Speaker 2 (00:05.614)
Welcome to the Hard Tech Podcast.

Everybody welcome back to the Hard Tech podcast. I'm your host Deidre Hericus with my co-host Grant Chappell. And today we have a super exciting guest with us from the world of sports tech. I hail from the world of sports tech. Now I jumped in the glassboard. David Gill, the managing director or managing partner of Vert Performance. And he's in a really unique space and going deep on volleyball. So David, thanks for being on the show.

How's it going everybody?

Speaker 1 (00:33.42)
Happy to be here.

Yeah, to kick things off here, we'd love to, so my background sports technology, and we really focus on all different sports, football, basketball, baseball, et cetera. You guys have found a ton of success really leaning into a niche. And so I'm just kind of curious how you guys landed there. Would love to get an overview on what exactly Vert does and where you guys are going.

Sure. even saying we landed there is an odd way of putting it. It found us.

and landed pun intended with kind of what you do.

Yeah, yeah, right. We jumped right into it, right. We always have plenty of vertical puns at our company. So, yeah, I guess a brief history. Our founder, this is going back decades, you know, he just noticed all the, I think coaching his basketball, his nephew's basketball team. And you guys know this, you got your new, I'll age myself a little bit, your Reebok pumps, you know, or maybe your Eric Jordans. And the first thing you put them on, you're like, look how high I'm jumping now.

Speaker 2 (01:26.328)
yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:31.674)
And obviously it's all completely subjective and anecdotal. Yeah, what if we could just measure that accurately in real time? So fast forward, he gets with his cousin who's an astrophysicist, actual astrophysicist studying the ionosphere. And they're working on this. And then another engineer comes in because getting an algorithm to measure vertical displacement turns out.

and wonderful marketing.

Speaker 2 (01:52.622)
Amazing.

Speaker 1 (02:01.528)
There's a reason it had never been done?

And this is measuring vertical displacement with an IMU for those listening at home. So this is with an inertial measurement unit. you're measuring USB stick size.

This little guy. Basically, everyone calls it the thumb drive, not a thumb drive. So they, you know, it used to be, it was like this big on like side of the shoe. Anyway, so they created it with the intention of like basketball, broadcast, slam dunks, all these things.

and get your live metrics on how high that person jumped, et cetera, et cetera, how many feet they traveled that game on fast moving.

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:40.238)
Sports science wasn't something that was the original intent. And even volleyball wasn't the original intent. So if I get my story straight, they'd gotten together with a group called SFIA, Sports Fitness Industry Association. Great group. just, they are what it sounds like. And one of them told our founder, goes, you need to go to the AVCA convention. Twitchy replied, what is the AVCA?

I was just gonna ask.

American Volleyball Coaches Association Convention. So they do this with college basketball as well. Whenever you have the final four, there's a convention around the final four. AVCH does a phenomenal job. Coaches from around the world come in. There are educational seminars, meet and greets, all this jazz. So they went out there with a total prototype. And a couple of coaches saw.

Oh, it can measure jump height. What's funny is they didn't care that much about the jump height. They all asked the same question. They go, can it, can it count the jumps? And literally at that point, exactly. They literally at that point, like looking back at the engineer, well, we have to know it's a jump. Yeah, we can count it. Next thing you had a Karch Karai for the uninitiated. He's considered kind of the Michael Jordan of volleyball, gold medal on the beach, gold medal indoor.

So pedometer, but for jumps.

Speaker 1 (04:09.154)
And then he coached us to a gold medal with the women's And know, Mary Weiss from UF, all these big programs. Everyone reached out and boom.

You have a market. accidentally found a market.

Yeah, we still work in other sports, but it's 90 plus percent, 90 plus percent of volleyball. that's how I fell into it. You had programs that used to be hand counting jumps.

David what's the value in in the count of the jump so what's important specifically the volleyball

So everyone has heard, mainly because they get pissed off when LeBron James doesn't play, of load management. And load management being just a measure of how much work, think of it as, almost think of it as damage you're doing to your body with your training. And the first people heard about it would be pitch count in baseball. Which is fascinating because it hasn't actually decreased injuries in that sport, but that's totally separate topic. So in volleyball, when people think of volleyball,

Speaker 1 (05:10.476)
When people think of jump sports, what do you think of?

basketball.

Right. In a basketball game, you you might get 20 to 50 jumps and maybe five or six of those are above like 80 % of your math.

I was gonna ask, and none of those are really high. Unlike volleyball that is like, I'm just trying to get as vertical as possible right now.

Yellowed or not.

Speaker 1 (05:35.662)
You'll have a middle blocker who in a five set match, volleyball's played in sets, in a five set match could jump as many times as 160 and 120 of those are over 80 % of the max. mean, incomparable as far as the jump sports. we, the industry understood that from a load management perspective to understand how hard we're working our athletes and how to compare the load in practice to the load in game.

How do I know if they're ready for game demand? I don't know what they've done. Well, jump count had to be it. Turned out it was. There's more nuance now, but that's how it started. Everyone's want to know how many freaking times have we jumped today.

