Success Stories

Number of Sports: 40

Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Departments using solution: Performance, medical, coaching

Main product uses: Injury and illness tracking and athlete health monitoring

The Swedish Olympic Committee (SOC) was founded in 1913 and is the authority for the Olympic movement within Sweden. The committee consists of the national sports federations for all Olympic sports and 18 recognized federations for sports that aren’t yet part of the Olympics. The mission for the SOC is to prepare for and operate the country´s participation at the Olympic Games and contribute to competitive Olympic teams.

One of the most dynamic and exciting things about the SOC is the variety of the disciplines it oversees. Sweden is always a powerhouse at the Winter Olympics and won 11 medals – its best total since Sydney 2000 – at the Paris Games in 2024. Such performances are the result of at least four years of training, and this varies greatly between sports. Yet the need to prioritize athlete wellbeing is just as urgent for every athlete, and this is one of the reasons the SOC brought in Linköping University professor Martin Hägglund as a medical research advisor in 2021.

“When I started at SOC, some of the biggest sports had their own surveillance systems and others had nothing, so it was really difficult to keep track of everything going on,” Martin said. “The first task I had was to arrange some kind of structured health surveillance among all the athletes. The problem was keeping track of everyone and having an umbrella overview of all the health problems and statuses across the whole Olympic organization.”

With this mandate in mind, Martin began evaluating athlete management systems (AMS). When asked why he selected AthleteMonitoring, he said: “AthleteMonitoring uses internationally accepted methods for health surveillance. Confidentiality is a big thing when you work with elite athletes, and with AthleteMonitoring, we have the same sort of data security as a hospital or clinic. We also wanted something that had health surveillance and medical records within the same system, so we have everything in one place.”

Consolidating Standardized Data for 40 Sports

When thinking back to the challenges he recognized when joining the SOC, Martin revealed that one of the biggest issues was the sheer scale of trying to manage data for every Olympic discipline. “There are 40 different sports and 40 organizations, and athletes are spread out all over the world,” he said. “So it was difficult to keep track of everyone because you can’t see them physically for a clinical consultation and there was no unified system in place.”

AthleteMonitoring helps overcome this issue. It enables remote data capture for athletes in any sport, no matter where they live or train. This information is then immediately available to authorized performance and medical staff, so they can better coordinate athlete care and preparation.

“AthleteMonitoring has provided us with a uniform health surveillance system among all the athletes and the organizations within the 40 different sports involved in the Swedish Olympic Committee,” Martin said. “Now we can keep track of what’s going on with each athlete. It’s a more complete system where we capture everything from minor complaints up to more severe conditions.”

Each summer and winter sport within the SOC is focused on its own athletes. But for Martin and his colleagues who oversee all 40 sports, it’s helpful to have standardized and universal information across the board, while offering the ability to tailor certain monitoring functionality to individual disciplines.

“Training diaries can be very detailed and look different depending on what sport you do, but we try to collect a more generic set of information from everyone, whether you’re a cross-country or alpine skier, a pole vaulter, or a climber,” Martin said. “We can compare athletes and sports, and federations are able to customize more details for each specific sport depending on their needs and how AthleteMonitoring suits them.”

Resolving Athlete Health Issues Sooner

In addition to capturing objective data in AthleteMonitoring, the SOC also utilizes it to capture, collate, and act upon subjective information that each athlete self-reports every Sunday.

“We use basic health surveillance based on the international standards with the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center questionnaires that are embedded in AthleteMonitoring,” Martin said. “These are based on weekly reporting from the athletes that we’ve added some questions to.”

Previously, it was difficult for the SOC to detect athlete health issues unless they reported a serious incident or were treated by a team doctor. Now, the SOC uses AthleteMonitoring as an early warning system, which features color-coded flagging to alert staff if someone moves outside their normal ranges.

“When an athlete reports health issues, illness, or lesser wellbeing in a weekly surveillance survey, the health staff gets a notification immediately, so they can take adequate action early on,” Martin said. “We have a better picture if someone has a minor health problem and act on that very quickly to prevent this from becoming a bigger problem.”

Martin feels that capturing subjective data in AthleteMonitoring can also play into load management and making more informed decisions about each individual’s preparation. “Using athlete reporting of perceived load, rate of perceived exertion, stress, and sleep can reflect that they’re not doing so well,” he said. “It helps pick up on things if everything isn’t going as planned, and that might lead to action like changing your training if you’re not getting the results you want or aren’t feeling as well as you should.”

It’s not only Swedish Olympic athletes who are geographically dispersed, but also the staff members who serve them. Martin believes that using one platform as a single source of truth is bringing physiotherapists, doctors, and practitioners together to provide more informed and timely care. In addition to utilizing data that athletes report, staff can upload interactions using diagnosis coding recommended by the IOC and add supporting documentation to medical records.

“As they share the same medical records, everyone on the health staff knows what each other is doing,” Martin said. “They have the same view of treatment, examinations, and rehab, so they can communicate and share information with coaches and other people who are working with the athletes. Everyone wants them to be 100 percent healthy and perform their best, and the more information they have, the better. I hear from the medical team that AthleteMonitoring is also creating better connections with athletes as it’s breaking down the barriers to reporting health issues.”

No matter what sport they compete in, elite Swedish athletes can only participate in the Olympics every four years. Martin believes that while it’s important to peak at the right time, competitors also benefit from the ongoing surveillance AthleteMonitoring provides.

“Just prior to and during the Olympics, there’s a lot of attention on athletes’ performance level, health, and wellbeing,” he said. “Having that same level of detail for every other part of the Olympic cycle helps their development because it’s what they do during those four years that puts them on the podium during the Olympics.”

Spotting Trends and Interpreting Data

While it is too early for Martin to draw definitive, long-term conclusions from the SOC’s health surveillance information, it is already providing clues about how certain factors impact athlete preparation and wellbeing.

“Now that we are collecting this kind of data, we can also look at trends,” he said. “If we change the training routine, what happens? Does it have an impact on injury incidence? For instance, if a team goes to a high-altitude training camp for four weeks or does a lot of traveling, do we have more or less illnesses after that?”

One of the main things coaches need to know each day is which athletes can train with no restrictions or are unavailable. AthleteMonitoring provides such information and can also be used to modify training for those with minor issues.

“If I only measured absence or availability, that’s one filter,” Martin said. “But if you measure all health problems that the athletes have, that’s a much finer filter. You’re aware of more things that should impact your planning. AthleteMonitoring is helping coaches to see how training and competition influences health and having quantifiable data allows them to also evaluate their own performance.”

Collecting standardized athlete data and consolidating it is beneficial to some degree, but the greatest benefits are achieved when this information is presented in a way that it can be understood and acted upon. The versatile reporting features in AthleteMonitoring make this easier for the SOC.

