‘THE BEST I CAN BE’
Harvard forum explores technology’s role in athletics
The NFL Players Association, Harvard University and a new consulting company co-founded by local women’s hockey legend Angela Ruggiero are teaming up to develop new technologies aimed at tracking player performance and preventing injuries.
“It can have a profound effect on extending the careers of our members, (and) that’s one of the many, many reasons we’re interested in this technology,” said Ahmad Nassar, president of NFL Players Inc., the commercial arm of the NFL Players Association.
“In our industry if an athlete runs a tenth of a second slower, not only are they out of a job, they’re out of a career, potentially,” he said.
At a conference at the Harvard Innovation Lab Friday, union members, athletes, researchers and startups came together to talk about the future of sports technology with a focus on how best to measure athletes’ performance.
Former Harvard and NFL linebacker Isaiah Kacyvenski, who serves as managing director of the Bostonbased Sports Innovation Lab, said, “in the end, it’s not about elite athletes.”
“It’s about all of us,” said Kacyvenski, who was special teams captain with the Seattle Seahawks a decade ago. “I want to be the best I can be.”
The Sports Innovation Lab is a new sports market research firm founded by Kacyvenski, Ruggiero (who played ice hockey at Harvard and medaled in four consecutive Winter Olympic Games as a member of the United States women’s team) and Joshua Walker, a former vice president at market research
firm Forrester Research. Kacyvenski said the firm will research sports technology companies in the hopes of sorting out those that are most impactful.
The company, unveiled earlier this year, already includes Gatorade and IBM among its customers.
The joint venture between the NFLPA, Sports Innovation Lab and Harvard’s iLab — called the One Team Collective — is also hoping to confront some of the difficult questions about what teams can do with the player tracking technology of the future.
Former New York Jets quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, who is currently a free agent, stressed the importance of ensuring players have a choice when it comes to tracking.
“If you want something like that, then the teams will provide it, but if you don’t want to do that then you’re not going to be forced to do it,” Fitzpatrick said.
Better player tracking technology, Fitzpatrick said, could also complicate team contracts in the future.
Right now, players can be fined for being overweight, but if teams begin tracking things like blood sugar or cholesterol, that could open the door for discipline for other metrics. “That line is going to start to blur a little bit,” said Fitzpatrick, who played at Harvard while in college, “so that’s where the union is going to be very important in making sure the p l aye r s are protected.”