And then the check plus is how hard did I hit the ground each time I landed because that's how high I jumped and that's how hard I hit the ground. And that's if you guys can measure height, you can say, this jump was so minimal it didn't matter. This doesn't consume damage. These medium jumps consume damage at a low rate, but these high, very high verticality jumps are going to hurt your joints if you do too many of them at once without letting them rest and repair.

Well, what ended up happening to that point is there started to a debate rose within volleyball because we were counting jumps and you'd say, all well, what's a jump?

Yep. What constitutes a jump? Go to chat GPT. It doesn't even know, right? We had to pick a number. And so initially we said, all right, we're just going to go with six inches. That's a jump.

Speaker 2 (07:05.102)
How high is the count?

Speaker 2 (07:16.748)
Yep, and where is your IMU just so can wrap my head around like? So center of mass you're looking just make sure it's not on your foot that you lift your foot up is counting to jump with your six inches

It's around the waist under the...

Speaker 1 (07:29.94)
Originally it was on the foot, way back in development.

That sounds like a noisy place to put that thing.

Well, the funny thing is not to digress too much, but every now and then I'll get a coach say, hey, David, I think there's something wrong with this IMU. So-and-so's data looks messed up. And I'll look at the data, like, you should put it in her sock, Anyway. That's awesome.

And you've got enough experience you can just tell that from reading the tea leaves

Immediately. So yeah, it goes in the elastic belt center of mass. Because if this is my waist and you put it on the right hip and you tilt, like, I jumped three inches higher. It's like, you did not jump three inches higher. But we had to figure out what is a jump? What constitutes a jump? And I'm really, really glad we kept it very low. Because to your point, you would think the higher the jump, the harder the landing impact.

Speaker 1 (08:25.41)
but it's also the kind of job.

Okay? And what does kind mean to you?

So what I found, we were doing this.

like lateral movement versus straight forward. That's what I thought. was not intuiting that's going to be the hardest on your joints.

Well, lateral is actually the most dangerous.

Speaker 1 (08:39.286)
Yeah, most of the ACL injuries we see is their landing moving laterally. But one of the hardest landing impact movements the athletes do, in fact, it's the hardest per inch of vertical displacement, is most oftentimes on serves.

Okay.

We're talking 12 to 14 inch jump serve and yet in the way we measure landing is we're isolating the peak acceleration.

I was going to help you dug into this. was like, what are peak accelerations you see on your IMU in this case?

It's really neat, right? So every acceleration, we're not showing them as like acceleration. We're showing, we show them as impacts. because we can, we can isolate the peak acceleration at the end of a jump because our algorithm is so good at looking at a jump, we can get insight into not force of landing, but attenuation of set force.

Speaker 2 (09:13.518)
you.

Speaker 1 (09:37.538)
Yes. And also it's, you know, like deceleration is just acceleration in the opposite direction. That's what we're getting. And we have millions of jumps. We were able to set up normative values and thresholds, low, medium, high, and alert. And what was fascinating is we found these athletes were jumping 12 inches and landing. We measure it in G.

Yeah, yeah, multiples of gravity.

Yep. And that way can also be mass adjusted. Like we don't need to know anyone's weight, which makes it way easier to compare and normalize. And so we'd find that someone is actually landing as hard, if not harder, from a peak acceleration standpoint on like a 12 inch serve than like a 24 inch attack.

And just to pick this up, what is the delta in Gs between an average serve and an 24-inch attack?

It can be dramatic. mean, this is very individualized, but we're looking at, let's say we have an athlete who lands, I don't want you to say land well, because you could land poorly, but still attenuate.

Speaker 1 (10:46.104)
Be very clear of my language. Yeah. If you can't see like knee valgus from the sensor, that's when your knees cave in. Yep. Dangerous. don't like that. but you can have athletes who are, and this would be a better way of answering your question. I've had six foot four middles, strong athletes jumping 30 inches and landing at like 12 G's.

rate of peak deceleration.

And then I'll have someone who's 6 foot, 120 pounds, soaking wet, jumping 20 inches, landing at 20.

So what happens there? What's like the difference?

A couple things. Flexion.

Speaker 1 (11:28.622)
timing.

It's a flexion just for those of us that aren't in the sports world. This is like basically using your knees as appropriate shock absorbers versus just letting all the energy ride through you.

ankles, knees, hips. So picture, if you will, something coming down to land. And instead of kind of landing in almost a quarter squat position, like the hips come back, well, there's a net right in front of them. So instead, they just land with their torso completely straight.

and they're just putting all that load right into their joints linear.

And then they have minimal flexion at the ankles and knees. Without going too deep into it, the knee is what we in the biz refer to as a dumb joint. Like the knee is going to do what the knee is going to do based on what the ankle and hip does. Makes sense? Exactly. It's just going to flex and hopefully not go side to side.

Speaker 2 (12:11.598)
It's a follower.

Speaker 2 (12:16.93)
Yeah, don't go side to Please just bend in the direction of motion that's intended.

Right, so you'll have athletes that are sitting here jumping at like, you know, in their attack, you know, attack height or block height between 20, 23 inches, and they might be landing between 10 and 14 Gs on average. then when they serve at 12 inches, they're landing like 15, 16 Gs.

