MarketScale Sports & Entertainment 12/21: The History of Tech in Sports Science

In most industries there is a domino that can be pointed to as the first innovation that started a chain reaction, forever changing the way people in that industry think. Skylar Richards, Head Athletic Trainer and Director of Sports Science for FC Dallas, joined the podcast to explain the recent history of sports science and to talk about the innovation that launched his industry forward.

Also included in this week’s episode is a roundtable discussion about the number of college football bowl games that are played each year. Have we reached a saturation point where there are simply too many bowl games? Are advertisers and broadcasters getting their money’s worth out of these games or are we seeing people get bored with the entire process? MarketScale’s VP of Business Development Tim Maitland and Director of Analytics Thomas Riley hopped in the studio for the discussion.

The Past, Present, and Future of Sports Science

The field of sports science has been exploding in recent years as teams look to gain a competitive advantage over their opponents. Technological innovations have helped push the industry forward, as heart rate monitors and GPS trackers have become commonplace among the general population.

Skylar Richards is the Head Athletic Trainer and the Director of Sports Science for FC Dallas. He joined the podcast to take a larger look at the past, present, and future of technology in the sports science space. We’ll take a look at the everything from the original Polar heart rate monitors to the new and innovative video tracking that is currently emerging.

“Where things really started was with heart rate monitoring,” Richards says. He walks through the introduction of this technology and talks about the missteps taken by himself and others in his position as they worked to assign conclusions to the data they were obtaining. “We were making jumps to conclusions that we didn’t realize we were doing early on,” he says. As the science has gotten more precise and sports science directors have grown smarter, they’ve gotten better at correctly assigning meaning to the data they’re receiving.

Bonus Episode Teaser

We’ll be releasing our full interview with Erin Patton coming up on December 27th. Erin is the Founder of AMPlifi Sports and previously served as the Global Director for the Jordan brand when it was launched by Nike. We were planning on including it in this episode of the show but it was such a good conversation that we felt that it deserved it’s own status as a bonus episode. For now, we’ve included a two minute teaser for what you can expect to hear when we release the full interview on the 27th.