We dive deep into the world of elite soccer performance with Chris Shenberger, head of sports science and medicine at Columbus Crew SC. Chris shares fascinating insights on how cutting-edge technology and data analytics are transforming the way professional teams monitor, train, and optimize their players. From GPS tracking and personalized training plans, to the potential of AI and genetic testing, this episode explores the future of soccer performance and the innovative techniques being used to keep players at the top of their game.
We dive deep into the world of elite soccer performance with Chris Shenberger, head of sports science and medicine at Columbus Crew SC. Chris shares fascinating insights on how cutting-edge technology and data analytics are transforming the way professional teams monitor, train, and optimize their players. From GPS tracking and personalized training plans, to the potential of AI and genetic testing, this episode explores the future of soccer performance and the innovative techniques being used to keep players at the top of their game.
Chris Shenberger: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-shenberger-7832831a9/
Chris Hoyd: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishoyd/
For the full YouTube video: https://youtu.be/8_tWPG9E_tk
Columbus Crew Website: https://www.columbuscrew.com/
Columbus Crew YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWaD_J0qRubgPr9DV_x9-Jw
Chris Hoyd 0:00
Welcome back to Product In Healthtech, a community for health tech product leaders by product leaders. I'm Chris Hoyd, a principal at Vynyl, which is product development firm focused on health tech. Today we're looking at an angle of health tech that we haven't really explored before. Rather than focusing on the way technology impacts more traditional health care, like care delivery or population health. Today, we're taking a look at health tech in the context of intense athletic performance specifically for professional soccer. To dive into this, I spoke with Chris Shenberger, head of sports science and medicine at Columbus Crew, SC. Chris had some fascinating things to share about how data driven professional sports have become, how personalized athletes training regimens are now, and how precise it allows his department to be optimizing for things like recovery time, anticipating illness, and even catering players strength to various team structures and playing styles. Let's jump into the conversation.
Chris, so talk to us about how technology has transformed the way you monitor and track player performance and help.
Chris Shenberger 1:12
Yeah, sure, it's a great question. You know, I've been in Columbus now for for eight years. And, you know, over the course of those those eight years, there's been more and more technology, right, that's kind of come out and at our fingertips, you know, in terms of being able to, to track players. There's so much right, we have so many data points at this point that it's really now about figuring out what's important - what are the important data points, and why are they important, but it's truly transformed the way we're able to understand the individual understand the system, or the style that we play. You know, I think about three coaching staffs that I've had in my time here, and each has had a little bit of a different style that they play. And we've been able to use the technology that we have to understand the style that each plays, and how the players that we have fit our system, how we can make them perform better, how we can determine if it's a player that fits in our system, or doesn't fit in our system. And then even furthermore, down into our our reserve team and our youth academy. Do we have players in those systems that that fit those profiles based on the data that we've collected and the ability to understand. What it takes to play play at this level. So
Chris Hoyd 2:41
okay, so you just got an in a direction that is way more interesting than I was even expecting. So you're like, essentially matching sort of biometrics or indications of strength of fitness to a playing style. That's really cool. Can you say a little more about that?
Chris Shenberger 2:55
Yeah. And so you know, we're able, for example, the the GPS data that we collect, we're able to create kind of physical profiles of what it takes to be a center back in our system here in Columbus or what it takes to be a striker, what it takes to be Cujo in our system and be successful. And we're able to then take that and say, okay, internally do we do we have someone within our system, whether it's at the reserve team level, or the youth academy that we feel like, fits that profile physically? And then you take that even in a step further into the gym, where we're using velocity based training now, right? So we can take a look at how how fast guys are moving weights. We are looking at with you know, a bunch of different products from the company Vault, where we're able to look at eccentric hamstring strength, we're able to look at adductor strength. There's, there's all these different variables force plates, right, how high are they jumping? How quickly are they able to land and jump again, all these things create this large profile in which we're able to say, okay, these, these guys are successful, what is their profile look like? Now, how can we find the next version of that person? And if it's not internal, even right externally going out and recruiting players that fit their profile of what we're looking at, in that specific instance.
Chris Hoyd 4:22
Okay, so that's incredibly sophisticated. It sounds like it sounds like there's, you know, data science, all kinds of disciplines that must be involved in in determining those things.
Chris Shenberger 4:33
Yeah, it's really a, a team of people not just not just in the performance world, right. I have a I have a staff on the first team of nine other individuals in the performance and medical world. And then we have a separate staff that works with our reserve team and another performance staff that works with our academy, right, but we're all looped in together and then outside of that. A director of analysts who truly doesn't even touch the performance side at this point, he's all on the technical tactical side, we've got a staff under him, that's recruiting, scouting, right? All those sorts of things. So that entire group all really plays a part in it.