That's way crazy just to know that like that posture in which they're landing and they're not utilizing the shock absorber because the way they have to hold their body rigid to impart the energy in the ball. They can't set themselves up to land correctly. Is that what I'm seeing?

serve it's actually completely different because the serve there's no net in front of you. Right. And this is this is funny not to get into this topic too quickly. This is something we figured out. I figured out in my my lab in COVID, which was my bedroom where we're trying to figure out why is it on the serve? That's not again, not all but some of these athletes are landing so much harder. So what we figured out was it's the only thing they do.

where when they come back to the earth, their eyes are looking up and out. So if you think about visually, proprioceptively, you're never coming down to the ground and looking at the floor. Your brain's making a trillion calculations. When am coming back down to earth? And then your foot's gotta hit. You have to react. You have to flex. Again, it gets into your tendon. There's a lot, obviously, that goes into it.

Speaker 3 (13:35.278)
Sure.

Speaker 1 (13:50.892)
But what I found was, and I did this test, was I put a dot on the wall. We'd run through some jumps. I moved the dot higher, dot higher. And the further my visual got away, the harder I landed.

He's with.

That's hilarious.

And what's really great is we've changed the way that a lot of programs return to play injured players. Cause a lot of times like, we'll start with serving. Yeah. With three, three players, can with these two, absolutely not. Cause you can look at it live. You can look at the data live by the way, it all goes in iPad. So you can see like, my gosh, whenever you serve your landings just spiked through.

Nick, please don't.

Speaker 2 (14:27.192)
Yes, Sarah's still spiking her landing through the roof. Now my question is like have you weaponized that data to coach players on how to land softer when serving?

I was going to say like David, what are insights that you found that like became anecdotal, like evidence, like, this is how you should be training. This is the recovery process and things like that, just from the data.

I'll try to start with serving. Otherwise, it's a very long answer to that question. I'm obviously not happy to get into it as much as you want. But we'll go to the first serving, because serving was a really, really complicated one. serving in any sport, it's so rigid, right? You don't want to mess with someone's

And it's the one thing they can practice over and over and over and over again on their own so it's they have developed habits good or bad

Well, and the thing is, and this goes to your greater question about landing, is a high school age athlete who plays club volleyball. I they play for the high school team, and they also play recreationally with their club. You're looking at on court, forget everything else they do, but on court, you're looking at anywhere from 19 to 23,000 jumps a year.

Speaker 1 (15:34.062)
Think about that for developing motor patterns. That's a lot. So when it comes to serving, at first, the first thing we did was it was more of an educational campaign. Like I said, maybe don't return to play with serves right away. Let's figure it out. But the more we got into it and the more video we looked at, it's like, the problem is they're jumping, they're hitting, and then they just kind of smash into the ground and then go get in position.

Crazy.

Speaker 1 (16:03.15)
It's like, what if we don't change your serve, hit the ball the same, but just continue your horizontal displacement by taking a few steps as you land?

just land better.

Speaker 1 (16:16.302)
We actually have some college programs that they've named it. Like one program calls it the parkour drill. That's literally what they do. They work on serves and the focus is moving through your landing. And what's cool is we've had athletes that would be... basically take anyone that's... Any landing above 15G falls into what we call elevated landing category as a percentage.

We always like to give coaches a simple number you can follow day over day. Sure. And what's cool is you have an athlete who's at 18 % elevated landings. You fix that, and the next practice, they're.

That's awesome.

And now you know that was the issue.

That sort of leads me to my next question. You kind of alluded to it there. So you're gathering all this super valuable data. And that's super applicable. This is how you can serve different, like reduce injuries and reduce their load. And then you're also dealing with coaches, coaches who are full-time teachers or they're full-time coaches. And they're thinking about all the different aspects of coaching the game and things like that. What's that digital interface? How you focus on making that data simple to understand and digest for the coaches?

Speaker 2 (17:27.054)
That's the thing with hard tech and collecting IoT data is like, well, you can collect all the best data in the world, but if you don't let users use it well, it doesn't matter that you collected it.

Yeah, I always say data is only as useful as it is usable. Like that's, that's it. and that's, that's, that's the overwhelming majority of my job. So when I first started here, our system was pretty basic. It was just jump, count and jump height. We didn't have landing jumps for active minute energy power, all this other stuff, right? jump count and jump height. And I reached out to a bunch of programs. Said, how do you like it? Like.

No, that's a good one.

Speaker 1 (18:05.326)
How are you using it? And a lot of them would say, essentially, really awesome. And I know it's valuable. No idea what I'm doing.

That's awesome. Of course. I'm excited. I don't know why.

Yeah, this is so new and it's great, but I don't know what to do. And that shifted the focus for us. Again, we were not originally intending on, I'll pat ourselves on the back, changing the way volleyball is trained around the world. We weren't gonna be the sports science team behind the sport. But inevitably what happened was there was a lot of education that went into it.

In sports, the way I simplify it is everything's about the game or the match. That's what matters. Everything. So everything moves from there. So what we did was we just looked at game data. What is the game demand by position? Three rotation player versus six rotation player. And for those who don't know, three rotation, like in volleyball, I think everyone knows you rotate volleyball, you know, to do side outs.

