3 Reasons Your Performance Systems Are Limiting Your Team’s Success - Part 1

Professional and NCAA sports teams have dedicated performance staff and systems that aim to improve player health and performance. While this is an essential aspect of player and team preparation, it may not be enough to create a competitive advantage and enhance team success. In the next three posts, we will explore the reasons why your performance systems may not be contributing to your team's success.

Reason #1 - You Don’t Have A Performance Department

It might sound shocking, but many professional and NCAA sports teams do not have a defined performance department. An intentional collection of the domains and staff that support athlete health and performance often does not exist. These organizations operate with separate strength and conditioning, athletic training, nutrition, sports science, rehab, and mental performance departments. As discussed in my previous post (https://www.teamintegro.com/blog/creating-a-high-performance-culture), the effectiveness of a performance department depends on a strong cultural foundation. Department culture is driven by leadership, and without an effective leadership structure over all elements that impact player health and performance, the result is isolated sections with misaligned goals, ineffective communication and collaboration, and systems that fail to reach their true potential.

If you have ever watched an orchestra play, you likely noticed the person standing in front of the musicians rhythmically waving their arms. The conductor is the orchestra leader and is responsible for keeping the musicians in sync. They do this by understanding every musician's role, and then teaching the music to the orchestra so that they can perform it in unison. They make interpretive decisions about how the music should be played to create a beautiful harmony for the orchestra and the audience. A conductor is to an orchestra what a musician is to an instrument. The musicians play the instruments. The conductor plays the musicians. Without the conductor, the orchestra is a group of musicians playing instruments in an independent, uncoordinated manner.  

Similar to an orchestra’s conductor, leadership is needed to effectively integrate all performance domains within a sports organization. Leaders need to understand every performance domain and teach the staff how to work together systematically. When I was hired as Director of Performance at the New York Mets, there was an organizational push to leverage cutting-edge technology and equipment to enhance player health and performance. While this was needed, my higher-priority goal was to unite talented people to work together to create progressive and impactful performance systems. In doing so, we were then able to strategically inject cutting-edge technology and equipment that improved the precision of our systems. This resulted in a reduction of player injuries across the organization by over 50% over the next four years. Additionally, we also saw great results across player development, player readiness, and reconditioning systems. These results would have been mitigated had we tried adding state-of-the-art technology to a disjointed system. Thus, it wasn’t the new equipment that created the positive results, it was the collaborative, progressive systems. The new equipment just enhanced the effectiveness of those systems.  

If you are still operating with your performance staff in separate sections, you are at a significant competitive disadvantage to your peers who have developed a fully integrated performance department. 

The next post will dive into Reason #2 - Understanding the difference between your purpose and your methods.