“We provide regular reports from this data set back to the Olympic committee,” Martin said. “We’re also very active in giving information and feedback to athletes, coaches, and health staff so they feel it’s useful for them to provide data to the system. Using graphs and color-coding is a simple way to get the message across, and if coaches have questions about how certain training impacts the health status of their athletes, we can do specific analyses.”

Such information sharing is providing the SOC’s medical staff and coaches with a more complete understanding of their athletes’ wellness. It is also empowering individual competitors to discover more about how their training and health are linked.

“Most athletes have a good sense of how they train and the intended load but maybe not so much on the output of their training and competition,” Martin said. “If they have a system where they can monitor their wellbeing, sleep, injuries, and illnesses, they have their own stats that they can benchmark against. It’s a learning experience for athletes to be active in monitoring their health.”

It is undoubtedly useful for the SOC’s performance and medical staff to see a daily snapshot of each athlete’s health status. Researchers like Martin also find the longitudinal information and ability to track athlete progress over time useful.

“It’s very helpful to get standardized structured data collection from everyone,” Martin said. “I have confidence I can trust the data that is being produced by the athletes, which is validated by the health staff working with them. I can compare information between different sports and organizations and with international colleagues who have the same system in place.”

Extending Health Surveillance to Paralympic Athletes

The SOC’s continued success with AthleteMonitoring has led to them expanding the system. “We’ve helped the Swedish Paralympic Committee to come in and get involved with AthleteMonitoring as well,” Martin said. “We have piloted with them within our program, and now they’re taking off on their own. This is also helpful for us because we can compare data between the Olympic and Paralympic groups of athletes.”

Looking ahead, Martin has identified other ways that the SOC can enhance its athlete management and surveillance initiative. “Another development for us would be to have the coaches more involved with AthleteMonitoring,” he said. “We could take advantage of the system’s full functionality to report training loads and schedules so that it becomes a platform for everyone around the athlete to work in.”

From the initial deployment with health surveillance to finding new ways to track athletes’ wellbeing, the SOC has created a productive and collaborative partnership with AthleteMonitoring.

“The AthleteMonitoring team is quick to communicate and helpful with troubleshooting,” Martin said. “When you deal with this kind of sensitive information, it’s important to work with someone you trust. They’re also keen to continually develop the system based on experiences we’ve had and the needs of the SOC and their other customers.”

Number of Athletes: 400+ (Olympic program) + 100+ (Paralympic program)

Location: India (multiple training bases)

Sports Covered: 10+, including wrestling, boxing, archery, shooting, badminton, athletics, table tennis and various para sports

Departments Using Solution: Physiotherapy, strength and conditioning, nutrition, research & analysis, athlete management

Main Product Uses: Load monitoring, injury tracking, wearables integration, multidisciplinary communication, and performance analysis

Key Integrations: Whoop, Garmin, and Polar wearable devices

(OGQ) is a program of the Foundation for Promotion of Sports and Games, a Not for Profit (Section 8) Company founded by Indian sports legends Geet Sethi and Prakash Padukone.

The mission of OGQ is to support Indian athletes in winning Olympic and Paralympic Gold medals. Operating through funding from corporate social responsibility and High Net Worth Individuals (HNI), OGQ provides comprehensive support, including coaching, training, equipment, competition funding, and sports science expertise, to over 400 athletes across more than 10 sports, plus approximately 100 Para-athletes in a dedicated Paralympic program.

Aalaap Jawadekar, a physiotherapist with 15 years of experience, is the sports science lead for the Para Program for OGQ. After studying in India and Australia, he returned to work with junior and elite athletes in his home country, progressing through various Olympic and Paralympic disciplines and supporting athletes who have achieved Olympic success.

“I’ve been working with OGQ for over 10 years now, and it’s become home for me,” Aalaap said. “I’m leading a team of physiotherapists and strength and conditioning coaches and got introduced to AthleteMonitoring in 2017. I was one of the first to set up the platform for OGQ.”

Addressing Documentation and Data Challenges

When Aalaap joined OGQ’s sports science team, the organization faced significant challenges in athlete data management and documentation. The cultural context presented unique obstacles.

“One of the key things we wanted was proper documentation,” Aalaap said. OGQ was working with a basic electronic medical records (EMR) software that provided minimal functionality. “We had worked with a smaller system for a couple of years, and it was doing just the bare minimum of keeping notes,” Aalaap said. “It wasn’t going anywhere. We needed something that would give us analysis, visual inputs, and deep insights.”

The challenge extended beyond technology to fundamental athlete data. “Basic information like height, weight, and fitness metrics wasn’t properly recorded,” Aalaap said. “When we started working with AthleteMonitoring, the goal was to use features like the exercise library and calendar to monitor training loads and determine whether athletes were training optimally, undertraining, or overtraining.”

Selecting AthleteMonitoring Through Trusted Networks

OGQ’s potential use of AthleteMonitoring came through established relationships that Aalaap had in elite sports in India.

“The credibility factor was huge,” he said. “We were introduced through a colleague who was already working with AthleteMonitoring with golfers and shooters. He spoke highly of the system and its features, and having someone who knew our ecosystem made it natural for us to choose AthleteMonitoring.”

Before committing to the platform, Aalaap conducted extensive testing. “I tried the platform for three weeks in 2017 while working with an elite archer,” he said. “I tried various features and assessments to see how AthleteMonitoring analyzed and returned information to me.”

The results were compelling. “AthleteMonitoring was intuitive and interactive,” Aalaap said. “We realized that this system could lead our organization. You put in the information, AthleteMonitoring flags things for you, and then you work accordingly.”

Building a Data-Driven Culture

Implementation required careful change management, given the traditional resistance to documentation in Indian sports.

“We started having access from November 2017, and I spent from then until January 2018 constructing the full platform for us,” Aalaap said. OGQ invested in internal education to ensure maximum user adoption of the new AMS. “We’ve done internal workshops with the team, and now various verticals use AthleteMonitoring differently according to their needs,” Aalaap said.

Transforming Load Management and Performance

AthleteMonitoring enabled OGQ to introduce sophisticated load monitoring concepts.

“Load monitoring was a very new concept in Indian sports,” Aalaap said. “There was a lot of heavy training for athletes without sports science documentation. We wanted to get data to understand when athletes were being overloaded.”

The platform’s visual data presentation proved crucial for buy-in. “Once we could show coaches data demonstrating that an athlete was having four or five heavy days a week versus the optimal two or three, that made the difference. The athletes saw the data first, then spoke to their coaches about it,” Aalaap said.