You know, some players are just going to play front row because they can't pass to save their life. But then you have a six rotation player who never leaves the court.

Speaker 2 (19:26.402)
Yep, it plays every position they need to be played in, they can do it.

But what's fascinating is in practice, their training loads the same as the three rotation player in many cases.

interesting. like third.

So they're gonna be more exhausted in the game because they're playing two times as much.

Essentially, you're kind of either overtraining someone or undertraining someone. Right. You know what saying? But so that's what we work back from. So I always use that 160 number. I think I already mentioned that with middle blockers, right? Not that they can't go above that, but really, realistically, 160 is pretty much as they might see that twice in a whole season. Five set match, crazy. All right. Well, you try to break it down to two things. The coach.

Speaker 1 (20:16.278)
Skill development, team, chemistry, communication. Can't really help with that. But then there's the physiological side. So you might feel like you're good on the reps, but is the body developed the capacity it needed that day? Was it a low day, a high day, medium day?

And to understand that, it sounds like you're trying to determine through practice data, does this player have the energy in their body, not just the kinetic energy, but the ability to land these jumps and do it safely and maintain a healthy G load when they're landing at that density of landing. It's like 160 landings. How long does a five-set match take?

A five set match could be three and a half hours plus.

Right so within three and a half hours can we do 160 real game time jumps in practice or do we start faltering if we see that you know getting close to that in the data is that what you're trying to like see here

Honestly, before we even get there, the most important thing that we've helped programs with is how do we get them to be able to handle 160 jumps, period. And what I mean by that is, you when athletes come in, especially collegiately, it's different than the pros. In the pros, athletes will come in and they've got 12 weeks to train. And a lot of times they start without even jumping the first few days.

Speaker 2 (21:26.04)
Got it.

Speaker 1 (21:41.038)
And then they're starting like 40 jumps a day. Like they start small and grow. In college, it's changing now. Shout out to Dr. Jamie Gordon, head of the AVCA currently, because he's trying to get them more time on the court. you would have kids come in from summer. With compliance rules, you're not allowed to track the kids at all. you don't know what they've really done. And you might have like two weeks, two and a half weeks before game.

his first game.

programs used to and this I think is what I'm most proud of with our team is there programs that used to start with 250 to 300 jumps a day.

that's healthy. And- for the marathon by running the marathon. Got it.

Yes, exactly. Train for the marathon by running an ultra marathon. And what do you think would happen? They'd start to fall apart later on. so a lot of these same programs that end up reaching out to us and all the credit because those same teams now start 75 to 85 jumps. Now think about that drop. Think about what practice looked like.

Speaker 1 (22:59.21)
then versus now.

Right, no, and there's so much less energy on indeterminate state bodies. Some people might have really practiced over the summer, taken it really seriously. Some might have had an internship that was really important to their career and had to go to work every day, nine to five.

Thanks

And I think historically for a coach perspective, it's like, don't know where these kids are. They probably saw more as conditioning, because that's how you typically start a college season. It's like, all right, if these guys get your mind right, get right into it, it's going to be really hard and tough. And that, from a coaching perspective, makes a lot of sense. But it doesn't take into account what you're actually doing to the body and the statistics that you guys are pulling.

Yeah, and there's a lot of research on it. Ideally, what we try to tell programs is if you can grow in your load roughly 10 % week over week, that allows, the way I like to phrase it is, especially with a plyometric sport like volleyball, is the muscles can develop really fast. And muscles like rest and recovery, your tendons develop rather differently. And again, for the initiated, tendon connects muscle to bone.

Speaker 2 (24:08.43)
It's the pulley, right?

It's the energy store, really. It's how like people to think about it. And the reason is because people only think of tendons, like, tendonitis. I hurt my knee. I'm inflamed. But the fact is when you jump, when you load the jump, your tendons would store so much of that energy and releasing it. So it's not only helping you jump high, it's helping you jump fast.

Yeah, it's the rubber band. Your muscle can pull the rubber band taut and the tendon is what you let go of to kind of store that energy.

Yep. not to clarify, and I always like to make this point, the unique thing about the tendon though, because people use rubber band or they use spring, right? You hear that a lot, spring. The main difference though is the spring, if I hold it down for one second or five seconds, it's going to jump the same height. Whereas the tendon, they call it the half-life, it's like 800 milliseconds. And then after that, the energy starts to dissipate.

Yeah, they can't store it for long time.

Speaker 1 (25:10.03)
That's why want to jump fast. You got to go down fast, up fast. Anyway, so in order to make sure that tendon keeps up with the muscle, because your muscle gets really, really strong, your tendon's lagging behind, and then all of a sudden, yeah, you get tendinopathies, get inflammation, you get tears. That's why you need to be careful with your growth week over week. And this is true to any sport. You don't just want to run a marathon day one.

