Episodes

When Bianca Rech shares a decision with FC Bayern’s players, she knows instantly how it has landed. “You feel it,” says the Director of Bayern’s women’s programme. “You already know when you look at their faces. You’re like ‘I think she doesn’t like it’, ‘yeah, she likes it’ and ‘she needs a bit of proof’. It’s like sometimes I see myself sitting on the other side.” The ‘other side’, as Bianca tells Teamworks’ Andrew Trimble and Leaders’ John Portch, refers to her transition from a Germany int...

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but does that hold up in the world of elite sports performance? “The issues I’ve seen here, they’re very rarely – almost never – [a result of] things getting missed,” Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers, tells Teamworks’ Director of Athlete Performance Andrew Trimble and Leaders Performance Institute Editor John Portch. “Where we run into slight problems is everyone trying to do the right thing with r...

Lachlan Penfold’s time at the Golden State Warriors was eye-opening in numerous ways. Chief amongst them was his realisation that joy is crucial in a high performance environment. “Joy in a professional sport? That’s a bit strange,” thought Penfold, but it was one of the team’s trademarks and no-one embodied it better than their Head Coach Steve Kerr and illustrious point guard Steph Curry. “The player that embodies it better than anyone in world sport is Steph Curry in terms of just the abso...

Flo Laing does not miss a beat in explaining what she’s most excited about heading into 2025. “It’s got to be the World Cup,” says Scotland women’s Lead Physiotherapist. The competition will be hosted across the border in England and starts in August. Laing says it has been the Scotland team’s “north star” for several years. During the course of our conversation – the second of three in this Keiser podcast series – we spoke about her work in women’s rugby at a time where the sport is starting...

Duncan French, the Senior Vice President of the UFC Performance Institute, is describing the aftermath of a bout. “If an athlete has gone through the fight pretty well and won, then it might be a very simple kind of cool down in one of the back rooms in the locker room and just do some light work to bring themselves back down again,” he says of the victor. “If an athlete’s had a pretty significant amount of trouble, that’s a very different strategy.” Mixed martial arts is, as he adds, “a spor...

Dan Jackson is the General Manager of Player Development & Leadership at the Adelaide Football Club, but he is quick to dispel any notions that he is a guru. “I can’t teach leadership,” he tells the Leaders Performance Podcast. “I can help unlock what’s already in there.” On that note, he is certain that leaders are not born. “Leadership is 100 per cent made, but it’s made from a very young age.” Beyond the origins of leadership, Dan spoke to Henry Breckenridge and John Portch about the impor...

Kitman Labs ensured Bayer Leverkusen knew what it took to win the German Bundesliga. They demonstrated to Dr Karl-Heinrich Dittmar, Leverkusen’s Head of Medical, the optimal range of player availability to top the table during a meet in Dublin, four or five years before Die Werkself actually won the title. “I kept this data; and last year we did it,” Dr Dittmar told the Kitman Labs podcast with evident pride. It turns out the data scanned almost perfectly across the numbers posted by the club ...

You may have a great performance structure for your men’s team, but simply cutting and pasting that to your women’s team does them a disservice. That is the view of Arianna Criscione, the Head of Football Operations at Mercury/13 and Como Women. “It’s not enough,” she tells this Kitman Labs podcast. She explains that there are a range of services, from nutrition to psychology, that need to be tailored to women players. Criscione continues: “You also have to have access to medical [support], bu...

More than 77 per cent of professional contracts in the Premier League and EFL are held by homegrown players. It wasn’t always thus. “English clubs were basically funding talent development models in Spain or in Brazil because English talent wasn’t seen to be at the same level as players from those countries,” Paul Prescott, the Managing Director of the International Football Group, told this Kitman Labs podcast. That situation persisted until recently and is starting to change in part due to t...

The 2024 StatsBomb Conference took place at Old Trafford in Manchester in October and the Leaders Performance Institute was in attendance. We spoke to the great and the good of the football analytics world, including three people speaking that day, about their thoughts on data & analytics in football, from recruitment and time management to analysis and AI. Coming up for you, we have: Liam Henshaw, a Data Analyst & First Team Scout with Hearts, who discusses his efforts to balance two roles a...

Predictably, when Sport Wales formed its Female Health & Performance team, some asked why there was no male equivalent. The truth is that male physiology and psychology has long been viewed as the default across sport. “For so many years we haven’t thought about females as being different,” says Esther Goldsmith, who works for Sport Wales, on the latest episode of the Leaders Performance Podcast. “When you think about it, it doesn’t make sense because it’s obvious we’re different.” This lack...

Alex Hill has spent 13 years studying organisations that have out-performed their peers for over 100 years, including the All Blacks, Eton College and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The result is his book Centennials: The 12 Habits of Great, Enduring Organisations. “If you want society to support you long term, your impact has to be much broader than just creating role models,” he continues. “Why don't you take the learning from being at the cutting edge of mental and physical performance and s...