Recovery monitoring became another critical application. “Wellness information that athletes self-reported helped them understand their recovery status and how much they could push,” Aalaap said. “Nutritionists could base strategies on wellness scores in the platform.”

Enabling Seamless Team Coordination

As OGQ’s sports science team expanded, AthleteMonitoring became essential for coordinating care across multiple practitioners and locations.

“One of our key successes happened before the Paris Olympics and Paralympics when we had athletes training at different bases and had to shuffle team members,” Aalaap said. “We are proud about the fact that everyone knows everything about the athletes when they’re supposed to work with them. When I go to an athlete, I’m well-prepared because I know what the previous person did with them.”

This approach proved invaluable during the buildup to major international competitions. “One athlete was injured three to four weeks before the Paralympics,” Aalaap said. “He was treated by at least three different physiotherapists, but his training and rehabilitation never slowed down because each new person entering the system was immediately informed through AthleteMonitoring.”

The results spoke for themselves. “The athlete eventually won a medal at the Paralympics,” Aalaap said. “The multidisciplinary approach—with AthleteMonitoring being one key discipline—contributed to that podium finish.”

Leveraging Wearables Integration for Automation

OGQ has progressively integrated multiple wearable technologies with AthleteMonitoring, driven by the need for automation in a high-volume environment with many athletes spread across various sports.

“We needed automation because one person could work with 10 athletes, and it’s hard to manually enter data for each activity,” Aalaap said. “We’ve integrated Garmin, Polar, and now Whoop with AthleteMonitoring. The key was moving from manual data entry to automated systems.”

The Whoop integration has made it easier for athletes and coaches to track training load and adjust it if necessary to improve recovery and adaptation. “Someone wears a Whoop Band, we create one login, and the athlete doesn’t even need to look at AthleteMonitoring anymore,” Aalaap said. “They just train, and all their data automatically populates inside the platform.”

Driving Performance with Heart Rate Training Optimization

One of OGQ’s most compelling success stories with their AMS demonstrates the power of integrating wearable data for performance optimization.

“We had a case study where we realized through Garmin integration that training zones weren’t matching competition intensity,” Aalaap said. “We needed to adjust heart rate zones and push the athlete to train harder in specific zones.”

The intervention was precisely guided by AthleteMonitoring data. “Using Garmin integration, our support staff could see when the athlete was hitting those zones,” Aalaap said.

Creating Organizational Intelligence Through Data Insights

AthleteMonitoring has evolved into OGQ’s single source of truth for organizational decision-making.

“For me as a leader overseeing operations, the framework that AthleteMonitoring offers is allowing me to do my job more effectively,” Aalaap said. “I can log in and see which athletes are training well, who is injured, and what’s happening with ongoing issues.”

Having ready access to comprehensive athlete data helps Aalaap and his colleagues investigate performance and health problems and remedy them rapidly. “A couple of months ago, there were inconsistencies in blood test results with one of our athletes,” Aalaap said. “We do these tests at regular intervals with elite athletes, and she was struggling with training before an important championship.”

The platform’s historical data proved crucial. “The team realized there was a dip in her values over six months, and we could see that on the platform,” Aalaap said.

Expanding to Paralympic Excellence

OGQ’s success with AthleteMonitoring led to expansion into Paralympic sports, for which Aalaap now heads a dedicated group of multidisciplinary professionals.

“I started leading the Para sport team from 2021 onwards,” Aalaap said. “We now support about 100 Para-athletes across different sports. For the Para program specifically, we have notes and consultations as key metrics that support staff update in the platform.”

Futureproofing Through Innovation

Looking ahead, Aalaap sees AthleteMonitoring as essential for staying competitive in an increasingly data-driven global sports landscape.

“Technology is advancing in every sector of sports,” he said. “Athlete management systems have to evolve accordingly. We need a platform that gives us more than what we need to know so we can continue pushing boundaries.”

The collaborative relationship with AthleteMonitoring’s development team has been crucial. “The support offered has been incredible,” Aalaap said. “Francois responds to every query, no matter how small. We have direct channels with developers who can customize the platform.”

Meeting the Needs of Olympic Committees and National Governing Bodies

For organizations considering athlete management systems, Aalaap emphasizes several critical factors that make AthleteMonitoring stand out.

“If I had to recommend AthleteMonitoring to colleagues, I’d highlight three key things,” he said. “First, the communication and user-friendly interface it offers. Second, the support and backend assistance provided. Third, the integrations with various wearable technologies.”

Sport: Basketball

Location: Istanbul, Turkey

Departments using solution: Performance, medical, coaching

Main product uses: Injury and illness tracking, performance and load monitoring, assessments

Integrations: KINEXON and VALD

Founded in 1907, Fenerbahçe won Turkish national basketball championships in 1957, 1959, and 1965. The club beat Tofas to win the Turkish League in 1999 and made it to the EuroBasket Final Eight in 1999. Following the 2006 merger with four-time national championships Ulker, Fenerbahçe qualified for the EuroLeague playoffs in 2008 and won the domestic league and cup in 2010 and 2011. They reached five straight Final Fours between 2015 and 2019 and three championship games, becoming the first Turkish team to win the EuroLeague in 2017. Fenerbahçe claimed their 10^th Turkish league title in 2022 and made it to the EuroLeague playoffs the next two years.

Collecting Consistent Performance and Injury Data

Before joining Fenerbahçe, Kostas Chatzichristos, the club’s director of performance, spent eight years with CSKA Moscow, helping them win two EuroLeague titles, seven league championships, and seven Russian cups. In 2017, he saw that the club needed a way to keep track of players’ injuries and illnesses, while also providing an overview of their performance.

“We realized that we couldn’t keep using spreadsheets – we needed a system,” Kostas said. “What I liked about AthleteMonitoring was that it met our needs for injury recording, calendaring, and sharing information. Simplicity was also important, and it was customizable. It would allow us to record player data offline when we traveled. We ran a test, and it proved to be reliable too. So we started with just a few features.”

Without the ability to gather, aggregate, and interpret data, it’s difficult for it to inform decision-making for players’ performance and medical care.

“The first challenge is to try and coordinate the whole staff to collect consistent data,” Kostas said. “We travel a lot, players aren’t always available to do what we’d like them to, and we have people coming in at different times, so it’s hard to organize. The second challenge is that there’s a lot of data coming in from different sources. The most common question I’d hear is, ‘Why didn’t I know about that?’ It was difficult to tell everyone what was going on and share information in the right way.”

When Kostas went from CSKA Moscow to Fenerbahçe, he didn’t just bring some staff with him, but also the solution he relied on for injury surveillance and performance management.