Yeah, well, this is so amazing like in a hard tech podcast. I'm learning more about biophysics than I ever knew I didn't know that tendons and muscles developed at a different rate and Rate limiting your muscle generation. So your tendons don't get outstripped is really important It's just like and I'll take this back to engineering like building a race car You don't put in a thousand horsepower engine when the transmission can only handle 500 because you'll rip all the gears out of it This is effectively what happens your muscles or the engines and the tendons direct that energy into your bones that let you launch up like You're pulling the transmission out

This way too many plyometrics can be dangerous. Great. mean, you're going to jump so much higher, so much faster, but your tendons are going to be in trouble. you can place metrics. again, hold another conversation. But that's, to your earlier point, that's where we always start. That's where we focus. You can get individualized, but what ends up happening is these programs that started lower.

and that's

They're so, mean, they get through the season infinitely healthier. And now some of those same programs that started at 250, 300 jumps, the highest they ever go into practice with their middles might be like 160. They've learned, not that you can't go higher, but they've learned to be frankly more intentional with each rep. And the players know, like, hey, not necessarily a hard cap. Sometimes it is. I like to think it's a jump goal.

Speaker 1 (26:56.49)
Now I have programs that are jumping too little. I'm like, man, you need to, you need to jump more because your, capacity is lagging at this point. Yeah.

Get some more practice.

Speaker 3 (27:06.572)
Yeah, I think it's a fantastic story so far of like going back to the beginning when you guys started out, there was just a group of really, really smart individuals working on this product. Yeah. You stumble into this area and they're like, I think we can use it for this. And then now you're actually fast forward a number of years later and you're literally helping athletes play longer. You're helping coaches win more games because their athletes are healthier for longer throughout the seasons. They're not like overbearing their joints and leading to like huge injuries and things like that. with like the combination of the software and the hardware and the things that we really focus

astrophysicist

Speaker 3 (27:36.526)
on the Hard Tech podcast of the value that you're creating for your customers. Absolutely. There's some curious from the business side of things. Where is the company today, maybe not customer account, where you see yourself in the market? And then in addition to that, what you see, what's next for the next level of enhancing the world of, you said over 90 % is volleyball, but just specifically focus on volleyball. What's the next world of enhancing the sport that much more, becoming that much more valuable?

Yeah, the timing here is interesting because, and I do want to point this out because it's actually very important on the wearable side. It's also everything we do is done live. It's not like post analysis.

Right, so your IMU is recording the data live, syncing to the iPad, so the coach can see we're on track, good jumps, bad jumps, etc. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm so used to doing the sports science side of this. On the tech side, we use BLE and Wi-Fi. So programs will have a custom provision router, create a local area network, don't even need internet access, right? iPad, Chrome.

Got it. So basically you're a Wi-Fi network to the actual IMU, collecting a bunch of IMU data and then Bluetooth to the iPad that one data source you can go sync in and like see the awesome. Okay.

Speaker 1 (28:51.11)
It'll go Wi-Fi to the iPad as well. other Mac address. Yeah, and and we do that because Like I said if you've got a plan of like so and so is gonna hit X amount of jumps today And this player is coming back from a meniscus tear in the knee. They only Yeah, yeah exactly. It's like you're you're getting a max 30 jumps today and you're done. You need to know that live like

and you need to 20.

Speaker 3 (29:17.87)
Is the little machine vibrating to let you know that you're out of jumps kind of thing?

We've joked that if you land too hard, it's going to shock you.

No, but it just means... Our CTO's dad invented the electric dogshot collar. We have some expertise there, Dave, if you want to go talk. We can play a game.

We have a little beeper in it too. We've joked about that. But then you have to be very, careful, as you might imagine, with... We made it tiny because you want it to be as invisible as you can. Which has hurt us in marketing. But every now and people feel like the little V logo on the belt. Like, what's that? You want them to forget they're wearing it. Which again, also doesn't hurt us, but they forget they're wearing it and they leave with it. Because we're like, well, if it beeps when they land hard, but...

then you're taking them out of practice, right? So you never like.

Speaker 2 (30:06.238)
You alert the coach who can jump in give that feedback how that that players gonna receive it best Someone wants to be yelled at I want to be yelled at from the top of the mountain if I'm screwing up Please berate me hit me with the biggest brick you can find Whereas I know other people on our team are way better if you're like hey We see this is happening and let that person draw their own conclusion

Yeah, it's every athlete's an individual. Even how they like we periodize their training. I'll go back to your previous question, but you know, Wednesday, high day, low day, all that jazz. It's not the same for everybody. But where we're going now, it was really cool. I had an amazing opportunity. They invited me the Polish national program, some of their strength conditioning people invited me to come speak in Poland at a load management conference. And it was really the pinnacle for our team because

you know, we're on the other side of the world and there's this whole conference and everyone's talking about how they use our technology with their programs. It was honestly, it was fantastic. And we didn't put it on. They put it on and just invited us to come speak. And so we really, not that we're always evolving. I have a million other ideas of how to continue to improve in volleyball. And we'll do some other stuff in basketball. We're always throwing ideas back and forth about getting into other sports. Over the horizon though,

Very cool.

Speaker 1 (31:29.098)
What we're doing is we're moving more into consumer.

look, could buy this and just take it home with me.

Yeah, we're starting though, we're going to be sport specific. So we're starting with volleyball. Right. Strong. Yep. We have some other ideas too in football that I'm pretty excited about. But the goal is like right now with youth volleyball in this country, it's the biggest sport for females. I think 29 states now.

Mm-hmm, absolutely.

