3 Reasons Your Performance Systems Are Limiting Your Team’s Success - Part 3
Reason #3 - You Haven’t Identified What Actually Impacts Winning
It is well understood that keeping players healthy, strong, and on the field of play is critical to winning. I have illustrated that connection in the NFL, NHL, and NBA in several LinkedIn posts. Athletes pack weight rooms and training rooms every day, working to get stronger, healthier, and remain in the starting lineup. Every team’s performance staff is busy treating and training athletes so that they are available to perform in competition. So, if every team in your sport and league is utilizing variations of the same methods (some teams are better than others, but most are doing variations of the same practices) to support athlete preparation and development, where is your competitive advantage?
Separating your team from your competition lies in the ability to impact not just athlete development, but more importantly, player development. Athlete development is critical to team preparation and readiness, but there is an important difference between athlete development and player development that needs to be highlighted.
Athlete development is the process of enhancing the mental and physical qualities that enable athletes to improve their athletic potential. All athletes need a robust foundation of athletic development where they are developing the general performance qualities (mental resilience, strength, power, mobility, stamina) that will support them throughout their careers. However, the assumption that continuous development of general physical qualities will result in enhanced sport performance is not always the case, especially as athletes mature throughout their careers. For example, in many sports, once a requisite level of strength is achieved, continuously chasing increases in force output can have diminishing returns. However, addressing increases in rate of force development, power output, stiffness, etc. will likely have a greater transfer to sport performance, being that the time available to express force is limited in most sports.
More specifically, player development has a narrower focus on maximizing the mental and physical qualities that are relevant to success in one’s sport. The key word here is relevant and understanding what is relevant is complex and relies on an effective integration between performance staff with analytics and scouting personnel. Between these groups, research and discussion allow for the identification of the on-field abilities that support elite performance at every position within a respective sport. The identification of these abilities pushes further research into identifying the performance qualities that support the development of those skills and abilities. Once identified, you are able to create a player development “road map” that directly impacts your team’s sustainable success.
MLB has had a head start and is leading the way with analytics in elite sport. This creates a ripe opportunity for MLB teams to hone in on the more detailed aspects of player development that will have a greater impact on player success and winning. Having led a performance department in an MLB organization that made a strong commitment to analytics and sports science, building a deep connection between the two and the performance staff allowed us to develop systems that expedited the development of many minor league players. As the NFL, NBA, NHL, and NCAA invest more in analytics and sports science, answering player development questions will become easier, allowing for a seamless transition from athlete development into player development, and enhanced organizational success.