“I moved to Fenerbahçe with my physio, and as AthleteMonitoring had become part of our way of working, I told management that we needed to get it. At CSKA, we were using it for recording and analyzing data, so for me, it was a no-brainer. I already had a relationship with the team at AthleteMonitoring and they took care of us.”

 

Putting Player Information in a Central Hub

It’s hard for most teams to combine information stored on paper, in various databases, and in niche systems, visualize it, and give access to everyone involved in managing athletes’ preparation, treatment, and overall wellness. AthleteMonitoring overcame this issue at Fenerbahçe by consolidating performance and medical data in a single, secure, and centralized platform.

“AthleteMonitoring makes everybody’s lives easier because all the information we need is in one place,” Kostas said. “It gives me the sense of being in control. I’m aware of what’s happening in all corners of the system, and it reduces the number of blind spots.”

In addition to enabling Kostas to plan his day, update coaches on players’ availability, and modify training and treatment, AthleteMonitoring allows him to coordinate with his colleagues more effectively. In many clubs, there are silos between disciplines, but at Fenerbahçe, the entire performance and medical staff has united around a single source of truth.

“We have a place where everybody can go and record their information, retrieve it, and then share it,” Kostas said. “AthleteMonitoring is the main hub that everything goes into, and from there, we make sense of the data. It’s also a great way to communicate and start conversations among us. This is crucial for a team that has such a high pace and a fairly large number of staff members.”

In the seven seasons that Kostas has been utilizing AthleteMonitoring in Russia and Turkey, he has seen its capabilities expand. This has enabled him and his colleagues to extend it to many areas of performance and medical operations.

“Over the years, we’ve used more features,” Kostas said. “The system has evolved based on users’ recommendations and now we’re basically running the whole team with it. Testing, assessments, questionnaires, recording practices, uploading medical records – it’s all done with AthleteMonitoring and it is very central to our practice.”

Reducing Injury Risk

To help get ahead of potential injuries, Kostas and his team combine player assessments from systems such as VALD ForceDecks, self-reported wellness surveys, IMU practice tracking data from KINEXON, and staff reporting in AthleteMonitoring.

“We have an early warning system and anytime a player tells a staff member about a problem, they’re required to log it,” Kostas said. “If someone has calf or knee pain for two days in a row but still plays, we all need to know about it so we can be proactive. These early warnings often turn into injuries, so it’s important to be able to detect those, share that information, and have an algorithm for what to do. Last season we had 21 percent less lost days than in my first season, we’ve seen injury rates decrease, and we’ve got a good handle on return to play. AthleteMonitoring is helping us work more closely together, which has a positive impact on the players.”

If a player gets hurt, they complete an additional daily survey to report on their pain level, how the site of the injury feels, and what they experienced during rehab or modified training sessions. This enables Kostas and his team to see how they’re healing. The AthleteMonitoring system allows Fenerbahçe to manage the entire continuum of care from the moment an athlete is injured until when they’re cleared to return to practice and play, including scheduling appointments with staff members.

“One of the features that we use the most in AthleteMonitoring is the clinical notes,” Kostas said. “For every injury, we open a case and record everything staff members do with that athlete. So if I’m away on a three-day tour and have a player back in Istanbul, I can log in and see their progress. There are also reports like injury incidence and prevalence that let us track injuries. AthleteMonitoring added a feature that lets us see what type of medicine a player is using and how much of it. Over time, the system gets better and better in giving us opportunities to record more things.”

Tracking Player Progress

In addition to providing a daily snapshot in a dashboard – which Kostas said “is a great invention because it lets you see everything”– AthleteMonitoring allows him to assess player progress over time.

“Long-term tracking is valuable because you can spot trends,” Kostas said. “We can see events like practices, games we’ve won or lost, and when we’ve had 100 percent availability or 75 percent. For example, there’s always a big disruption after EuroLeague games and travel. We can tell what’s really happening to the athletes, how these events affect them, and what can we do about it.”

Such monitoring is more difficult at certain times of year. After Fenerbahçe’s season ends in mid-June, senior players compete in international competitions, such as EuroBasket, the Olympics, and the FIBA Basketball World Cup, while younger squad members participate in junior national team tournaments. Others head home to work out with personal trainers and coaches. The team doesn’t reassemble until late August, meaning that the offseason can become what Kostas called “a black box.”

“One of the biggest challenges when the preseason starts is that we need to figure out what condition the players are in because the training camps are short and intense,” Kostas said. “If you have a monitoring system in place that players are comfortable with, you can use it during the summer to have them report as much as they can – from wellness questionnaires to session RPEs. By getting this information, you can have a better training camp and adjust it to the capabilities of your players so you don’t have injuries that can jeopardize the season.”

Improving Relationships with Players and Coaches

Another benefit of utilizing subjective surveys during the summer and competitive season is that they not only inform workload management but provide a frequent touch point between players and Fenerbahçe’s staff. Questionnaire responses are normalized with Z-scores. If they’re within a player’s personalized normal range, a consideration like sleep is color coded green. Yellow means there’s reason for caution, and red is a warning sign.

“By asking these questions every day, we’re opening a communication channel,” Kostas said. “Most players appreciate being asked how they feel, and it builds trust. If someone tells me, ‘It’s all reds today,’ I continue the conversation and find out if they had a bad night, their kid is sick, or they’re stressed. AthleteMonitoring is helping us build relationships with our players and enables us to manipulate their loads throughout the week.”

Some of Fenerbahçe’s staff – including Kostas, physiotherapists, doctors, and other practitioners – use AthleteMonitoring to provide a detailed view of each player’s medical and performance status. It also offers a simple summary for others.

“The coach doesn’t want to see a lot of reports – he just needs to know how the team is doing physically,” Kostas said. “I have to be ready to tell him who is injured, who is capable of practicing according to our standards, and who needs training to be modified. I share a simple document with each player’s photo and two or three pieces of information. It helps to give a centralized picture of the team that day.”

As significant as the features of an athlete management system are, the human connections between the client and vendor are just as vital to a successful deployment.

“When you have a system that’s a crucial part of your daily function, the relationship with the vendor is important,” Kostas said. “If I have a problem, I don’t want to submit a service ticket, wait two days, and then talk to someone I don’t know. With AthleteMonitoring, if I have an issue, I reach out and hear back from somebody quickly. At the end of the day, we work with people, not with software, and our partners at AthleteMonitoring have become part of our team.”

Dr. Craig Duncan is a globally recognized authority in human performance science. His expertise has been fundamental to the success of top-tier clubs, guiding them to victories in prestigious international competitions and league championships. His strategies have also played a key role in national teams’ impressive runs in continental cups and world-level tournaments. His expertise transcends the realm of sports, bringing his high-performance strategies into the corporate sector. Learn more at https://drcraigduncan.com.

