In an exclusive interview with Ministry of Sport as part of the Brand Break series, Global Wellness Tracking CEO and founder, Graham Dudley, discussed how to get the best value out of data and the changing nature of performance tracking.

Following the organisation’s recent partnership announcement with EyeGuide, which will see the Baseline Your Brain initiative provide access to a baseline brain health test for over 30,000 junior and senior Australian Football athletes in Victoria, Dudley said the work Global Wellness Tracking does provides added sports science and validity to sports performance data.

“What we’ve done now is move toward allied health and supporting wellbeing in human performance,” Dudley told Ministry of Sport.

“One thing that makes us a little unique is we’ve created something called GPTQA which is Global Performance Testing Quality Assurance and it’s the first in the world that looks at validity and consistency when applying technology to human performance.

“Instead of just sticking a GPS on the back and running people around, we add a lot of sport science and validity around that, and there’s some great organisations that look at that, but as you come down the tiers of community and sub-elite sports, it gets a bit greyer.

“One of the projects we’re working on right now is the Baseline Your Brain project with EyeGuide.

“It’s a really key topic at the moment around concussion in sport so what we’ve seen is lots of stories and research around post-career effects of concussion, something people generally don’t want to talk about but it’s very real.

“We’ve got lots to deal with as an industry about this, but we know if a child or athlete of any age gets three or four head knocks in succession, that’s got a long-term consequence.

“Baseline Your Brain with EyeGuide is a great campaign where we’re taking the EyeGuide technology out to communities and Global Wellness are then servicing that to all the community really efficiently rather than them all having to buy a piece of technology.

“We roll out the service with quality assured sports scientists and accredited staff and do a baseline test.

“Once you’ve got your baseline, you’ve then got something to refer to, and with our connection system to our allied health partners, as soon as anyone has a head knock, we can provide valid assessment, use guidelines like SCAT-5 and other concussion tracking which are more subjective assessments, but in an environment which can intervene immediately,” he said.

On the increased opportunity for athletes and sporting organisations to get actionable data from performance data, Dudley said typically athletes don’t have the opportunity to effectively understand performance data.

“It’s really positive in the respect a lot of athletes don’t get the data,” Dudley said.

“They go to a draft combine or have fitness testing in a school or sporting club, and they don’t really get the data, or they get the data in an Excel spreadsheet or just numbers.

“We provide the data, but then also provide what the numbers mean and how it works.

“For example, we don’t focus on BMI as a number of body composition, we talk about all the body components, and we look at anthropometry in the measurements too so then someone can figure out how they feel and correlate those numbers to their life as well.

“The general output is two primary things happen, one is they compete against something else like a previous score they’ve had or norms we have for an AFLW player for example, and they can see how they stack in that particular assessment, or they then start to understand how they can change and improve those parts.

“It’s not just a number, it’s connected to a particular event or training system.

“The tracking platform you have you can enter your own data too so the assessment we do will be under controlled verified conditions, but then they can go and repeat those with a stopwatch and some friends and track over time.

“It’s a bit of gamification in that sense,” he said.

Providing recommendations for sporting organisations and coaches to best apply performance data, Dudley said: “Physical literacy is thrown around a lot at the moment and I’ve been in the space for over a decade now around the world, and in certain areas, there is still no understanding of what it is.”

“My advice is in order to be physically literate, you need to be able to assess and track change, and that can’t be subjective, it has to be objective.

“You have to have a baseline of something to understand where you stand.

“For sporting organisations and coaches, the really important point is when you’re putting a program in place, you need to start from a known known.

“That might be a physical fitness assessment, or it could be a tracking tool like asking the athlete ‘how are you’ or ‘how do you feel’, these are things never asked by coaches.

“It’s always ‘you do this because page 14 of my curriculum tells me to say that’ and that’s the missing part of the puzzle.

“If you can professionally understand where you are and get some objective information around you, you can use commercial fitness tools to increase your performance because you’ve started from somewhere solid,” Dudley told Ministry of Sport.