Major League Baseball has accepted the use of wearable tech and recently approved two different wearables that can be used by the teams during the games. This is the first season that players can use Zephyr Bioharness and Motus Baseball Sleeve.

Zephyr Bioharness is capable of providing breathing and heart rates, and is used in pro and collegiate sports markets, including the University of Georgia football program. The Motus Baseball sSeeve monitors the stress and force exerted on the elbow. Such strain sometimes leads to baseball’s most dreaded injury-related procedure: Tommy John surgery.

MLB has allowed the wearables for the reason that they would detect serious injuries and concussions during games, and it must be noted that the data provided by these sports wearables wouldn’t allow any sort of performance improvement during the game. The data is downloaded by players after the game to find out about the injuries.

MLB’s acceptance of wearables to be used during the official games is just an indicator that the wearable tech industry will likely begin infusing itself into many other popular leagues and live games.The biggest reason wearables are revolutionizing sports is the way that they utilize big data, much like the way big businesses do.

With the NFL adding tracking sensors to the shoulder pads of each and every player starting this fall, coaches will be able to build on training regimens in a more unique way. And with that customizable training comes better performance, more effective, efficient coaching staff, and potentially more money in the long run. While MLB and NFL have opened the gates to including wearables in competition, some leagues are slower to take action.

Just recently, NBA ruled out the use of Whoop by Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Matthew Dellavedova. Whoop is a wearable activity tracker that collects more than 150 megabytes of physiological data per day based on tracking heart rate, heart rate variability, skin conductivity, ambient temperature, accelerometery and motion. The player had been wearing the tech for about 15 games before the league took notice and banned it. So a middle ground is still needed.

In a world where winning is directly correlated to profits, it’s easy to imagine how this investment in wearables technology could produce an incredible return. The biggest impact is that we could see an increase in player safety. The ability to track an athlete’s reaction to injuries both can trigger a more effective rehab and a better regulation of player safety. Even normal wear and tear on a body can be observed to decrease recovery time and emphasize preventative measures. That’s a win all around.

The post #DigitalPPG: How Wearables Make Sports Better appeared first on Startup Southerner.

My father and Steve Young at a Monday Night Football game last year. He coached Steve Young in the mid-80s with the LA Express.

Many of my earliest childhood memories involve the game of football. It has been the profession of my father, Ed Lambert, for my entire life. We often joke about the countless number of games endured or the many football stadiums visited over the years. His 12 different jobs in as many states certainly kept our family on the move. Imagine a little black girl from the San Francisco Bay Area being transplanted to places like Ames, Iowa, or Albuquerque, New Mexico, or Waco, Texas in the mid- to late-1980s.

Navigating those spaces and places was certainly a different world for my then 10-year old self,  long before “diversity” was ever a topic deemed worthy enough of discussion. Little did I know that my father’s career path in football would ultimately become a training ground for me on lessons on both race and gender. But that’s what happened.

Race relations in sports has long been a complicated history, particularly in football. There was always some sort of struggle to overcome. First it was just allowing black players the ability to participate in many major conferences in the 1960s. Then it became the struggle for equality in the hiring practices of coaching staffs in the 1980s, a fight that is still a point of contention to this day. While most teams often comprise a large percentage of black players, the coaching staffs and athletic departments of many NCAA schools often struggle with diversity.

Today’s game is seen as being rigged, with fewer than 8 percent of top head coaches in the biggest football programs

My father, the coach at Vanderbilt.

being black. Of the 128 schools that comprise the Football Bowl Subdivision, only 10 schools have black head coaches. Let’s be real. These numbers are predictable because the entire decision-making apparatus is dominated by white men. Let’s start at the top: The NCAA has never had anyone but a white man as president. Of the Power Five conferences, none has ever had anyone but a white man as commissioner.

My father was a charter member of the now-defunct Black Coaches Association, an organization that was at the forefront of the fight to create more opportunities for black coaches at a time when colleges and universities were slamming doors in faces of minority coaching candidates. In 1988, amidst community pressure, my father was hired as the first black assistant coach at Baylor University. We had no idea what we were stepping into as a family.

Prior to his hiring, the Baylor football program was criticized by some members of the local black community, culminating in a letter-writing campaign to recruits that claimed the Baylor program was racist in its hiring practices. At the time, the historical significance of that hiring was certainly lost on me, but looking back I now understand its weight. My father played a big part in pushing things forward for many black coaches in football, but nearly 30 years later, the issue of diversity in hiring practices in the NCAA and the NFL is still a major issue. You think diversity just happens on its own? Think again. It’s implemented by design.

The post Daughter of the Game: What Football Taught Me About Diversity appeared first on Startup Southerner.

