The University of Pennsylvania is about to gain a significant competitive advantage over its Ivy League peers, but not in a way most would expect.
Instead of becoming better or more athletic, they’ll simply be much healthier. That’s because Penn recently signed a three-year exclusivity deal with Sparta Science, an injury management technology company, it was announced last week.
Penn and Sparta Science have been working together for two years to reduce the number and severity of injuries throughout all of the Quakers’ athletic programs, according to Sparta Science founder Dr. Phil Wagner, MD. Since the partnership began, Wagner claims, Penn has seen its athletics-related insurance premiums drop $400,000 annually, accompanied by a 30 percent reduction in injury volume.
“As a result, this past offseason they (Penn) called and asked, ‘How about you guys sign on for a three-year exclusivity agreement?'” Wagner recalled in a phone interview with SportTechie. “Their interest was sparked by continuing to use it, but simultaneously, like a lot of good sports teams, also preventing others from using it that they would be playing in sports.”
Sparta Science, which also operates a training facility in its Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters, uses software and a trove of data built over more than a decade to create models that can predict the injury risk to athletes of any sport based on variables such as position, age, gender, and injury history.
The software is compatible with any triaxial force plate on the market, and the insights provided by an athlete’s jumps help create an individualized training or rehabilitation plan that the athlete can keep track of in a smartphone app.
“We’ve been developing this data for the last 10 years — not only in quantity but also in quality — to make sure that basically every force signal is normalized and accurate,” Wagner said, “because we’re gathering data from the U.K., from Australia, South Africa and obviously the U.S., different sports, we’ve got to make sure that everybody’s able to collect it in a standardized way so the database becomes meaningful.”
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To be sure, the partnership doesn’t only benefit Penn’s football and basketball programs. The technology is beneficial to whichever team has greater issues with injuries, Wagner said. It’s applied entirely differently to football than it might be to baseball or to soccer. The system is designed to predict injury risk both in volume and severity.
As for the $400,000 insurance premium reduction? Wagner says it’s been consistent across universities, meaning the software’s cost — calculated based on the number of users — pays for itself often in the first year.
So far, Sparta Science has worked with the University of Maryland, University of Kansas (thanks to a pivotal trip to Germany with a Kansas associate athletic director), San Francisco 49ers, and Colorado Rockies, among numerous other college and professional sports programs. Perhaps most unexpectedly, the company has also worked expansively with the U.S. military, where, according to Wagner, the demand for injury reduction is growing in the special forces.
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But the Penn deal uniquely represents an investment in Sparta Science’s future. Though the company was in the process of inking deals with other Ivy League programs, Penn offered something the rest did not — access to a world-class medical school and the Wharton School’s data analytics program, both of which have engaged in pilot work with Sparta Science.
“With us, it was mostly being able to leverage and look more into the medical side with Penn Hospital and the Penn medical care as well as work closely with Wharton and their data scientists and analytics,” Wagner said. “For us, it was more looking long-term as we grow into more of the medical field, as well as as we grow into more data science, so it was more product-driven rather than sales-driven.”
With Penn locked down as a customer, Sparta Science is turning its attention abroad to the U.K., where it has been in discussions with English Premier League clubs like Stoke City and universities like Bolton. Wagner is also focused stateside, helping collegiate athletic directors better understand student wellness through technology and data.
“Where we’re in talks with a lot of these schools is to say, you have this information (about injuries) already,” Wagner said. “Let’s help you track it and subsequently let’s help you reduce it.”