Doing the Basics of Sports Science Well

In Craig’s early days of guiding sports teams, each player used to record their training sessions, how hard or easy they thought each workout was, and other information in personal diaries that they’d sometimes share with their coaches. As technology progressed, Craig saw an opportunity to digitize this process, track more variables, and make player data more readily available.

“Athletes aren’t with us all the time, and there are many hours when they’re on their own,” Craig said. “It was important to find a way to track their readiness before they got to training. I needed something simple, and Francois was wonderful, so it was an easy choice to go with AthleteMonitoring back in 2011.”

While some teams become fixated on capturing hundreds of data points and doing ever more complex analysis, Craig decided that doing the basics of player tracking well would be more impactful.

“I always tell people that sports science is very simple,” he said. “I forecast the predicted outcome of each session and then gather data into AthleteMonitoring to understand if we met that desired outcome, including the response of each athlete. It’s about advising the coaching staff whether that session should be adjusted or not depending on the outcomes of the players. If we’re not monitoring the right variables, then we’re missing an important piece of the puzzle.”

As he has watched the AthleteMonitoring platform evolve over the past 14 years, Craig believes that the capability to build a complete electronic medical record (EMR) for each player is one of the most significant developments. Data is available to authorized personnel across the continuum of care and is protected by a HIPAA and GDPR-compliant platform that prevents unauthorized access to sensitive information.

“AthleteMonitoring has worked really hard on getting the medical side right,” Craig said. “I can’t tell you how many organizations I go into where their medical data is not governed very well. It’s on spreadsheets and all over the place. There are so many holes from a legal perspective because a physiotherapist can have player data on their computer and leave with it at the end of the year. Information is stored in all these different spaces, while it could all be absorbed into AthleteMonitoring.”

Supporting Global Sports Performance Management

Craig is at the forefront of a new wave in elite sports, where a seasoned professional can consult with multiple teams in various sports based in different locations around the world. Utilizing AthleteMonitoring from his home base in Australia gives him as much oversight into the daily training, game day performance, and recovery of athletes that he’d get if he had an in-person role.

“Working from Sydney, I’m very comfortable with my understanding of what’s going on wherever that team is,” Craig said. “I can wake up in the morning and see the AthleteMonitoring dashboards for each team we’re working with. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world if we’ve got all the data coming in, have a good philosophy, and there are well-trained people on the ground. Because I’m acting as a virtual high-performance manager, your organization is saving a lot of money.”

When working with national teams, Craig builds relationships with club teams and helps them see the value of him tracking their players’ fitness, health, and wellness.

“I like to monitor players on a daily basis from a national team perspective,” Craig said. “By having that data, you build up a real understanding of the athlete and can look at their training loads so that when they come into camp, you don’t get large spikes in the data. I recently worked with a wonderful coach who understood this concept. He wanted to know where the players across the world were at from a performance and wellness and a training perspective to help selection. A player could be a long way away from home, isolated, and not enjoying their club life, but for one minute a day they’re putting data into their home nation’s system, and they realize that there’s a relationship.”

As he consults with national and club teams across the globe, Craig puts similar best practices into place. He combines this with tailoring his approach to the needs and cultural expectations that each local environment presents.

“A wonderful thing about AthleteMonitoring is that I’ve been able to put it into most of the languages of the teams I’ve worked with,” he said. “When you’re going into Japan or the Middle East, that goes a long way to simplifying the data, and I can customize the system to what’s required in that specific place. It’s wonderful when you can start to see it take hold and people see how it’s contributing to the whole performance outcome.”

 

Pursuing a People-First Approach

In addition to gathering proven objective data from players, Craig utilizes AthleteMonitoring to capture self-reported information in weekly questionnaires that connect the dots between subjective experiences and performance.

“Sleep has always been a cornerstone for me, so we look at sleep volume and quality,” Craig said. “We also look at perceived muscle soreness, fatigue, and psychological state. It’s also important to leave a space for comments because if someone takes the time to add one, then there’s usually something there that I need to look at.”

Objective data can paint a large part of any athlete’s performance picture, and paying attention if their numbers trend up or down is key to making the right intervention. But Craig believes that taking a holistic view of the whole person is also a must.

“Athletes are humans as well, and there’s a lot going on,” Craig said. “Happy players play better, but they might have contract negotiations, issues at home, or a newborn – all these things that go into an athlete’s wellbeing are often overlooked. Performance is capacity minus noise, and if you’re building up the noise, then you won’t see a net gain in performance. AthleteMonitoring allows us to track the noise.”

Tracking athletes’ wellbeing alongside their training metrics gives Craig a starting point to create more informed touchpoints that enable him to get to know the people he is working with, so he can better meet their needs.

“People don’t care how much you know – they know how much you care,” he said. “I’m there to serve the athletes, coaches, and the organization, and once they know that, then they engage, and it makes a difference to performance. I have a philosophy about self-science, which is the study of you by you. Each player or corporate client is their own one-person business, and if I can help them understand themselves better with data, then they’ll know what they have to do to maximize their potential.”

Targeting Optimal Outcomes When It Counts

AthleteMonitoring enables a performance director, like Craig, to establish baseline ranges for every player’s objective outputs and wellness markers. If their scores are good, they’re marked green, if they are close to one end of the range or the other, they’re marked yellow, and if they’re outside the typical high or low value, they’re marked red. This can help Craig simplify player availability and readiness for the coaching staff, so they can make more informed selection decisions.

“We can have so many data points from training data, match data, wellness data, and sleep data,” he said. “At the end of the day, the final thing that you’d put in a report is whether we’re good to go or not. That’s what a coach wants to know: how many players have I got for the session today? I could have a player that’s red flagged all across, but just from that I’m not going to make a decision that they’re out. There needs to be a conversation with the coach, and then they can end up making that call.”

In addition to giving the coaching staff an overall, team-level view of the entire squad each day, continual monitoring enables Craig to keep tabs on each player and investigate any potential issues, so they can be quickly resolved.

“Even though it’s a team sport, it’s played by a group of individuals, so we need to look at the scores for each person. Having standardized ranges lets me know if a player is outside their norm. If there’s something in their wellness data, I can ask the physiotherapist to take a closer look and see what’s going on. You can take a small, acute snapshot of what’s happening and then use longitudinal data to see which way someone is trending. That’s very powerful.”

In working with national teams and high-level clubs, Craig has found that AthleteMonitoring helps get ready for individual games during the season. He also realized that using the system to track the readiness of each player and the squad as a whole can help effectively manage a team during a multi-week tournament.

“It’s very important in tournaments like World Cups or at the Olympics – where you’ve got multiple games – that you’ve got all this data before they come in, to keep athletes in their optimal performance zones,” Craig said. “When I was working with Australia in the 2015 Asian Cup, we played South Korea in the group stage and again in the final. The match data from the group game showed similar distances and high-speed distances ran, but in the final, we ran an extra 10 kilometers overall. We had fantastic coaching and medical staff who were able to keep the players in a balanced wellness state. Over the course of the tournament, we didn’t get fitter, but their fatigue was higher, whereas ours was managed.”

Over many years of using AthleteMonitoring with different high-performing teams, Craig has seen technologies come and go. He values the consistency that his vendor contacts provide.

“Usually when an organization grows, you lose your personal relationships,” Craig said. “That has never happened with AthleteMonitoring. Francois is a great person who believes in his system and is constantly working to make it better.”

Having used multiple AMS platforms, Craig has seen the impact of just about every option firsthand. He’s very clear on which one he recommends and why.

“If you’re going to buy an AMS, you can’t go past AthleteMonitoring because of the price and the fact that it gives you everything you need,” Craig said. “It’s a simple, thorough system that’s had years of continuous improvement and does a wonderful job.”

As he has expanded his performance consulting to the corporate world and other domains outside of sports, Craig has started to see the potential for tracking training, health, and wellness.

“Everyone wants to perform and maximize their potential, so why can’t we extrapolate what we’re doing with athletes?” he said. “In police departments, fire brigades, and the military, you want to know where people are at. AthleteMonitoring/FITSTATS allows you to do that because it’s versatile. I want to give every client the world’s best practices, and monitoring is an important part of the performance cycle.”

Location: Isle of Man, United Kingdom

Number of sports using AthleteMonitoring: 18

Main uses: Performance tracking, health monitoring, and athlete development

Athletes managed: 180

 Isle of Man Sport acts as an independent forum for the promotion & development of sports and recreation. It provides advice and expertise to the Department of Education, Sport and Culture on all matters pertaining to sports and recreation on the Island. Isle of Man Sport also identifies and develops athletes at all levels, from juniors to elite competitors.

The Isle of Man, an island in the Irish Sea, only has a population of 85,000. But it punches well above its weight on the world sporting stage. In the past few years, Manx athletes have included Sir Mark Cavendish, who holds the record for the most stages won at the Tour de France, and Olympic gold medalists Georgia Taylor-Brown (triathlon) and Peter Kennaugh (cycling).

The Isle of Man has also produced promising young competitors, including world top 100 tennis player Billy Harris, Olympic equestrian rider Yasmin Ingham, UK CrossFit champion Aimee Cringle, European motocross silver medalist Kaytlyn Adshead, and ultra-athletes Sarah Webster and Nikki Arthur.

To nurture such athletes, Isle of Man Sport created a development pipeline with five stages. Coordinating their training as they progressed used to be difficult, as strength and conditioning coaches and other professionals recorded workouts with paper and pen, and there was no good way for athletes to report their health status. Paul Jones, performance coordinator at Isle of Man Sport and manager of Isle of Man FC, looked for an athlete management system (AMS) that would facilitate better information sharing via a central platform. One system clearly stood out.

“We went through a government procurement process and looked at a lot of different athlete management systems,” Jones said. “Nothing could touch the level of detail and granularity that AthleteMonitoring provides at a low price point. Plus, they were able to help us create a bespoke solution that’s adaptable to our future needs. It was a no brainer.”

Customizing an AMS for 18 Sports

One of the reasons that Jones got up and running quickly with AthleteMonitoring was its usability. He has also been able to tailor it to the exact needs of Isle of Man Sport.

“There are lots of preset functions in AthleteMonitoring that you can crack on with, and then as you learn to use it, you can play around more with the settings,” he said. “That’s great for me because I want things to be editable and customizable. You don’t need to be overly technical to make it work well.”

Some of this customization involves applying real-time surveillance to athletes in 18 different sports. Certain governing bodies utilize AthleteMonitoring for this in a single discipline, while others like the Swedish Olympic Committee apply it across many. Isle of Man Sport has followed this second approach because the platform is versatile enough to be tailored to individual needs while also collecting standardized data.

“We’ve got just under a hundred athletes in AthleteMonitoring, plus another 80 young people in a lower part of our pathway,” Jones said. “Now I know most of what’s going on, without relying on bumping into someone who might share information with me. As long as our athletes and staff are communicating well, we can all stay up to speed on how each person is doing. We’ve got our fingers on the pulse from a systemic standpoint and can also zoom in to take a look at any individual. That makes my life a lot easier.”

Improving Communication with Secure Athlete-Coach Messaging

In addition to having a large number of athletes spread across many sports, they’re also based in multiple locations. “Young athletes live in different parts of our island and elite ones train and compete all over the world,” Jones said. “We wanted a way to keep in touch and make sure everyone stays on track of training data and any other information their team feels it’s important to track.”

The solution was to implement the secure messaging function in AthleteMonitoring. It enables every member of the team around each athlete to view current and complete data. This facilitates a multidisciplinary approach around a reliable single source of truth.

“A lot of our athletes are young people who very rarely use email,” Jones said. “We wanted a system within an app for secure messaging that met HIPAA and GDPR compliance. AthleteMonitoring gives us that, and allows us to bring a sports coach, physio, S&C coach, and performance psychologist together in one place without having to create big email chains. Now we can communicate with all our athletes in the development pathway and share documents with them and their team in a timely manner. We’re giving them the best support we can.”

Once AthleteMonitoring solved Jones’s biggest daily challenges – communication and information sharing – he soon realized that it also had other useful capabilities. These would give Isle of Man Sport quantitative and qualitative insights into their athletes’ progress.

“The added bonus is the training data, periodization monitoring, wellness checks, and psychological wellbeing questionnaires we do every month,” Jones said. “We use AthleteMonitoring for gym training design, RPEs, and velocity-based training with different sensors.”

Supporting Mental + Physical Health Worldwide

As Isle of Man athletes progress along their development pathway, they often start training and competing overseas. It’s all too easy for there to be a disconnect between them and their homeland, and for Jones and his colleagues to become separated from coaching groups in different sports.

“The athletes we’re tracking training for put their reps and sets into the AthleteMonitoring app, give us their RPE, and leave notes about how it felt,” Jones said. “If they’re in the States or Australia, their coaches can then adjust training for the next day. When they wake up, they’ve got a slightly tailored program based on their response to the previous day. And getting a survey from us about their health or mental state lets them know that we still care and want to stay connected. We often support them with information that their team or governing body doesn’t know.”

In addition to collecting and sharing hard data, AthleteMonitoring enables Isle of Man Sport to gather subjective information on each athlete’s mental health and progress toward their goals.

