Injury crises start with the wrong question

High Performance SportSports ScienceTechnology in SportBiomechanicsInjury PreventionHigh performance Coaching

5 Sept

Jason In thought. In locker room, trainers treating injuries in locker room. — Blame less. Understand more.

Every year we see it. An AFL club (or EPL side, or college football program) goes through a so-called injury crisis. Headlines fly. Social media piles on. And the first names dragged out? The high performance manager or sports science team.

I’ve lived it. I’ve been blamed for injuries that had nothing to do with load, strength, or monitoring. And I know Darren Burgess has too.

But here’s the truth: injuries are rarely the fault of one department. They’re the result of a complex ecosystem.

It All Begins with a Question

Sport science has evolved exponentially in the last two decades. At the forefront of this evolution—specifically in team sports—has been the use of GPS technology, which has clearly answered the question:

“What are our athletes doing?”

The focus of research and the practical application of GPS has centered on understanding WHAT an athlete does—how far they run, how fast they run, what volumes they hit.

But nearly 30 years in professional team sport tells me this: when we focus only on the WHAT, we miss critical signals that sit under our Framework Pillars: Performance, Injury Prevention, and Rehabilitation.

The better question is:

“HOW is an athlete moving?”

We know athletes need to be strong to generate speed, yet conventional strength tests don’t predict running performance. Research shows clear differences in running technique and mechanical preference between individuals—and major changes in biomechanics following lower-body injuries.

The ability to quantify HOW an athlete moves—easily and reliably—gives practitioners the critical insight to design the most effective interventions possible.

Assess… Don’t Guess

With SpeedSig, testing is:

Easy to administer at scale—many players at once
Field-based—athletes tested in their natural environment, in boots, on grass
Meaningful—focused on task pillars, the foundational movements of all dynamic sport

That means you’re not guessing from twice-yearly lab snapshots. You’re capturing real movement data in the same context where injuries occur.

The Easy Target: High Performance Teams

AFL, EPL, and college football all publish injury lists.

Fans and media jump on patterns without context.
High performance departments are often positioned as the scapegoat.

But think about it. If a player rolls an ankle in a collision drill… is that on the GPS guy? If a player has a pre-existing structural issue that unravels years later, is that purely “load mismanagement”?

The reality: we only measure what we can measure. And that’s not the same as controlling every factor that drives injury risk.

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The Role of Coaching Decisions

Not everything happens in our 3–5 hours of contact time.

One horror story: a player rehabbing a calf injury. He follows every protocol perfectly. Then on his day off? He goes boogie-board surfing for two hours in flippers. Next day—calf re-torn.

You can educate athletes. You can influence. But you can’t control every decision they make outside your walls. And yet, the high performance staff cop the fallout.

Has the Game Changed?

Darren and I looked at game-speed data. On average, AFL hasn’t accelerated massively in recent years. But the explosive transitions—defense to attack—are sharper, more punishing. That means more high-velocity running, more sprint demands, and more exposure to hamstring and quad load.

We’ve seen the same in the EPL, where sprinting and high-velocity efforts have skyrocketed over the past decade. In college football, some uptempo offensive systems now drive rep counts through the roof, forcing defenses into unprecedented volumes.

What Leaders Need to Do

If you’re running a performance department, here are my takeaways:

Stick to process. Control what you can control. Audit yourself. Would your program stand up to external review?
Educate upwards. Make sure coaches and execs understand the real cause-and-effect behind training load.
Prepare for the narrative. Injury crises create stories. Sometimes you’ll be the hero, sometimes the villain. Ride it out.
Ask better questions. Don’t just ask what the athlete did—ask how they did it.
Hire for honesty and creativity. I don’t care if you’re the smartest GPS operator alive—if you can’t contribute insights and challenge patterns, you’re not lifting the program.

Injury crises aren’t simple. They’re not solved with one data point, one GPS chart, or one scapegoat. They’re multi-factorial, influenced by coaching, training environments, player behavior, and yes—sometimes mistakes from the high performance staff.

But here’s the bigger picture: if we keep blaming one department, we’ll keep missing the opportunity to evolve the whole system.

And that evolution starts with asking the right question: not just WHAT athletes do… but HOW they move.