Sports Performance Leadership: Nick Grantham - “Batman or Alfred? Humility, Influence, and Action in High Performance Sport

Episode 235: In this episode of Accelerate Podcast, host Nicola Graham is joined by Susie Reiner, founder of TheoryEx, a research and consulting practice sitting at the intersection of human performance, technology and validation. Susie has spent over a decade moving between the worlds of academic research, elite sport, and commercial health tech, working with companies to translate scientific evidence into commercial decisions. Alongside her industry work she is an assistant professor of exercise science at Seton Hall University, and one of the lead authors behind the Sports Tech Research Network's white paper on the current state of sports tech innovation. That combination — sitting between the lab, the field, and the boardroom — has given her an unusually clear read on a term the industry uses constantly and defines rarely. At the centre of the conversation is what 'evidence-based' actually means. The phrase has become a marketing asset, but the standard behind it shifts dramatically depending on who is making the claim, what was measured, and against what. Susie unpacks the difference between a study that exists and a study that answers the question a practitioner is actually asking. ㅤ From there the discussion turns to why validation is so often bolted on rather than built in — treated as a box to tick once a product is already in market, rather than a process that shapes what gets built in the first place — and what that costs both companies and the practitioners buying from them. ㅤ The episode closes on the harder structural question: what it would take to close the gap between what the science genuinely supports and what the market is willing to pay for, and why that gap persists even when the appetite for rigour is there. ㅤ Topics Discussed:

Episode 234: In this episode of Sports Science Insights Podcast, host Steve Barrett is joined by Niklas Virtanen, who leads the sport science efforts at FC Midtjylland. With over eight years of experience in elite sport and high-performance consulting, and backed by UEFA fitness coaching and physiotherapy credentials, Niklas has built his work around a data-driven approach to optimising player performance and development. Much of the conversation starts from a premise that is easy to say and harder to sit with: GPS has been mastered. Total distance, high-speed running, sprint counts — the metrics that once felt like the frontier are now table stakes, tracked by almost every club at almost every level. The interesting question is no longer whether you can collect them, but what you do once collecting them stops being a competitive advantage. ㅤFrom there the discussion turns to what sits underneath the movement data. Niklas makes the case for IMA and IMU signals as a way of understanding how a player is performing an action, not just what action they performed — the accelerations, decelerations, changes of direction and mechanical signatures that separate two players covering identical distances in completely different ways. It's a shift from describing workload to interpreting quality, and it changes what sport science can offer a coach. ㅤThe episode also explores where that leaves practitioners: the discipline required to stop adding metrics, the value of asking better questions of the data already being captured, and what genuine progress looks like once the obvious layer has been solved. ㅤTopics Discussed:

Episode 233: In this Gameplan episode, Andy McDonald is joined again by both Alan Murdoch & Simon Harries for Part-2 of their combined approach to ACL rehab. -Alan is the founder of Elevate: Speed & Rehab, a performance rehab consultancy working with athletes from professional to Olympic level. With over 15 years’ experience, he specialises in the link between rehabilitation and sprint performance, using movement efficiency and speed-based principles to drive recovery beyond traditional timelines.- Simon is a specialist Rehabilitation Strength & Conditioning coach with a passion for problem solving the complexities of high performance rehabilitation. He has a PhD in Human Physiology and is an accredited ASCA Master L3 S&C coach with over 15 years of experience in high performance sport, having worked with athletes from a diverse range of backgrounds, including AFL, Rugby League, Rugby Union, Rugby Sevens, Water polo, and a range of individual event sports. - Part-2 Topics Discussed:

Episode 232: In this episode of Accelerate Podcast, host Nicola Graham is joined by Jordan Stewart-Mackie an Applied Performance Scientist and PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, where his research focuses on wearable technology and data integration. Jordan's work has spanned some of the most contrasting environments in world sport — from the Premier League to Thai football to NBA Academy Africa — settings where resources, infrastructure, and staffing vary dramatically. That range has given him a rare view of what actually determines whether technology succeeds: not the sophistication of the device, but the system and the people around it. ㅤ At the centre of the conversation is the translation problem in sports tech: the gap between what data can tell us and what practitioners can act on. Jordan has built a set of structured models to close it — BISA for technology selection and evaluation, SFQT for turning data into actionable decisions, PLACE for cultural readiness and implementation stickiness, and ATRIS, the end-to-end system that connects those layers. ㅤ The discussion also explores why human connection remains the deciding factor in adoption, and how educating and empowering athletes — rather than simply monitoring them — turns data from something done to a squad into something they buy into. ㅤ Topics Discussed:

Episode 231: In this Gameplan episode, Andy McDonald is joined by both Alan Murdoch & Simon Harries to discuss their combined approach to ACL rehabs. -Alan is the founder of Elevate: Speed & Rehab, a performance rehab consultancy working with athletes from professional to Olympic level. With over 15 years’ experience, he specialises in the link between rehabilitation and sprint performance, using movement efficiency and speed-based principles to drive recovery beyond traditional timelines.- Simon is a specialist Rehabilitation Strength & Conditioning coach with a passion for problem solving the complexities of high performance rehabilitation. He has a PhD in Human Physiology and is an accredited ASCA Master L3 S&C coach with over 15 years of experience in high performance sport, having worked with athletes from a diverse range of backgrounds, including AFL, Rugby League, Rugby Union, Rugby Sevens, Water polo, and a range of individual event sports. - Topics Discussed: