Optimizing Athlete Monitoring, Health and Performance Through Transdisciplinary Communication
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Discover how holistic player management and transdisciplinary collaboration enhance athlete health, performance, and overall team success.
How the Hudl ecosystem can help those working in sports organisations to achieve shared goals.
Introduction to this blog series
Performance in team sports is underpinned by a set of complex interactions between physical, physiological, technical, tactical, psychological, and athlete lifestyle factors. For these reasons, clubs often employ subject area specialists who are experts in their respective fields, who should all be working together to achieve the shared vision and objectives of the organisation.
For example, within an elite sports team, it would not be uncommon to see a wide range of support staff working with the players such as sports scientists, strength and conditioning coaches, nutritionists, psychologists, medical doctors, physiotherapists, analysts, data specialists, as well as a range of coaching staff responsible for designing and delivering the sport-specific training aligned to the club’s game model.
It is worth noting that job titles and departmental structure can vary between global regions, sports, and teams. For clubs with less staff, one person may cover multiple roles and take on more of a generalist than a specialist position.
Achieve Holistic Player Management with Collaborative Data
Within these separate but ideally connected departments, various technologies are used to collect various streams of data and information, but there can sometimes be a breakdown in the ability to share this data and communicate it effectively to all stakeholders. This could be a technical issue, whereby the personas are unable to efficiently centralize all the information they are collecting, or a human issue, where conflicting philosophies or subject interests render the information of less importance to one department than another.
For example, when planning a training drill, a technical coach might want to know what physical outputs to expect from the players and whether that will be appropriate for the outcomes of the training session. However, the sports scientist doesn’t have all this information in a centralized database and it will take them hours to collate and distribute this, ultimately taking away from important face-to-face time with the other staff and players.
A recent editorial in the Journal of Athletic Training titled ‘Athlete Health and Human Performance Will Not Improve Without Transdisciplinary Collaboration and Data Sharing in Elite Sport’ explores this topic in detail, suggesting that a ‘transdisciplinary’ and collaborative approach to managing athletes is essential to achieve the shared objectives of the organisation. When simplified, most would agree that one of these shared objectives almost always includes improving athlete health and performance.
To achieve this, information and data flows should be standardized and structured so that visibility of each important data point is presented to the right people, at the right time. After all, what is the point of collecting all this information if the data does not get through to the decision-makers who are responsible for important daily decisions such as designing appropriate training sessions, selecting the team, or modifying an individual player's workload to mitigate the risk of injury or underperformance?
In addition, the information collected from one department may substantiate, or conflict with, what another department is noticing – either reinforcing a decision or prompting a rethink. Connecting the dots between departments in any organisation cannot be overstated, and collaborative and diverse decision-making often leads to better outcomes.
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Collaborative Approach to Player Management with Hudl Pro Suite
At Hudl, our suite of products and tools are designed to make this easy. Within the Hudl Pro Suite, we have a fully-connected stack of solutions encompassing capture, content, data, distribution, analysis, and wearables which can be leveraged to enhance workflow efficiency and give powerful insights into athlete health and human performance, coaching, analysis, scouting and recruitment. Importantly, having all of your information under one connected ecosystem enables users of the Pro Suite to connect the dots between these areas, facilitating seamless communication and collaboration between departments. Ultimately, this helps everyone within your organisation make better decisions and gets you closer to achieving your shared vision and objectives.
This blog is the first in a series that will explore a range of in-depth topics related to athlete health and performance, with a specific focus on how an ecosystem of connected solutions can provide efficient data sharing and support collaborative decision-making.
Capture, analyze and share on connected platform: Take a closer look at Hudl Pro Suite