Chris Hoyd 5:18
That's super cool. So do you have a sense of where the crew sort of fits in the broader scheme of things in the league? Like, are you guys, you know, pushing the analytics and data even more than other teams? Or do you think it's sort of, you know, it's so competitive, everyone's doing it?
Chris Shenberger 5:32
You know, that's a that's an interesting question, I would say that we're probably not doing anything that other clubs aren't doing. What I think we do really well is getting everyone on board with moving in the same direction, understanding what the important data points are. And then being able to broadcast that across the club. So we started a movement here, probably about two and a half years ago that we call One Club. And the vision is that from our youth, 13, Academy players through our first team players and staff as well, everybody's working towards the same goals, the same mission, the same vision,
Chris Hoyd 6:23
With all that data and sort of the precision you're driving towards, in terms of certain characteristics, even for different positions, are you do you guys create, like personalized sort of training plans for each player?
Chris Shenberger 6:38
If you take it down to that level, right, we've created these, these profiles that say, in this specific position, we feel a maximal effort in total distance or a maximal effort and sprint distance. For you can say a worst case scenario, right. And a particular game, this person needs to be able to run 12k In this position, doesn't mean they're going to do it every game, but we feel like that's, that's kind of the max effort that they'd have to give in any particular situation in the game. And so we're able to then take that information, and build programming at an individual level to ensure that players in those roles are going to be able to achieve that if asked to do it in a game. It's interesting because we, you know, have a handful of players who play multiple positions. And, you know, there might be one particular position where on any any given game day, maybe they're only going to sprint 60 meters, but then we switch them into, for example, a wingback position where they might be asked to sprint 500 meters, right. And so if you haven't built the programming individually and appropriately for that person to be able to do the 500 meters, we're increasing the risk exponentially, to then say, okay, we need to go, we need you to go play this position, but we haven't actually built you to be able to do it. And so we use that we look at that daily, weekly, as a as a group to ensure that we're checking as many boxes as we can in terms of what we're asking the guys to potentially have to be able to do to be able to comfortably go to the coach and say, hey, yeah, we think he can do it. And, you know, the, the level of risk is, whatever, right? Low, hopefully.
Chris Hoyd 8:23
Interesting. So you kind of serve as a liaison or a representative, almost of like, how you've crafted their physical abilities in terms of what the coach is asking for. Okay, so let's, let's talk a little bit now about sort of the technology that the players interact with, is it you know, I imagine it's evolved quite a bit over the last eight years since you've started Can you talk a little bit about the you know, whether it's wearables or maybe getting into sleep tracking or any of that stuff that the players.
Chris Shenberger 8:57
Yeah, I mean, the big they can interact with as much of this stuff as you as you want to give them right but I think that's also a really key piece is to give them the right pieces of information and teach them the why we're giving it to them. Because we could give them all this are GPS trackers for example track 1000s of metrics 1000s of data points, but they don't all make sense for each individual. So the ones that we use most here are a handful of metrics within the the GPS - so the physical metrics that we collect on field we, for three years now, I've been using aura rings pretty regularly we have - yeah, we probably have 75% of the team that wears in an Oura ring. We have a handful of guys that pr efer oops, so they were the Whoop instead of instead of the Oura ring, but yeah, we collect all that information and we that's it's a tricky one because the players for example, are like why don't want you to know At what time I went to sleep, I don't want you to know how many hours of sleep I got. But we've done a lot on the front end to educate them. For us. It's, do we want you to get enough sleep? Absolutely. But I'm not concerned that on a night after game, you didn't go to sleep till 2am The adrenaline all those things, right? It's hard to go sleep, what we're more concerned about is looking at patterns? Do you have a pattern of consistently getting less sleep? We look at heart rate variability quite a bit with the Oura ring. So are there Are there patterns of change within your heart rate variability, that maybe are telling us something like, you're getting sick, you're not recovering as well. And so those have been, you know, I think really vital pieces of information that we've been able to pull in and add to our database. And, you know, kind of further allowing us to individualize programming for these guys.
Chris Hoyd 10:54
Does anything you know, any, any moments or stories stand out from the last couple of years, where, like you said, maybe you've been able to anticipate that someone had a, you know, the flu coming or something, and you were able to inform the coaching staff to, you know, adjust the roster in a certain way?
Chris Shenberger 11:13
Unfortunately, I would say we haven't had any instances where we've caught something, but we've seen themes where after the fact, you go back and look, and you're like, yep, there it was, they had a they had a big drop in their HRV. And then he came in the next day, and they, you know, they weren't feeling well. So I would say probably still in its infancy and in terms of us truly being able to understand and be proactive in our approach as it relates to that data.
