North-West University

Kyra Duvenage is a senior sport scientist at North-West University (NWU) in Potchefstroom, South Africa, where she oversees performance monitoring and data management for hundreds of athletes across multiple sports. Her work covers everything from grassroots talent identification with young athletes to Olympic-level performance, and she’s responsible for monitoring competitors at all levels.

Finding the Right AMS

After researching multiple athlete management systems (AMS), Duvenage evaluated them based on several criteria. The decision came down to one critical differentiator.

“The first thing that attracted me to AthleteMonitoring was the responsive technical support in South Africa,” Duvenage said. “There was a salesperson here and he set up a meeting with Francois, the CEO, who’s based in Canada. They told me that while it has preset features, AthleteMonitoring can be a blank canvas: whatever you need, you can build.”

Despite leading a large university program with hundreds of athletes, Duvenage maintains direct access to Francois if technical challenges arise. This relationship has proven beneficial for both parties, as the scale and diversity of North-West University’s operations often prompt Duvenage to suggest new features that improve the platform for all users.

“If I have any issue, it’s important to the AthleteMonitoring team and they resolve it quickly,” Duvenage said.

Creating a Service Model for Resource-Limited Teams

The South African rand’s exchange rate makes international software subscriptions too expensive for many local clubs, colleges, and national teams. Rather than limiting access to their own athletes, North-West University developed a service delivery model that leverages their bulk licensing to support external organizations.

“We are one of the biggest clients due to our service delivery where we made AthleteMonitoring possible for smaller groups to use,” Duvenage said. “Unlike with other, more expensive AMS platforms, we can afford it and are able to support all our athletes and coaches across many different sports.”

Through her consulting work with various national teams and clubs, Duvenage has noticed a pattern that determines whether the athlete management initiative succeeds or fails. Technology alone doesn’t guarantee results.

“The only teams that haven’t been successful with the AMS are those who don’t have someone to help roll it out and run it,” Duvenage said. “Once we learned that it’s more effective with a designated administrator like me, we’ve only had successful deployments since.”

Serving Athletes from Grassroots Level to Elite Performance

The breadth of North-West University’s athlete population requires a monitoring system that can accommodate everything from basic anthropometric measurements in rural talent identification programs to sophisticated physiological testing for Olympic athletes. Duvenage has spent years building assessment protocols that capture this entire spectrum.

“If you can think it, we can make it,” Duvenage said. “From basic assessments, like body composition, skin folds, and jump height, to complex testing, I can create anything our coaches want. Then we quickly make it available to them and their athletes.”

Beyond standard physical testing, Duvenage has integrated specialized outputs and custom questionnaires into AthleteMonitoring. Psychology assessments feed into the platform, while national sports federations use custom forms to collect equipment sizing and athletes’ housing details. Sophisticated lab equipment, like Cybex isokinetic dynamometers, also sends data into the platform.

“One thing Francois taught me is that if you can create it in Excel, you can create it in AthleteMonitoring,” Duvenage said. “It’s this versatility that I love.”

The university’s athletic department includes rugby, soccer, tennis, athletics (track and field and cross country), triathletes, swimmers, gymnasts, lifesaving competitors, boxers, kayakers, and even pilots who fly sailplanes. AthleteMonitoring provides a central hub for all these sports programs to record, manage, and visualize their objective and subjective athlete data, and delivers intuitive, graphical reports that every athlete, coach, and member of the medical and performance teams uses to make more informed and timely decisions.

Using Subjective Data to Guide Interventions

Duvenage regularly encounters discrepancies between the intended difficulty of training sessions and how athletes actually experience them. These gaps provide valuable diagnostic information about fatigue status, fitness levels, or misunderstandings about training intensity scales, and inform proactive load management.

“A coach might think that a session should be a seven out of 10 on an RPE scale,” Duvenage said. “But what if for some players, it’s more like a nine? Is it the misinterpretation of what the session should be or are they being overloaded in training? AthleteMonitoring helps us ask and answer such questions.”

The challenge lies in distinguishing between athletes who genuinely experienced high training loads and those who are not putting in the effort coaches expect. Cross-referencing subjective reports with objective monitoring in AthleteMonitoring helps Duvenage and the coaches she serves to get to the bottom of every issue.

“That is where the API integration between AthleteMonitoring and our GPS solution works well,” Duvenage said. “We can see physiological and mental loads together and figure out what’s really going on,” Duvenage said.

Supporting Mental Health and Wellbeing

AthleteMonitoring’s automated warning system presents red flags when individual athletes deviate from their personalized performance and recovery ranges. This allows Duvenage and her colleagues to intervene before minor issues compound into major problems.

“We can identify when a player’s response is different from the rest of their teammates,” Duvenage said. “If this is usually an eight out of 10 guy and he suddenly goes to six, AthleteMonitoring presents an alert on the dashboard to tell us there’s an issue so we can investigate further.”