“I’ve been told I give really good hugs.” So says Lindsay Mintenko, the Managing Director of USA Swimming’s National Team, in the second episode of this new series of the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you by our Main Partners Keiser. “Just being able to sit with an athlete; sometimes you don’t even have to talk,” she continues, “it’s just so they know you are there.” It is difficult to imagine many of her predecessors demonstrating such empathy with athletes whether they’re...

Michael Bourne has a sports science background, so it is no surprise that he places a premium on critical thinking. “It is core to me,” the Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA] tells the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you today by our Main Partners Keiser. Critical thinking is a skill that also served him well in roles at UK Sport and the England & Wales Cricket Board amongst others before he took the reins at the LTA in October 2020 (with Covid restricti...

Harjiv Singh, a performance and development scientist at the Orlando Magic, is another example of a practitioner who suffered their own debilitating injuries. Hot on the heels of Andrea Hudy, who recounted her own story of ACL troubles in episode one, Harjiv told the tale of a pickup basketball game that ended with him tearing his ACL and meniscus while also suffering an avulsion fracture. The 16 months of rehab stoked an interest in sports science that not only led him to the NBA but, since J...

When the US women’s national soccer team started tracking their menstrual cycles, it was seen as groundbreaking. At least part of their success in claiming back to back World Cup titles in 2019 was attributed to the fact they could adjust individual training plans and nutrition based on the data. Ellie Maybury was part of the USWNT backroom team that introduced this initiative and, more than half a decade on, tech support for female athletes doesn’t seem to have progressed as much as she’d hav...

Paige Bueckers’ stellar performances at this year’s March Madness proved that her ACL injury is long behind her. She returned to action in November 2023 after 15 months out and drove UConn all the way to the Final Four of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament. Behind the scenes, Andrea Hudy, the Director of Sports Performance (Women's Basketball) at UConn, was critical to Bueckers’ convalescence and is working (while pursuing a PhD) to ensure there are fewer such occurrences in the future. “...

David Dunne describes a perennial problem for practitioners in elite sports. “There’s a fundamental mismatch between what practitioners can deliver and what athletes actually want and desire,” he told Joe Lemire and John Portch on the People Behind the Tech podcast. “So we pivoted towards the COM-B model.” During this episode we spoke at length about Hexis’ continued growth following a successful seed round, technology’s ability to influence the evolution of the practitioner, and the fundamen...

“Everything is based upon the game for us,” said Ryan Alexander. “Understanding how the physical demands and fitness is going to be interpreted on the field as it is going to relate to the technical and tactical execution of a certain style of play.” Alexander, the Director of Sports Science at Atlanta United, was speaking to John Portch and Joe Lemire on the People Behind the Tech podcast ahead of the new MLS season, which began in late February. He also spoke about the club’s groundbreaking...

At November’s Leaders Sport Performance Summit at the Oval in London, a coach was overheard saying: ‘I have a team looking at AI but I have no idea what they do’. Gary McCoy is the CEO of Peak AI, which has been shortlisted in Sports Business Journals' list of the 10 Most Innovative Sports Tech Companies of 2023. Peak AI uses psycholinguistics to enhance performance and Gary has a firm view on that coach’s comment. “If you don’t know what they do, go and lead them because they probably don’t ...

Ben Baroody is a big believer in psychologist Michael Gervais’ idea that the apex of well-being and performance is human flourishing. “It means a lot to us,” he tells Henry Breckenridge and John Portch on the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you today by our Main Partners Keiser. “The aim and approach of all of our programs, processes, and our building blocks, is based on the foundation of the human psyche, the psychology of healthy minds and lives. And we try to take that evid...

“How do we design tech and tech solutions to almost combat [other] tech solutions and distractions?” The question is posed by Brian Cunniffe of the UK Sports Institute [UKSI], who is Joe Lemire and John Portch’s first guest on The People Behind the Tech podcast for 2024. Brian, a performance lead at the UKSI who works primarily in canoeing and who also served as the British and Irish Lions’ sports scientist on tours of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, is discussing the power in gamifyi...

Lydia Bedford, the Head Coach of the Brentford men’s under-18s team has some firm coaching advice. “There’s no shortcuts, even though everyone seems to want them these days,” she tells Henry Breckenridge and John Portch on the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you today by our friends at Keiser. “Time on the grass, working in different environments, working under different people as leaders will help you to understand what it looks like for you.” Bedford, who has also coached w...

Zendler speaks to Joe Lemire and John Portch about her work with Rimkus and the NBA and NBPA’s Wearables Validation Program. “It was scary at the start. It was this white space of do we want this to happen? Can you make it happen?” says Jess Zendler. The Program Manager of the NBA and NBPA’s Wearables Validation Program is discussing her first steps in the role with Joe and John on the People Behind the Tech podcast. “Academic-type folks, we don’t like to set thresholds that exist for pass-fa...