Right. It's crushing it. And because of that, it's also big business. And I don't know if you know this, but the largest youth sporting event in the world is a volleyball tournament. In Orlando, AAU Nationals every year try to picture one building with 170 volleyball courts in it. And then another building with like another 40. It's

Speaker 2 (32:14.07)
Really? Yep.

Speaker 2 (32:27.138)
That's crazy.

insane over 12 days. But what's happening is, and I was just speaking with a lot of my coaching clients and they would say, David, I was just in Kentucky looking at an athlete, a recruit, and I went to her high school practice in the morning and then she had her club practice at night.

I'm like, okay, and then club season's over, and then as soon as club season ends, the next week, you have club tryouts for the next season. Then you have high school tryouts, and then you start high school practice.

When are you recovering? When are you resting? Like what?

There is no real off season.

Speaker 1 (33:12.698)
Everyone's talking about all these NBA Achilles tears you just saw in the playoffs because the AAU schedule for basketball has also gotten completely out of hand with the amount of tournaments these people are playing and

And it's because there's so much money in it.

Of course, there's so much money and at high levels, these sports are not healthy for you, right? Like volleyball is not good in your joints, on your knees, period. Like we know this, just like pitching is not good on your elbow. Like it's not to say not to do it, but it needs to be in the

And this repetitively at this high of an impact or force or level or exertion isn't good.

It's going to cause wear and tear. And in the end, it's not always the best player who makes it. It's just the one who survived. So the goal here for us is how can we help change that for younger athletes? And it's a challenge because we're essentially taking this work team system that we've been talking about this whole time and we're giving it to an individual.

Speaker 3 (33:53.88)
That's right.

Speaker 2 (34:10.71)
make an individualized training program.

Speaker 2 (34:19.982)
practices like like club and high school in same day I can limit my goal jumps hey coach I can't do anymore

But see, there's the challenge. Because let's say they are overworked. A coach certainly doesn't want their athlete coming up to them and saying, coach, I hit my limit.

Let's pose the question would the coach rather hear that from a truth source then Let that athlete let the coach bully them into doing more than they should and get injured that season This is where that truth source comes in That's probably true

It depends on the coach. And I'll tell you a quick story where this is a years ago. I was at a club tournament and there was a was there, older gentleman. And he saw me with my vert shirt on. goes, vert. I was like, what? He goes, because you guys soon, they're just not going to jump in volleyball anymore. And I go, yeah, because they stopped pitching in baseball. That shut them up rather quickly.

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:27.706)
That's you have this old school mentality where it's like go, go, go, hard, hard, hard. But what they're not thinking about is there's no seasonality. And now they're playing one sport. And anyone in the industry understands that multi-sport athletes get injured less, not more, than youth specialized athletes. So we mainly want it to be something that people can use to educate themselves. We'll have programs in there, right?

And also have fun, but just know, even if you're jumping a ton and that can't change, I'm not landing well.

or I'm all of a sudden not landing well. That's even more impactful.

That is more impactful. That's the number one thing I look at in the data is changes to landing. Yeah, more than anything.

I was going ask you about As well as how different will this more consumer grade product be from the one that's being used at the university level or at the pro level? is it the same product is just in a different market?

Speaker 1 (36:30.622)
We're just simplifying it.

You're just taking the router out basically right you're not having yeah, it just communicates directly to the phone

Bluetooth your phone, so if you're in a crazy noisy environment, it might not be as live, but you'll still collect it, because it still stores all the data.

still stores locally, right? And then it'll batch sync whenever it gets a good connection. Yep.

And until the goal then is just to make it a little more fun because obviously the athletes can looking at it a lot. The parents can be looking at it. You have to do fun things like you you got a new PR today. You know, we're going to work a lot of other I know we'll talk about this later. I'm sure because you can't have anything without AI. But working in things where it's telling you like, hey, you're you're you've improved on your landings. Great job. Or Wow, you know, you're harder.

Speaker 1 (37:18.488)
Here are some programs we recommend that you can do at home to work on your landing.

it's directly to education, not just to data.

you can.

Speaker 1 (37:29.454)
Yes. The data is like, if you don't know what to do with it, yeah, it's fun. our goal is like, you're not going to be like rude. You can't jump. Here's our jump higher program, right? Pick a new sport. No, it's as we develop it further, the goal very much and it will do this eventually.

is to say, hey, landings are trending higher. Are you OK? Are you getting enough sleep? Here's a readiness test you can do. Here links right into our landing program. Check this out. Why don't you try some of these things? We want it to be educational without being something that coaches start to say, they start to resent. Even if they need to be told, like, bro, back off. You're crushing these kids.

But it's delicate. You have to walk a delicate line there.

So you're planning on using, guess to lead to that question, the way that you're implementing AI, from what I heard so far, is just serving it up to coach to coaches on like suggestions and things like that, that's seen from the data on the athletes and also for the individual consumer, sort of gamifying that as well through the experience.

Yeah, and also just programming, right? Like I've created a bunch of basic landing programs, jump programs, agility programs that, you know, because in a lot of the sports, again, if you have money, you have opportunity, right? So we also want to do it so if someone has the kit and they can't afford a personal trainer, which is always ideal, they can at least have something they can do at home and they can benchmark it. They're like, all right, I'm going to do jump higher program.