“Our surveys give us the chance to check in with our athletes no matter where they are and make sure they’re doing OK,” Jones said. “We’ve created a questionnaire that we use for quarterly athlete reviews. It helps identify actual and perceived progress and keep them active in our performance pathway for longer. We want to help them build skills, set and review goals, and be accountable. We’ve also modified a standard POMS questionnaire to assess their mood. It’s helping us be proactive in our care and clinical support, and the athlete response rate is fantastic.”

Uniting Performance and Medical Data

In many sports organizations, performance information is stored in one system and medical data in another. These silos make it difficult for professionals in various roles to coordinate an athlete’s training and treatment efficiently. With an optional Electronic Health Record (EHR) module, AthleteMonitoring provides a single, central repository for both and keeps athletes’ private data safe in accordance with GDPR and other security standards.

“We use AthleteMonitoring for medical notes,” Jones said. “Before, it was challenging to ensure we had these for all the athletes in our pathway, as they were on a government server. How could we communicate personally sensitive medical information using a central hub in a safe and secure way? AthleteMonitoring solved that problem, and that area is locked down so only physios and doctors can access it.”

While the clinicians who Jones mentioned can upload, search for, and retrieve a specific athlete’s health records, he and other authorized Isle of Man Sport users can see a health status summary. This helps get everyone on the same page when trying to progress through the continuum of care until they’re cleared to resume normal activities. There is also an audit trail to see which actions were taken and when a staff member interacted with an athlete.

“Once a doctor or physio writes their HIPAA-compliant SOAP notes in AthleteMonitoring, they can add treatment plans,” Jones said. “They can then share their status and when they’re likely to return to training with the whole group. That has made our governance process far more robust.”

Another way that an AMS can improve athletes’ overall wellbeing is to monitor their recovery and readiness. Jones and his colleagues combine objective assessments, data points like heart rate variability (HRV), and subjective questionnaires that can be completed in seconds from a phone or tablet. This enables Isle of Man Sport to be proactive, identify potential issues in advances, and intervene before a small problem becomes a big one.

“We do testing before gym sessions – including countermovement jumps – to see how well each athlete has recovered,” Jones said. “Once they get used to that, then we start rolling out a questionnaire two or three times a week through AthleteMonitoring. With that and HRV tracking, there are early warning signs so we can spot an injury, overload, or illness. If a teenager doesn’t listen to us, it provides an opportunity to go back, look at the data with them, and see patterns in the data before they got a muscle strain or a fever.”

Building Stronger Athlete Relationships

As much potential as it has to be a preventative measure, consistently gathering, consolidating, and visualizing each athlete’s data provides a conversation starter for Jones with young athletes in the Isle of Man’s performance pathway. The goal isn’t quick results, but sustainable, long-term development of the next Mark Cavendish or Georgia Taylor-Brown. Such a responsible, gradual approach is one reason that the island has far more Olympians, world champions, and elite competitors than is projected for such a small community.

“The great thing with AthleteMonitoring is that you have data that you can talk about and help young athletes to understand why some things are important,” Jones said. “It’s a really good way to educate them when things don’t go the way they wanted them to. Now there’s a learning opportunity, they embed better behaviors going forward, and they become more self-reliant. We’re building stronger relationships with our athletes and showing them that we’re going to deliver what we promised.”

Combining Value and Athlete-Centric Features

When asked why he continues recommending AthleteMonitoring to peers in similar roles, Jones said, “AthleteMonitoring is affordable and does everything you need it to do without it being too flashy,” Jones said. “You can gather solid data on the athletes you work with in easy-to-use software. By combining our community-driven activities with better and more timely information sharing, we’ll continue to produce and develop world-class athletes.”

Another reason Isle of Man Sport continues to extend the reach of AthleteMonitoring is the responsive support Jones receives anytime he reaches out.

“If there’s ever an issue, it’s always solved quickly and in a very personable way,” he said. “I never feel lost like I have with some other big vendors, and the AthleteMonitoring team genuinely cares about us and our success with their product. They’re very open to suggestions for new features and always make me feel like they’re here to help.”

Focus: College sports

Location: Winnipeg, Canada

Number of teams: 16

Sports: Basketball, golf, football, track and field, soccer, cross country, volleyball, hockey, swimming

The University of Manitoba (UM) is a public research university in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Founded in 1877, it was the first university in Western Canada. The school’s athletic teams, known as the Bisons, compete in the Canada West conference. UM consistently ranks among the country’s top 10 universities for producing Academic All-Canadian athletes.

Extending the Capabilities of a Small S&C Staff

In the early 2010s, UM received significant funding to invest in facilities, staff, and other resources for its sports teams. This included a new football stadium, a high-performance training center, and a dedicated strength and conditioning coaching group. After evaluating several athlete management systems to support their programming, these coaches selected AthleteMonitoring.

“We have around 400 varsity athletes, and the former head strength coach saw the need to synthesize information, parse through large amounts of data, and manage relationships with them,” said Cole Scheller, lead strength and conditioning coach at UM. “The aim was to bring data together in a central hub so we had greater context and could make information actionable. That led to selecting AthleteMonitoring.”

The athletes Cole mentioned are spread across eight women’s and eight men’s varsity squads. Back when the strength and conditioning staff used paper on clipboards and spreadsheets, managing practice and training data for all of them was extremely time-consuming and the data was limited to whoever recorded it.

“We only have two full-time staff and there’s no way we could collect objective, subjective, and injury data for 400 athletes,” Cole said. “We’d need at least 15 people to do it, and we don’t have the resources for that. AthleteMonitoring replaces an army of grad assistants with a platform that’s accessible at any given time.”

Since AthleteMonitoring was implemented, it’s much faster to capture information for all of UM’s athletes and it’s instantly available to every authorized user on the performance and medical teams. This makes it easier to know what’s going on with each sport throughout the day.

“Our men’s hockey program skates at 8:00 AM and our track and field program starts practice at 6:00 PM, so the breadth of the timing makes it difficult to establish set contact points,” Cole said. “AthleteMonitoring allows each sport to push information to us, so we see what’s going on, which makes it a very useful tool.”

 

Joining the Dots in the Offseason

One of the challenges that Cole and his fellow staff members faced was understanding what their athletes did during the offseason. Over half of them are not from Winnipeg, and when they went home for the summer, they could be given training programs, but there was no way to know if they followed them or not. The AthleteMonitoring system provides greater visibility and accountability.

“Because we’re involved in high-performance sport, we don’t deal with six- or eight-week training blocks – it’s 52 weeks of the year,” Cole said. “There are chunks of time when we’re not with our athletes – like over summer break – and we needed a way to maintain those relationships and see what they were doing with their workouts. With AthleteMonitoring, we can look at in-season loads, create yearly training plans, and build up athletes’ volume in the weeks before training camps start.

