Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center

This meant she needed to start collecting data on players in Norway’s pro league. Conducting her research at the internationally renowned Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center (OSTRC) gave Nordstrøm the opportunity to collect, visualize, and report on objective data via AthleteMonitoring once OSTRC switched from a different application.

OSTRC has been working with this athlete management system for several years and helped create the OSTRC-H2 survey that is now available to all AthleteMonitoring clients. This questionnaire helps researchers, performance staff, and medical professionals track athletes’ injuries, illnesses, and mental health so that they can provide faster and more targeted care.

AthleteMonitoring proved to be particularly beneficial when Nordstrøm started a new research initiative studying injuries among youth soccer players. “Players could report health problems via text message, which was very helpful,” she said. “I don’t know if we could’ve gathered the data we needed without this reporting feature. All a player had to do was click a link in a text to get into AthleteMonitoring. Then they could quickly enter information.”

This simple, intuitive process was also beneficial for Nordstrøm and her fellow researchers.

“It was useful for us to get direct feedback whenever a player reported an issue,” she said. “We had an overview of the whole team and could then focus on the problems individual players were notifying us about.”

The studies that Nordstrøm has conducted on adult Norwegian athletes are similar to those that focus on juniors, but the latter required her to make some alterations in AthleteMonitoring to ensure athlete privacy.

“There are different ethical challenges with junior athletes, and they can’t respond to some of the questions that adults could,” she said. “AthleteMonitoring has been flexible enough for me to make these changes to our questionnaires, so we still get the data we need without asking them about things that we’re not supposed to.”

One of the reasons that Nordstrøm has had ongoing success with AthleteMonitoring is the responsive report she has received.

“When you work with athletes, you need to fix any issues with reporting immediately, or they’ll stop answering questions,” she said. “Any time I’ve needed help from Francois or his team, they’ve gotten back to me right away and helped me find solutions. For example, we needed to adjust the wording in our text message reminders, and he helped me do it quickly.”

Nordstrøm is starting to see how AthleteMonitoring’s data visualization and reporting can benefit other professionals who work with the athletes she is studying. “In the adolescent girls’ soccer group, we just started adding PTs and coaches, so they can track training and game loads in AthleteMonitoring,” she said. “I work closely with the national boards for Norwegian soccer and ice hockey and frequently recommend AthleteMonitoring for medical personnel because it’s such a good tool.”