#DigitalPPG is a recurring column by Charisse Lambert, a writer specializing in the convergence of sports, tech, and urban brand campaigns.

Like many businesses, the National Football League is experimenting with big data to help players, fans, and teams alike.

The 2016 NFL Scouting Combine is at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Ind. this week from Feb. 23-29. NFL scouts will evaluate top college prospects in tests such as the 40-yard dash, vertical leap, shuttle drills, and more, and these players have spent months training in these combine events to improve their stock among NFL teams. TV networks have turned the weeklong gathering into an offseason programming bonanza that includes live television and social media coverage.

Despite the advancement in technology since the combine began—and all of the focus the annual event now receives—many of assessment tools used in this process have remained relatively unchanged and test only physical attributes. And in recent years, many NFL coaches have begun to speak out against the traditional combine process and its methods as a whole. Now more than ever, they are turning to technology to study prospective players. The days of scouts keeping time on stopwatches as prospects run in the so-called  “Underwear Olympics” are rather played out.

On Feb. 24, the league will hold its first Football Performance and Technology Symposium, featuring speakers including Dr. Marcus Elliott, founder and director of P3, which has evaluated NBA draft participants the past two years in a 3D motion analysis lab. The idea for the symposium was first sparked at last year’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, where Dr. Robby Sikka, Lead Clinical Research Scientist at TRIA Orthopaedic Center, met with Matt Birk, former Minnesota Vikings offensive lineman and current NFL Director of Football Development. Their discussion included the increasing trend of teams hiring sports science directors and analytics departments. The idea then became to develop a best-practices program for the NFL so the increasing number of teams interested in data, analytics, and sports science could hear from the best in the world how they are handling the vast amounts of data permeating the sports world.

Together Sikka and the NFL Football Operations team developed the symposium, where attendees will have the opportunity to hear from sports science directors; management from top college football programs; analytics executives from NBA and MLB teams, including last season’s World Series and NBA champions, as well as English Premier League teams. Experts from TRIA Orthopaedic Center, Harvard, the U.S. Air Force and other institutions will also be present to discuss the future of technology and data in football.

The post 2016 NFL Combine’s New Feature? The Inaugural Football Performance and Technology Symposium appeared first on Startup Southerner.

#DigitalPPG is a recurring column by Charisse Lambert, a writer specializing in the convergence of sports, tech, and urban brand campaigns.

How we watch sports is about to change in a major way. And at the heart of that transformation is a familiar gaming technology—virtual reality. What was once seen as fantasy, VR technology has quickly entered the sports world, and is changing the way coaches conduct practice and train players. It is also enhancing the fan experience by allowing an all-access approach to fans’ favorite sports teams, enabling the masses to experience what only a limited number might otherwise enjoy.

STriVR Labs, which stands for Sports Training in Virtual Reality, is a leader in the sports VR space. The company’s client list includes at least six NFL teams and even more college teams, including Arkansas, Auburn, Vanderbilt and Clemson. Video is shot on a 360-degree camera cluster atop a lightweight tripod, which is placed alongside selected players in practice. The video is uploaded to a VR database, where it can be viewed through an Oculus Rift headset.

The benefits of using VR technology is not lost on many who play contact sports like football, where injuries are an inevitable part of the game and head trauma has become a part of the public conversation. Programs are venturing into virtual reality as a perfect step forward in the world of athletic training. Because the mind has no way of distinguishing between a real situation and one generated by the technology, it is the ideal means of supplementing work on the field, on the court, on the ice, to further a player’s skill development and knowledge of the game. What virtual reality brings to the table is the ability to let athletes practice without stepping on the field, increasing reps while minimizing injuries.

At present, virtual reality is a high-end product that comes at significant expense. But that will likely change—as soon as this year. In the same ways that the earliest high definition tech wasn’t yet completely streamlined when networks began to switch to HD, we are still in the infancy of VR and the headsets on the market have yet to be perfected. But as companies like Samsung develop smaller, more comfortable VR wearables, many predict that the technology will see a boom similar to that of HD in the early 2000s.

And as the price point drops, look for the interest from teams and leagues in monetizing virtual reality to continue to skyrocket. The NBA made history on opening night this season when it became the first major sports league to offer a live-streamed version of a game in virtual reality. NASCAR and the NFL both have been in experimental stages with using the technology to stream events. Recently, FOX Sports began collaborating with company NextVR to bring live VR coverage of the Premier Boxing Champions (PBC) matches. And there was even the recent announcement from CNET founder Halsey Minor of a virtual reality network launching in the second quarter of this year that will focus on sports and music events.

It’s still early, but I am calling it: Viewing live sports via virtual reality will be the next big breakthrough on the sports broadcasting landscape. Mark it.

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