Although analytics in sports may seem like a work-in-progress strategy for teams and athletes alike, some are thinking about its next evolution already. The major tenets of what’s been colloquially coined moneyball – science, data, and analytics – have been employed by those using them to redefine how they evaluate in-game performance.
Old school agents and young reporters have recently shifted focus on what the next moneyball phenomena will be. Mental, emotional, health, and hormonal metrics are some of the common data points that these thinkers forecast will be part of the next sports analytical movement. In North Carolina, a team of doctors and scientists are part of a team called HeadTrainer who have developed an app that may be integral in this shift.
HeadTrainer is a brain training app designed to exercise five major athletic cognitive skills in the areas of decision making, processing speed, focus, memory and visual/spatial awareness. The app is free to download and play, with a subscription option at the price point of $4.99/month. I decided to try it out myself for a few days to give our readers the user experience.
The first thing I noticed about the app is the dynamic appearance in the way it keeps the user engaged through moving icons and 3D-style navigation. Once I registered using Facebook login (it’s important to note I have not been spammed with notifications or emails since doing so) I was able to begin gameplay. HeadTrainer is meant to be used between five and ten minutes a day, and each day before I exercised it asked me to enter how I felt, if I was hungry, and how many hours of sleep per day I got. Each day I played one game: a basketball swiping game, a luge memory game, and a golf focus game, all weighted differently towards the cognitive skills they aim to strengthen. Those three games combine to make one mini-camp, and once completed I was invited to the next mini-camp. After seeing my progress I had the opportunity to speak with the scientific team behind the app to see how they tailored and assessed the user’s performance in the HeadTrainer suite of exercises.
Dr. Deborah Attix, Medical Director of the Duke University Clinical Neuropsychology Service and the brains behind HeadTrainer, spoke with me about the research that went into and continues to develop HeadTrainer two months after its launch. After HeadTrainer founder Hank Durschlag came up with the idea for a brain training app, Dr. Attix led the charge to create the specific sports-themed challenges that would be fun while also testing the brain’s key cognitive areas. Dr. Attix remarked that “athletes spend so much time training their bodies, but little is done to sharpen their cognitive abilities, which is critical to making smart and instinctive decisions during athletic competition.”
As far as drilling down to the five cognitive skills HeadTrainer measures, Dr. Attix said the team tried to make them sport dependent while also knowing how much these skills vary based on interactive (football, soccer) versus passive (golf) sports. “It doesn’t matter how good someone’s arm is if it isn’t rapid enough, and that’s the element we want people to understand” said Dr. Attix in relation to her goal of trying to get people to recognize that cognition is a huge part of performance. As she continues to develop and refine HeadTrainer for future iterations of the app, Dr. Attix and her team are looking at the levels of precision that will “look at the whole person to yield a better plan for whole performance.”
As far as the forward facing piece of HeadTrainer, the team has received the backing of star athletes like Richard Sherman, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Rickie Fowler, Jose Bautista, Alex Morgan, Caroline Wozniacki, and Alana Blanchard. Jay Bilas and Kirk Herbstreit have also enlisted their support as respected media entities in sport. What’s particularly pioneering about these athletes and the way HeadTrainer chose them are the marketing and endorsing techniques the team used.
Shortly before HeadTrainer’s launch in June, a Twitter exchange between HeadTrainer’s athletes focused on mental toughness and preparation. While this ultimately was part of HeadTrainer’s marketing strategy, it captured the attention of major outlets to talk about this often under-discussed topic. In a discussion I had with HeadTrainer COO Jon Pritchett he said this “cause marketing uncovered benefits to help young people start the conversation of positive, supportive conversation about sports.”
In the media, social media especially, the conversation can get ugly and destructive when it comes to talking about sports. “Using sports as the carrot will help young people use HeadTrainer to improve not only their batting average but also things like their homework,” said Pritchett.
The process to select which athletes to endorse HeadTrainer was carefully crafted by HeadTrainer and their marketing agency, Signature Sports Group. “A strong social media presence as well as an ability to articulate the benefits of the mental game and how they help these athletes in their sport” were two of the major drivers according to Mr. Pritchett. Some of these athletes, like Jose Bautista, were already educated in and believed in cognitive training. While others expressed a sincere belief in cognitive training and the role it plays in their on-field performance. Mr. Pritchett used golfer Graeme McDowell as an example of the latter who, while not an officially endorsed HeadTrainer athlete, has posted screenshots of his HeadTrainer app on social media to show his followers the progress he’s made in the cognitive skill areas.
HeadTrainer was transparent in the methods they compensated these endorsed athletes, as detailed in an ESPN piece by Darren Rovell. Cash is the traditional method athletes are paid to endorse products, but Mr. Pritchett also wanted to focus on other incentives. Being a start-up, HeadTrainer used a combination of “cash, stock, and royalties tied to user downloads” according to Mr. Pritchett to entice athletes to join the team. With regards to the royalties, when the user signs into HeadTrainer they select their favorite HeadTrainer athlete, and that selection helps determine which athlete led to that download. As evidenced in ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary “Broke,” athletes have notoriously been known to invest in fledgling endeavors. Mr. Pritchett said the athletes HeadTrainer sought out were ones who “surrounded themselves with the right people and were educated financially.” He says getting athletes to invest in tech is a new trend and, if it becomes more mainstream, one that HeadTrainer is happy to be a change leader in.
In its first few months after launching, HeadTrainer has been downloaded in over eighty countries with 13 to 29 year olds as the main demographic. Pritchett mentioned that “originally” the target demographic was 8 to 18 year olds, and this revelation is one of the pleasant surprises he’s noticed as initial analysis into the launch begins. He also continues to be surprised how the brand ambassadors continue to grow HeadTrainer’s presence, citing an Instagram post by Richard Sherman that tripled HeadTrainer’s followers. On the research and development side, Dr. Attix said “HeadTrainer is melding, informing, and keeping tabs on what’s going on scientifically” while they pore over initial feedback and figuring out how to “convene on the larger picture of cognitive performance.” From a business perspective, Pritchett hopes that athletes posting about cognitive performance will get athletes of all ages to do the same. As development of an updated version of the app begins, some things HeadTrainer is looking at are competitions with prizes such as meet and greets with and autographs from HeadTrainer athletes.
It took decades for classical statistical measures to derive formulas so advanced that teams are now investing in million-dollar computers to build competitive rosters. As this evolution becomes more of the rule rather than the exception, tech companies like HeadTrainer are looking ahead to grow and measure less tangible metrics like cognition and behavior. Through conversations with the leaders of HeadTrainer, these developments will not only affect change in professional athletics but also with younger athletes through the recognition of and importance in the intellectual aspect of sports. If the role models in athletics begin the conversation with their younger fans, and start a trend in more modern and smarter investments, as they are with HeadTrainer, this mindset shift towards brain training can accelerate.