Leaders Performance Podcast The Leaders Performance Institute

“I’ve been told I give really good hugs.”So says Lindsay Mintenko, the Managing Director of USA Swimming’s National Team, in the second episode of this new series of the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you by our Main Partners Keiser.“Just being able to sit with an athlete; sometimes you don’t even have to talk,” she continues, “it’s just so they know you are there.”It is difficult to imagine many of her predecessors demonstrating such empathy with athletes whether they’re a multi-medal winner like Michael Phelps or Katie Ledecky or a swimmer who came agonisingly close in some of sport’s most competitive trials. The top-two finishers are guaranteed a spot on the roster; those in third – who would likely medal with other nations – are almost certain to miss out.“After the trials, our main job is to make sure our athletes are focused on Paris, but we don’t always take a step back and look at those who came third by a hundredth of a second. That’s a tough place to be; so we really need to make sure that we do a better job of looking out for those athletes afterwards.”It is perhaps no surprise that USA Swimming is currently the only national governing body in the US to have an in-house licensed clinician on staff. This has happened on the watch of Lindsay, a two-time Olympic gold medallist in the 4x200m freestyle. She is the first former athlete and first woman to serve as Team USA’s Managing Director, but as she tells Henry Breckenridge and John Portch, it is not about her but serving her athletes and their coaches. Lindsay also spoke about her role being analogous to that of a general manager in the major leagues [8:00] and the importance of providing a challenging but safe environment [17:40]. Elsewhere, she elaborates on the importance of providing mental health support for her athletes [29:50] and explains how her swimming career began when as a six-year-old Lindsay fell out of a tree [5:30].Henry Breckenridge X (https://twitter.com/HenryBreck) | LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/henrybreckenridge/)John Portch X (https://twitter.com/JohnPortch) | LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-portch-696a4366/)Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leaders-performance-podcast/id1124488318?mt=2), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/4EKIUuWYk5SWWqRWRQfw3z?si=epSPBhLdREOwtHiGYJnvEg), Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/leaders/the-leaders-performance-podcast) and Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1124488318/leaders-performance-podcast), or your chosen podcast platform.

Michael Bourne has a sports science background, so it is no surprise that he places a premium on critical thinking.“It is core to me,” the Performance Director at the Lawn Tennis Association [LTA] tells the Leaders Performance Podcast, which is brought to you today by our Main Partners Keiser.Critical thinking is a skill that also served him well in roles at UK Sport and the England & Wales Cricket Board amongst others before he took the reins at the LTA in October 2020 (with Covid restrictions still in place).“But,” he cautions, “leadership for me is about change and progress, and you can have the greatest thinking and the greatest ideas in the world, but if you can’t drive and implement change, then it’s for naught.”It starts with taking stock. “As a leader, make sure that you are ensuring everybody else is confronting those brutal facts and you've got to be ahead of that,” he says, adding that he too must be open to feedback.“It should be unacceptable in a high-performance environment to know there is a challenge and to take no steps to do anything about it.”In the first episode of this new series, Michael explains his mission-driven and people-centred approach to helping produce British tennis players with the means to compete with the world’s best [33:10].During the conversation, we also touch upon the challenges the LTA faces and the benchmarks set [8:30]; his belief in the unique qualities of British tennis [14:30]; why the flow of information cannot be taken for granted at the LTA [38:30]; and the enduring power of the Lion King to move him [49:30].Henry Breckenridge X (https://twitter.com/HenryBreck) | LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/henrybreckenridge/)John Portch X (https://twitter.com/JohnPortch) | LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-portch-696a4366/)Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leaders-performance-podcast/id1124488318?mt=2), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/4EKIUuWYk5SWWqRWRQfw3z?si=epSPBhLdREOwtHiGYJnvEg), Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/leaders/the-leaders-performance-podcast) and Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1124488318/leaders-performance-podcast), or your chosen podcast platform.

Harjiv Singh, a performance and development scientist at the Orlando Magic, is another example of a practitioner who suffered their own debilitating injuries.Hot on the heels of Andrea Hudy (https://leadersinsport.com/performance-institute/podcasts/paige-bueckers-proved-her-acl-injury-was-behind-her-at-march-madness-but-questions-must-still-be-asked-about-the-injuries-that-afflict-female-athletes/), who recounted her own story of ACL troubles in episode one, Harjiv told the tale of a pickup basketball game that ended with him tearing his ACL and meniscus while also suffering an avulsion fracture.The 16 months of rehab stoked an interest in sports science that not only led him to the NBA but, since January, roles at the Grand Rapids Rise women’s volleyball team, as Director of Performance Science, and the University of Michigan, where Harjiv teaches out of the Human Performance and Sports Science Center.John Portch and Joe Lemire could not have wished for a more engaging guest on this finale to this People Behing the Tech podcast series, where Harjiv delved into the sports science principles that define his work.He also shared his thoughts on training drill design [15:39] and the transferability in competition – a relatively new area of enquiry. “It could be as simple as, in basketball, you’re putting a defender in front of you,” he says. “But it can also be as complex as the angle and the approach of that defender, the people in the vicinity of the athlete, where the athlete is starting from, their position on the court. And that’s merely the introductory part of this.”Then there’s his thoughts on the “neglected” cognitive component to ACL injuries [6:41]; the need to know your audience when visualizing data [27:38]; and his ability to ask applied questions in the lab at Michigan.Check out episode two:Five Years on from the USWNT Introducing Menstrual Cycle Tracking, Sports Science for Female Athletes Remains Under-Developed (https://leadersinsport.com/performance-institute/podcasts/five-years-on-from-the-uswnt-introducing-menstrual-cycle-tracking-sports-science-for-female-athletes-remains-under-developed-so-what-can-athletes-and-practitioners-do-about-it/). So What Can Athletes and Practitioners Do about it?Joe Lemire LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lemirejoe/) | X (https://twitter.com/LemireJoe)John Portch LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-portch-696a4366/) | X (https://twitter.com/JohnPortch)Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leaders-performance-podcast/id1124488318?mt=2), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/4EKIUuWYk5SWWqRWRQfw3z?si=epSPBhLdREOwtHiGYJnvEg), Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/leaders/the-leaders-performance-podcast) and Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1124488318/leaders-performance-podcast), or your chosen podcast platform.