North-West University’s integrated performance center houses sport scientists, physiotherapists, psychologists, physicians, and many other performance and medical professionals under one roof. This proximity enables rapid response when monitoring data suggests an athlete needs specialized support beyond the sport science team’s scope.

“We have a multidisciplinary team working within our facility, and AthleteMonitoring makes it easy for anyone to look at their recovery and performance and let them know if their numbers are trending down,” Duvenage said. “We might see that an athlete’s sleep quality is low or that they’re not enjoying training anymore. With AthleteMonitoring, we keep an eye on their data trends and can intervene right away if necessary.”

University athletes face the dual pressure of academic and athletic performance. When someone who has chosen to compete at this level despite the additional demands suddenly loses interest in their sport, Duvenage knows it warrants immediate attention and support. AthleteMonitoring accelerates this process so that at-risk individuals get the care they need.

Identifying Athletes’ Lifestyle Challenges

Sometimes physiological data reveals problems that exist outside the training environment. When an athlete’s markers change without corresponding fluctuations in the training program or academic calendar, Duvenage knows she should investigate lifestyle factors.

Identifying Athletes’ Lifestyle Challenges

Sometimes physiological data reveals problems that exist outside the training environment. When an athlete’s markers change without corresponding fluctuations in the training program or academic calendar, Duvenage knows she should investigate lifestyle factors.

“The body doesn’t lie,” Duvenage said. “Physiologically, if the training stimulus was the same over time and there’s a change in physiology – such as resting heart rate or HRV – we will try to see what else is going on. Maybe the athlete is stressed out because their exams are coming up, or there’s another lifestyle factor behind the change.”

The conversations that AthleteMonitoring prompts between coaches and their athletes sometimes uncover relationship problems, financial stress, or other personal circumstances affecting the athlete’s physical state. The goal extends beyond optimizing performance metrics to supporting the whole person.

“We try to be a support system within each group we serve,” Duvenage said.

Combining Historical and Real-Time Player Data

Managing six years of accumulated data in AthleteMonitoring creates a powerful longitudinal record that’s readily accessible to authorized users. Traditional file management systems would require searching through dozens of spreadsheets and documents to compile a complete athlete profile, whereas with AthleteMonitoring, relevant information is just a click away.
“Everything is in one place in AthleteMonitoring,” Duvenage said. “If I have to pull a player’s profile, I don’t have to open 10 Excel files – everything is right there in front of me.”

Beyond data storage, AthleteMonitoring serves as the primary communication channel between Duvenage, her team, coaches, and athletes across all university sports, external club teams, and individual athletes. Medical documentation, training programs, and team-wide conversations all flow through a single platform rather than across multiple email, text messaging, and file-sharing applications.

“When I have to communicate with my athletes quickly, I use AthleteMonitoring,” Duvenage said.

Providing Data-Informed Answers to Non-Tech Savvy Coaches

Introducing technology to coaches who built their careers without it requires a specific approach. Rather than asking them to learn new systems, Duvenage positions herself as the intermediary who handles the technology, and presents them with simple, actionable information.

“We have some very experienced older coaches in South Africa,” Duvenage said. “They don’t like change or technology. So I just give them the minimum information they need to make data-driven decisions that benefit their athletes.”

The first question coaches need answered each morning is straightforward: which players are ready to train or compete today, and which are injured? AthleteMonitoring’s dashboard provides this information at a glance.

“The main thing coaches want to know is whether each player is good to go or not,” Duvenage said. “That lets them know how many athletes they’ll have for training today. While AthleteMonitoring allows us to capture and present complex data, we’re also able to simplify information so that every coach is in no doubt about the availability of their squad.”

A One-Stop Solution for Athlete Management

When colleagues around the world ask about athlete monitoring systems, Duvenage tells them that AthleteMonitoring provides ease of use and exemplary customer service.

“AthleteMonitoring offers user friendliness for coaches, athletes, and performance professionals,” Duvenage said. “The company also provides responsive technical support. I know the system and can help people with it, but if I struggle with anything, I just reach out to the AthleteMonitoring team.”

Most AMS vendors charge separately for each staff member who needs system access. This quickly becomes expensive for programs with multiple coaches, sport scientists, physiotherapists, and medical personnel. AthleteMonitoring’s pricing model eliminates this barrier for North-West University.

“AthleteMonitoring is cost effective, and you can easily add and remove athletes,” Duvenage said. “If I archive a player because he leaves the team and he comes back next season, I can unarchive him and still have all his data.”

The modular structure of AthleteMonitoring allows organizations to purchase only the functionality they need initially and then expand as their programs develop, rather than paying for unused features.

“If you want to use only health monitoring or the questionnaire module in AthleteMonitoring, you can just utilize that,” Duvenage said. “You don’t have to buy the whole system.”

After several years of using AthleteMonitoring as her primary tool for managing hundreds of athletes across dozens of sports, Duvenage is convinced that the platform offers unbeatable value.

“AthleteMonitoring is my main data management system and everything goes into it,” Duvenage said. “It’s like having OneDrive for my athletes: a one-stop solution.”