Chris Hoyd 11:39
If you could only pick one piece of sort of equipment or wearable or piece of technology for the for the players to lean on for you to track their their overall health what would you pick?
Chris Shenberger 11:53
This is gonna it's gonna sound crazy, probably but for me, it's it's just the simple a simple wellness questionnaire. You know, it's subjective, right? But for me, we learned so much from that. I've got a player who, no matter how hard he trains the day before, no matter how much he did in a game, he's he's a five and energy every day is a five and it's so that it's a scale of one to five five is three is your average five is like you're better than your average one is you're no good he's a five everyday no matter what in energy soreness, nutrition quality, across the board, but for me, it's a piece of information that we learn a lot about the person. And so he's a five everyday if he puts a three for something. For me, that's a flag, right? Like, okay, what's going on with this guy? And then we can start to dig into - do we see something in the GPS data that we're collecting? Do we see something in his jumps on the force plates? Do we see something - Is he not moving the weight as fast with the VBT system? It kind of for me is the first step in okay, now we start to dig into things and and see what else we're finding.
Chris Hoyd 13:12
At this point. Many international players have come through MLS, right. From all over the world that played for the crew or other teams in the MLS. I went to the MLS All Star game, in 2015, the All Stars played Manchester United. And back then it looks like there were sort of almost visible differences in the level of like fitness and strength, and maybe even different focus areas like so I'm curious if, if you ever sort of noticed that or picked up on that? Or maybe like, if now there's so much data and technology involved? Maybe that's normalizing a little bit, but just curious if you have any thoughts on that?
Chris Shenberger 13:49
Yeah, you know, I think to your point, there's, there's so much data out there now that it's probably normalizing some, you know, for example, for us, again, I mentioned earlier, but the ability to build a profile within the style that we want to play allows us to kind of maximize the strength and fitness of each player, based on what we want them to do. You know, I talked a little bit about the velocity based training system, we use a brand called Enode, right? But we can take, we can take the same exercise with three different players and get a different result from that, right? If it's a player that we're trying to build more speed, if it's a player that we're trying to build pure max strength, if it's a player that we need more endurance, right, we can take the exact same exercise and say, okay, we need you to move it at this particular speed in order to achieve this result. And then we can load the weight onto it to make sure that they're moving at that, that specific speed. So I think at some level, we're able to start to normalize some of that now.
Chris Hoyd 14:58
Yeah, that's right cool. Is there any tension between a, like the head coach, the manager and how, you know that maybe they have a traditional approach to training and your departments bringing all this data and precision? Have you found maybe with the different coaches you've worked with - are some more receptive than others to the sort of data led approach?
Chris Shenberger 15:22
Yeah, you know, I've been pretty lucky in my time to have, you know, three coaches who I think have been, in their own respects, in their own ways, pretty open and receptive to it. You know, it's it at the end of the day, the data is a small, a small piece to the bigger puzzle, right. And so it's, it's on us that are working in the in the performance space with the technology to be able to make the coach understand the value in it, and present it to them in a way that they find it valuable and want to use it in terms of the way they're training. So I've had coaches who have been like, I want you to give me projected loads for a session every day. And I want you to, to get my attention and tell me in the middle of a drill, if we're starting to go over, I've had coaches who want some level of periodization, but then they they want you to back off, and they're going to they're going to do what they're going to do on the field. And some sometimes it's going to be less, sometimes it's going to be more, but what I've learned is they're all pretty good at, without you reminding them on field where they're at, they have a pretty good understanding of where they're at. You know, also, I like to think of the data in terms of working with the coaching staff is we're really providing them a framework to work within, whether it's a recommendation about what the microcycle periodization looks like, for the week, or a particular player who we're seeing a trend in like, man, this guy's not covering as much ground - he's not moving weight as fast as he normally does, or his wellness questionnaire, you know, he's coming in with a two soreness three days in a row. And that's not typical for him. That's all information that we relay to the coach and then ultimately, the coach is going to make a decision off of it, but it's really a framework for them to to make better and more informed decisions.
Chris Hoyd 17:25
Interesting. Have you found maybe over the course of your tenure - Are players receptive to this? Are they really interested in this? Or does it feel like it's infringing on their, you know..?
Chris Shenberger 17:40
Yeah, you know, I would say, Gosh, I would say probably even five years ago, I would have told you to, yeah, it's a battle to get them to do these things. We're pretty lucky here. But again, I think it goes back to the education piece, we do a really a really good job of educating on the front end of the 'why'. And so we, we tend to you have, it's cultural, right. So there's certainly players from certain regions who maybe aren't as accustomed to it or don't like it, but we, we don't tend to have any issues currently in terms of guys wanting to wear for example, so that the players are a part of a player's union, right. So they have a collective bargaining agreement with the league, one of the one of the things that we are not allowed to do is require them to wear the GPS pods in game. And probably four or five years ago. Guys fought at quite a bit on the basis of like, I don't want you to be able to use this information when I'm up for a new contract.