Coming in, we can see the level that every player was at during the previous month, and tailor practices and strength sessions accordingly. Our football team had its best season in 23 years and part of that was matching their training camp and on-field demands with their summer training.”

Many college strength and conditioning programs store athlete data in separate systems, applications, and databases, which makes it difficult to share and act upon information. Others have blind spots where there’s no context at all. Using AthleteMonitoring has solved these issues for Cole and his fellow coaches.

“Software doesn’t make decisions – the professionals using it do,” Cole said. “But you can’t make informed choices without information. We log data in AthleteMonitoring like assessment results, training loads, and session RPEs. It allows us to see each player’s progress over time. Data is accessible in one place and gives us a shared language, which improves our organizational agility. It cuts down the need for seeking information because you can easily pull it.”

For an athlete management system to be practical, it needs to be user-friendly. While AthleteMonitoring includes advanced functionality – such as injury and illness monitoring based on IOC standards – it’s also simple to operate and administer.

“I only need to look at AthleteMonitoring for five or 10 minutes in the morning and periodically throughout the day because all the information I need is right there,” Cole said. “I can also provide each coach with a simple snapshot of their team’s physical state and readiness. It’s easy to get it to show exactly what you want because it’s so customizable. If you have a program that is well-informed and holistic, almost every day is going to be fine. Then you can just identify one-off outliers to start conversations about.”

Proactively Managing Injury and Return to Play

In addition to cataloging objective performance data and subjective wellness responses in AthleteMonitoring, Cole is also utilizing the system to collect and report on injury statistics. This doesn’t just improve hindsight but enables training programs to be tweaked proactively to reduce the incidence of injury going forward.

“Driving performance with our athletes isn’t that difficult – it’s reducing the likelihood of injury that’s hard,” Cole said. “Three years ago, I noticed that we were getting too many hamstring injuries in the skill position groups on our football team, so I started having them sprint year-round. Now the hamstring injury rate went way down. AthleteMonitoring allows you to target things like this and do something about them. When we’re able to make micro changes for consecutive seasons, it produces macro results.”

Making such informed changes enables UM to keep its overall injury rates low. Yet there will always be some athletes who get hurt. Logging these incidents quickly in AthleteMonitoring, enabling the performance and medical teams to coordinate their efforts, and uploading clinical notes, treatment plans, and more help provide timely care and accelerate return-to-play protocols.

“I know what happens to an athlete before they tell me about it because the medical staff did their thing in AthleteMonitoring and I was notified,” Cole said. “We have a weekly meeting with them where we go through athlete updates. I can upload an exercise program for an injured player so that when they go to physical therapy, they don’t need to do those exercises again. Clinical notes are available in the summertime to make sure that if someone got an ankle injury right before the season ended, they resolve it while they’re away.”

Load management is one of the biggest challenges for any injured athlete. Some are so eager to return to full fitness that they often overdo their training, while others don’t get sufficient load exposure. Real-time tracking in AthleteMonitoring helps Cole and the medical staff manage acute-to-chronic workload and progress each player at the right rate, so they come back strong and ready.

“Data visualization has allowed us to avoid the mistake of someone quadrupling their training volume over three or four days,” Cole said. “We can spread out the load instead so that they safely ramp up on their way back to full performance.”

Informing Player Relationships and Development

As important as it is to collect, collate, and visualize objective data in AthleteMonitoring, this only tells half of each athletes’ story. Cole believes that it’s also crucial to obtain subjective data about how every player is feeling, what their recovery looks like, and if there are any issues they’re dealing with outside of sports. This is why the school created a wellness questionnaire that they send out weekly. If someone’s scores are outside their normal ranges, it flags in the system so that Cole or another staff member can follow up and dig deeper into the issue. This way, the school is helping safeguard its athletes’ physical and mental wellbeing.

“You could have the best practice plan and best training program in the world, but if someone’s not eating or not sleeping or they ended a relationship, it doesn’t matter,” Cole said. “Our athletes have lives outside of college sports, and AthleteMonitoring surveys help provide greater context of what they’re dealing with, so we have a more complete picture. It’s the things that are unseen that AthleteMonitoring does a great job of illuminating. This enables us to target people who might need help, so we can check in and let them know about the resources that are available to them.”

As well as referring students to experts like counselors and nutritionists, Cole also takes it upon himself to check in with athletes if their survey responses indicate that they might be struggling. If enough fields are color-coded red, he can see with a quick glance at an AthleteMonitoring dashboard who he needs to talk to.

“The hardest part of my job is relationship management with the athletes,” Cole said. “It makes them feel valued if I know what’s going on in their lives. If someone’s wellness score has been really poor for the past few days, it allows me to ask, ‘How are you doing?’ Without having that information pushed to me through AthleteMonitoring, it would be a lot more difficult to have those conversations.”

Another way that UM has enhanced its athlete data collection is by augmenting hard numbers with rate of perceived exertion (RPE) scores. Doing so provides greater insight into how difficult players find each training session so that coaches can better balance more and less intense sessions during each practice week.

“The thing that causes friction is differences between reality and expectation,” Cole said. “If you’re designing a sport practice or a training session, you might think something is easy, but some of your athletes could think it’s super challenging. AthleteMonitoring helps to better inform what coaches’ expectations should be. Our hockey coach went through every drill his team was going to use for the entire year and gave it an RPE scale based off of how hard his players thought each practice was.”

While Cole has to write programs with lines of best fit for entire teams, being able to see how each athlete’s metrics change and comparing this to their normal ranges presents a greater chance for personalization.

“AthleteMonitoring tells us if someone is different from their normal self, which is useful for fitting into each person’s own context,” he said. “It gives you an opportunity to make everybody feel like an individual in a team setting.”

The ability to track players’ progress across their entire college sports careers allows Cole to take a long-range view of athlete development that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

“With the longitudinal data AthleteMonitoring provides, we’ve started to work on the nuances of player development instead of just objective outputs in the weight room,” he said. “If you’re a women’s hockey player who’s in year four and you’re back squatting 140 kilos and running 17.5 on the yo-yo test, what do you want to work on next?”

It’s essential for UM’s athletic department to have a full-featured, stable AMS that offers continual uptime. What is also key to the ongoing success of the athlete performance and wellness initiative is that Cole is working with a trusted long-term partner.

“AthleteMonitoring’s customer service is awesome,” he said. “Anytime I have an issue, I have a direct line to a familiar point of contact, who always gets back to me right away. That has helped ensure we’re able to use the system exactly how we need to. They really value our customer experience.”