When the US women’s national soccer team started tracking their menstrual cycles, it was seen as groundbreaking.At least part of their success in claiming back to back World Cup titles in 2019 was attributed to the fact they could adjust individual training plans and nutrition based on the data.Ellie Maybury was part of the USWNT backroom team that introduced this initiative and, more than half a decade on, tech support for female athletes doesn’t seem to have progressed as much as she’d have hoped. At least in soccer.“A lot of the technology we have absorbed into the women’s game has come from the men’s game or men’s sports environments,” she tells the People Behind the Tech podcast.“And maybe some of the processes and metrics that come with that get transferred as well.”Maybury, who recently founded Soccer Herformance, a performance consultancy for female soccer players, is in the hotseat on episode two of this series.She addressed the issues that hold back female high performance, from managing the lack of objective datapoints [4:50] and the importance of education for athletes who often misunderstand their own bodies through no fault of their own [26:20], to the need to take athletes on a journey while remaining honest about the limitations of research at the present time [17:00].Check out episode one:Paige Bueckers Proved Her ACL Injury Was Behind her at March Madness, but, as Andrea Hudy tells us, Questions Must Still Be Asked about the Injuries that Afflict Female Athletes (https://leadersinsport.com/performance-institute/podcasts/paige-bueckers-proved-her-acl-injury-was-behind-her-at-march-madness-but-questions-must-still-be-asked-about-the-injuries-that-afflict-female-athletes/)Joe Lemire LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lemirejoe/) | X (https://twitter.com/LemireJoe)John Portch LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-portch-696a4366/) | X (https://twitter.com/JohnPortch)Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leaders-performance-podcast/id1124488318?mt=2), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/4EKIUuWYk5SWWqRWRQfw3z?si=epSPBhLdREOwtHiGYJnvEg), Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/leaders/the-leaders-performance-podcast) and Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1124488318/leaders-performance-podcast), or your chosen podcast platform.

Paige Bueckers’ stellar performances at this year’s March Madness proved that her ACL injury is long behind her.She returned to action in November 2023 after 15 months out and drove UConn all the way to the Final Four of the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament.Behind the scenes, Andrea Hudy, the Director of Sports Performance (Women's Basketball) at UConn, was critical to Bueckers’ convalescence and is working (while pursuing a PhD) to ensure there are fewer such occurrences in the future.“My passion is trying to understand why people get hurt or the story behind their injuries and keep them strong and resilient for what’s unexpected or the challenges ahead,” she tells The People Behind the Tech podcast.Andrea speaks from her own experience of injury as a varsity volleyball player. Indeed, when anyone says she “played without an ACL” for six years – as Andrea tells Joe Lemire and John Portch – it makes you sit up and take notice.In the first episode of this new series, we discuss the questions that still need to be asked about female injury occurrence rates [18:00]. We also touch upon Andrea’s career in college athletics, which took in tenures at Texas and Kansas before she returned to UConn three years ago for her second spell [8:40]. Then, we broach her willingness to experiment with new technologies while concurrently seeking better insights from existing datasets [11:40]. Finally, she tells us why she can occasionally see herself as a modern, real-life Icarus [26:30] and much more besides.Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leaders-performance-podcast/id1124488318?mt=2), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/4EKIUuWYk5SWWqRWRQfw3z?si=epSPBhLdREOwtHiGYJnvEg), Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/leaders/the-leaders-performance-podcast) and Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1124488318/leaders-performance-podcast), or your chosen podcast platform.

David Dunne describes a perennial problem for practitioners in elite sports.“There’s a fundamental mismatch between what practitioners can deliver and what athletes actually want and desire,” he told Joe Lemire and John Portch on the People Behind the Tech podcast.“So we pivoted towards the COM-B model.”During this episode we spoke at length about Hexis’ continued growth following a successful seed round, technology’s ability to influence the evolution of the practitioner, and the fundamental union of academic rigour and those so-called softer skills.COM-B was a major part of that conversation. It has been integral to Hexis’ growth. The company used it in tandem with elements of design thinking which, as Dunne explains, stems from his time working for teams including Harlequins and Ryder Cup Team Europe. The model is a framework for understanding and changing behaviour. It was developed by Susan Michie, Maartje van Stralen and Robert West in 2011. The model posits that behaviour (B) is a result of an interaction between three components:Capability (C): this refers to an individual’s psychological and physical capacity to engage in the activity. It includes having the necessary knowledge, skills and abilities.Opportunity (O): this encompasses all the factors outside the individual that make the behaviour possible, including social and physical environmental factors.Motivation (M): this includes the brain processes that direct behaviour, such as habits, emotional responses, decision-making and analytical thinking.Listen to the full conversation.Joe Lemire LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lemirejoe/) | X (https://twitter.com/LemireJoe)John Portch LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-portch-696a4366/) | X (https://twitter.com/JohnPortch)Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/leaders-performance-podcast/id1124488318?mt=2), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/4EKIUuWYk5SWWqRWRQfw3z?si=epSPBhLdREOwtHiGYJnvEg), Stitcher (https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/leaders/the-leaders-performance-podcast) and Overcast (https://overcast.fm/itunes1124488318/leaders-performance-podcast), or your chosen podcast platform.