Chris Hoyd 18:47
Whoa, interesting.
Chris Shenberger 18:48
Alright, so since they're not going to pay me as much, because I'm not covering as much ground as I was three years ago, when I got this contract right. Now, it's not even, like we just put their pods in there that you know, they were a little GPS bra, we put it in their locker, they throw it on and go out to the game. It's like, it's not even a question. But again, it goes back to I think, where we're at in terms of the evolution of technology, the education that we've done on our end as to the why, right? Because if we miss that, if we missed the data in the game, trying to put together what did the week look like for them? Did we overload them in a specific area? Are they under loaded, and we don't have the game data, it becomes really hard right to individualize a program to do the right thing for that player and so I think and you start to see you watch games on TV right now they they pop up and show you how far somebody's run or how fast they've run and we've gotten to a point now with the guys where after a match the day after a match here we have a dashboard that we built in Tableau that we cast up to a TV in the in the rooms and gym and the athletic training room that basically just has all the loads for the players, how far did they run? How fast did they run? How much sprint distance? How many accelerations decelerations. And they stand in there and they'll look at it for an hour and make jokes with each other if somebody didn't run as much as they thought they did, or, you know.
Chris Hoyd 20:19
So, Chris, I'm curious, you know, the sort of buzzy topic and healthcare Health Tech right now is AI. Are you seeing much of that in your world?
Chris Shenberger 20:31
To be fair, not not yet. But yeah, it's it. I think it's probably the next big thing that's, that's coming our way. In fact, our one of our owners has been has been on me about some buddies that he has that are in the the AI tech world and trying to trying to connect us at some point. So you know, it's funny, I think AI is probably one of the next big things, I've been talking with a company that's doing like genetic testing, at a level of taking the genetic testing, with all of our physical data from the field, and trying to help us better understand at an even deeper genetic level, how to individualize recovery for guys. Right? So there's, there's some, I think, some really cool things on the horizon. At the same time, this stuff, right, you have to again, there's so much of it out there, you have to filter, what makes the most sense for you. As it relates to do you have the manpower to manage it? Do you understand it? Is it cost effective? Right?
Chris Hoyd 21:42
You mentioned genetic testing, I think that's probably a good segue to I'm curious what your what your take on the future of technology in in your world might look like and what it might enable for the team?
Chris Shenberger 21:55
Yeah, I mean, I think it continues to go one direction, where we're going to be able to individualize these guys programs, at a level that you you've never been able to or probably could have even imagined that you could write. I think about it a lot in terms of the recovery, because so much of the recovery becomes, you know, some mobility on field, opening up their legs, taking them in to do some stretching and foam rolling contrast bath. You know, compression boots, things like that. But can we get to a level with the AI stuff that's out there, and this genetic testing to where we can, we can better understand maybe contrast bath is good for for five of the guys. But maybe these two guys, actually it doesn't, it doesn't have the same impact with them, maybe there's something else out there a different recovery tool that we haven't thought of, or that we just don't utilize, because we don't think it works, right. But then you you, you start to get data that connects with the genetic testing and tells you actually, for this guy, foam rolling is what he should be doing. You shouldn't be doing contrast bath, right. So I think it's pretty exciting to think that, you know, that could be on the horizon.
Chris Hoyd 23:14
Okay, so what advice would you give to, you know, aspiring younger soccer players looking to leverage technology to improve their health and performance?
Chris Shenberger 23:23
Yeah, I would, I would say there's a ton of it out there. So probably, to start, find somebody who knows, knows what they're doing with it, and can help direct you towards what makes the most sense for you in terms of understanding you, first and foremost, right? Find the technology that helps understand who you are as a soccer player and an athlete. And then you can start to build on that in terms of you know, you see a lot of these things that are like, Oh, this will help you become the next Mbappé or something like that, right? Like, for me, it's about finding the technology to help you understand who you are first, and then you build from there.
Chris Hoyd 24:04
Chris, thanks. This has been a fascinating conversation. You and I could probably talk at length about a lot of these things. If any of our listeners or viewers have questions, how can they reach out to you?
Chris Shenberger 24:17
If anybody wants to reach out and connect probably finding me on LinkedIn would be the easiest way to do it.
Chris Hoyd 24:24
Thanks so much for joining us. You can also connect with us on LinkedIn, YouTube, or on our website at productinhealthtech.com. If you have ideas or suggestions on what you'd like to hear in a future episode, or if you'd like to be a guest, please just shoot us an email at info@productinhealthtech.com