Speaker 1 (39:18.926)
I'm going to work on it. All right, I'm going to check off. I did these things in my app, my Vert app. And now I can see it's working. Hey, crazy concept.

That's weird, you're showing the correlation between work and data.

Yes. I had so many parents of mine who would joke, like, yeah, my kid's training. How's it going? I think it's going well. So that's the goal there. But the way we're going to use AI is, and you kind of touch both of them, is we have with our teams, we what we call Fert Team System Advanced. This is something we're proud of. We're the only ones, I think we're the first ones who ever did this. May still be the only ones who do this.

where, like I said before, there's some programs that would start every season with like 300 jumps. There's one program in particular where I came to them with a crazy idea. I said, what if I just told you how many times to jump? You do the rest. You design your practice. You do everything. But I'll actually give you the numbers, just based off science. We can go into that in a moment. You want to give that a shot.

Now we have quite a few programs we do that for. We call that Virtium System Advanced. We're basically a virtual sports science hub. So they don't have to think about that. We do it for them, and they plan their practices around it. It's worked out exceptionally well. That's something down the road AI will be able to help with quite a bit. You have your jump loads, like I talked about, kind of growing roughly 10 % week over week to the best of our ability. But at the same time, it'll have a script where it can see, is this player jumping?

Speaker 1 (40:59.074)
their highest after their highest volume day, or two days after, or three days after. So where should their highest volume day be? Because it's not the same for every player. And then it will take into account their landing. We have seen, we've been able to go in and look at landing trends. This has happened a couple times. One player in particular, though, very, very soft lander, like a fricking cat. Never injured.

third year of tracking this athlete, and then I saw them go from like a 1 % to a 9%. Again, 20 % in the red. So for her, I was like.

Speaker 1 (41:41.55)
All right, let's just wait. Next day, back down to 1 or 2%. OK, maybe, I don't know. We'll just watch. A few days later, 12%. Back down. 8%. Back down. So I got in a call with a team. Their academic advisor was on too. And I pulled up the counter and said, this day, this day, this day, this day, this day, what's happening with this player? And everyone was looking around. The academic advisor just starts kind of smiling. Why are you smiling? Because you just pointed at every day she has a 3 and 1 hour lab.

that she's been complaining to me is crushing her.

just like the emotional stress of school.

physical manifestation of mental fatigue.

And so this is me very high on my soapbox. But the difference between load management and load monitoring is this example. Load monitoring is, wow, that's crazy. Load management is, OK, the day she has that lab, we're taking her volume down by around 15%, 20%.

Speaker 2 (42:43.02)
Yeah.

and then we'll maybe move it somewhere else. But that way she's still getting training in. She was still landing harder on those days, but the volume is down.

The total wear on the joints in those days.

It was time-developing knee pain and we got her through the season no problem.

It really sounds like to me, as you're describing that capability and that that's what AI is going to enable to do at scale, as well as like what off on the teams. wonder, you thought about, you might have already thought about this as well, on that sort of being the beachhead into these other sports? Because that's less specific to like getting really, really good at one data point, but really being able to holistically coach an athlete from a like,

Speaker 3 (43:26.286)
sports data science perspective through AI through the tracking. That seems to be like, well, I could very quickly go over to a football team and you notice one guy, his heart rate gets up a little bit too high or on the football side of things. Is that sort of how you're thinking about the other markets or is it more leaning initially on the data and then evolving over into the AI coaching?

Yeah, the challenge in the other markets is purely just hardware and then new software capability. If we're going get into some of that, all right, we need a heart rate. So what's interesting, if we look at heart rate variability, which is great, I don't think it's particularly useful in indoor volleyball, right? But basketball, soccer, lacrosse, football, sure, absolutely really important. The challenge is if you're going to measure jump height accurately, like we talked about, sensor is center of mass under your belly.

can't get good heart rate.

So now we're talking about two sensors. This is just more letting you in on some of the challenges. And then now we're going add GPS to the system. If you're adding GPS and it's under my belly button, can I lean forward in a higher position? can block the signal.

GPS good enough or do you need RTK?

Speaker 1 (44:35.798)
Or we're or or ultra wideband

yeah, UWB. These are like which technology, because how much accuracy and what data rate do you need to be effective in your sport? Right? Because that's all relative to what you're trying to figure out.

We haven't even talked about sampling rates yet. But yeah, it's the thing. We've looked at ultra wideband. We've looked at a lot of these things. Can't go into too much detail because some stuff's in the works. But to get into other sports, again, going back to your question, you have to measure not only what's most relevant, what's the most digestible and applicable. So we measure specific kinetic energy based off the accelerations, joules per pound.

Right.

Speaker 1 (45:20.302)
Do you think coaches liked seeing, all right, today, Brian and basketball practice was 5,715 joules per pound today?

