terms of the talents evaluators seek though. While character and toughness goes a long way for soldiers, athletes need to pass a battery of “assessments of current performance, fitness, anthropometric indicators, and skill,” from a recent essay in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance.
The lesson from highway construction and automobile congestion is that building more lanes is not a solution to traffic jams. Build more lanes to accomodate demand, and unless the demand is fully met, those lanes fill and the crowds are no smaller than before. The simply supply-demand calculation for logistics gets more complicated as the athletic assessment gets more involved. Like on- and off-ramps that further complicate traffic patterns, the questions asked of athletes complicate any expectation for a smooth flow of athletes through things like combines. And if athletes are indeed like highways, the traffic-induced demand will mean many more athletes to test as the scale of athlete testing increases.
Technology fits into the athlete evaluation process with its own cost-benefit calculation. If the information is valuable enough the new technology gets added to the process, the benefit stacked against the inconvenience. Or the technology saves time or effort compared to the current way of doing things. Both factor into the rules of disruptive innovation originally put forward by Clayton Christiansen). The current era of emerging disruptive personal health technologies sets up a situation ripe for rapid change in how athletes measure performance.
Technology products associated with this year’s NFL combine include: a sort of portable x-ray machine, a real-time 40-yard dash timing clock, and an interface that syncs athlete assessments with game highlights. Also, news articles discussed how combine training and combine training technologies are more valuable now than ever before.
Beneath the surface of the cycles of innovation (and cycles of innovation hype) is the natural push-pull of technology adoption. New technologies push their way out of product development finding their way into business models, business models that sometimes make sense to involve combines, and so here they are. The push is the supply side, and the pull is the demand side. Currently it is the early adopters among players, coaches and teams that want the technology.
You know they are early adopters because they are willing to put up with the bad interfaces that nearly all early-stage technology products have. These people are critical for improving the usability of the technology so that it can one day become part of athlete assessments and workflows which lead to useful results. They are comfortable with the risk that they are not wasting their time, that there is some fruitful technology-enabled outcome they can point to, one that makes a detour into unfamiliar territory worthwhile.
The risk that players, coaches and teams are taking is amplified because they are so unfamiliar with technology. They depend on advisors and/or salespeople to help, and the players, coaches and teams have no real way telling how expert their collaborators are. This is the situation Ben Alamar outlines in his ESPN The Magazine article, that NBA teams need more technical skills on hand to fully take advantage of the new sensor technologies. Alamar also says nothing to show he possesses any in-depth technical understanding or skill, making him another one of those trust me-collaborators who might or might not know how new technology fits.
Fortunately for Alamar and everybody else the usability of technology improves as it settles into more certain, more regular patterns of use. Eventually people know what hardware is good for and in turn learn the data that has utility and in turn the interfaces to unlock the data to produce useful insight. Richard Whittall at 21st Club soccer analytics makes an important point about professional soccer management having to choose between taking players with known track records and betting on players that need development. Decision-makers have mostly been selecting the information with more, better information, and those choices mean that fewer young English players are getting the opportunity to develop into Premier League footballers.
Both Alamar and Whittall cite job security as motivation for people who have to make risky decisions about technology, athletes and sports. The leadership risk aversion has downstream affects, slowing technology adoption and depressing innovation among practitioners. For people who have jobs to develop athletic talent and who depend on these decision-makers to sign off on new processes and technologies, they experience a bottleneck where there is too much unproven, not very usable technology being foisted on them, taking away from the time and energy they have to do the actual work with athletes to make them better.
There has to be a role people who understand athletes and who understand technology to get practical, actionable information about new technologies to sports decision-makers. Or else progress will be slow.