Yeah, I know well, this is like zooming all the way out to like, know How do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? You guys have to figure out what can I physically measure or what should I measure first? Here is fill a whiteboard up with all the things I would love to measure support scientists for basketball for football for volleyball And then you got to go cross the ones out that you can't measure easily Right and the next one you can measure right down how I'm measuring this how expensive the sensor where does need to go? What's his battery life? What's his data rate and you do the hardware test, right? You know

haha

Speaker 2 (45:56.962)
Can I build this and do a product today with today's tech, which is better than 10 years ago or five years ago tech, which is amazing. UWB, big shout out to tech that's gotten really mature in the last five years. So now you've got this new tech. Then let's pretend I can get dev kits and strap them to David, make them run around a lab doing football things or basketball things. Can the software team make sense of that data quickly so that a sports scientist could allow a coach to have action? Boiling that all the way down to the bottom line, can I train an AI to do that exact same, you

seeing the tea leaves and alerting someone that we see this pattern happening. That's from top to bottom. What hard tech is in IoT and AI, in any application, sports or anything else, hard tech's there to capture the raw data. That data has to be processed in some human written software to do something useful with it. And then how do you train an AI system to automate that detection or those action items that you're trying to get someone to do for you?

Well, and then you'll do all of that. You'll have a strength coach who's in love with it. And they present all this information to their head coach who just goes, eh.

Neat, I wanna win this champion.

Yes, and that's the sales and marketing angle.

Speaker 1 (47:12.906)
So I had, I won't name the team, but it was a major division one basketball men's team. And one of their athletes, he's, know, NBA bound. And this is early days where we're all still learning a lot. And they said, look, we're just going to collect, we're going to look at the energy here. And anyway, so they're collecting, everything's going fine. And I get a call and like, hey, know, so and so stress reaction in his shins, right? So think like really bad shin splits,

So he's out, like, David, can you look at the data? Just tell us what you see. Oh, we did a basic trend of his energy. And I think I'll need to give this a little more background, though. But basically, remember I talked about the whole 10 % week over week thing? was like 2,500, 2,800. And then he went in consecutive days, 3,500, 5,300, 7,600, or something like that. Like, just, bam, bam, bam. And then injury. All right, so I put this together, and I submitted it him. I said, look, this just happened.

I can't say this is why, however, the literature would suggest this played a big part. He's all right, cool, thank you. He comes back, he's going.

Exact same thing. He's out again. Stress reaction. I pull the report. I go, hey, it's the same exact pattern. You're doing the same practice thing with

Data point of two, we've got two for two here.

Speaker 1 (48:36.482)
Something's going on here. And I started saying, have some suggestions. And he goes, I don't know if we're there yet. OK. I started doing some math, though, just looking at what his game demand was, like I said, in energy, and then when he would get hurt and what he could handle. Third time, I get the call. It's year three now. He's not gotten through half season. And he goes, all right.

He goes, David, I've got good news and I've bad news. I'm like, what's the bad news? He got hurt again. I'm like, well, it's good news. Coach will do whatever you want.

I said, fortunately I'm ready. I said, well, this game demand, the highest he gets in a game is like 3,600. So everything I've seen, if we can, and I don't like doing this, but let's keep them under 4,200 joules per pound. It's the craziest it all sounds. And he said, done.

Guess who got through their first full season.

and you didn't get a phone call until the end of the season.

Speaker 1 (49:37.55)
And that's the fascinating thing. And I get it. You have very successful coaches. Some coaches are very dogmatic. This is how we do it. So it's not, you get the best data in the world, best hardware in the world. If you don't present it in a way where they see the value without making them feel dumb, important, then you're onto something. But it's top down. When we had the best start using it, it made our jobs really easy.

release.

That's fashion part of the sale.

Now the sales, like our cycle used to be like six to nine months to close a sale. Now it's, sometimes it takes like four days. Most of the people reaching out are like, hey, so and so told me to call you guys. And then it's like, all right, cool.

You know, David, think tying it all together here as you wrap this up, it's really the story. I asked you the original question of like, you guys are started in the sports tech industry and you said we're going to focus on a niche and your sales cycle used to, went through like obviously this incredible story, but your sales cycle kind of one of the business side of things used to be nine months. Now it's four days because you've really created value. I mean, I can literally hear your passion behind, like, even as you told that story at the end there, like I could see you genuinely smile when you like, when he didn't get injured because you gave that prescription.

Speaker 3 (50:58.19)
And the fact you guys even have the plus offering of, we'll literally tell you how many jumps each one of these, like the team should do on a week-over-week basis to increase, to reduce those injuries. I think it's awesome just to hear your passion. I think it's just a really cool story on how it went from nine months sales cycle, like this is a hardware, software product in the sports tech space, historically pretty hard to scale. I mean, you really have to work hard to do it. But I think ultimately, it just sounds to me that you fell in love with the customer. You created a product that people wanted. You found a product market fit.

and now your cell cycle is four days instead of nine months. I think it's just a fantastic story, so well done.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, it's been a journey. I'm going into, this is my 10th year.

that's awesome as a week last for turns ten this month as well so this is all that's it's a good run if we finally almost know we're doing right

Just when you think you do.

Speaker 2 (51:51.48)
Yeah, the new curveball comes.

Everybody, this is the HeartTech Podcast. I'm your host, Deandre Herikas, with my co-host and CEO of Glassboard, Grant Chapman. And David Gill, thank you so much for being on the show. Tune in next week.

Thanks for having us everybody.