Stephen Smith: 'Four of the top nations are leveraging our platform'

Steve Borthwick wasn’t shy last weekend in volunteering a specific reason why England had just been knocked over by South Africa, falling away in the latter stages of the Autumn Nations Series fixture as happened in the earlier November losses to New Zealand and Australia.

“Clearly we have played against a series of very good teams that have come off the back of The Rugby Championship, so they are Test match hardened. At the start of this series, you looked at the condition of the players and it wasn’t quite where it needed to be for Test match rugby, for teams stepping straight into Test match rugby,” he suggested.

In other words, the work his players had done at Gallagher Premiership level wasn’t fully up to standard and left them playing international-level catch-up. It’s a wrinkle, though, that is hopefully on its way to being ironed out as a new multi-year, multi-partner agreement between Kitman Labs and the Rugby Football Union was confirmed last month.

The RFU had been using Kitman’s performance optimisation solution in its intelligence platform since last year, but the company’s performance medicine solution has now been added and the whole shooting match is being rolled out to all senior teams and academies across the Premiership. Stones will no longer be left unturned.

“The operating system will power share intelligence, driving collaboration and support the seamless dissemination of insights and analytics between club and country,” read the accompanying media release.

“Coaches, practitioners and stakeholders alike will now have a real-time, 360-degree view of each player to support monitoring of load management, inform training plans and game strategy, preparation for international duties and return-to-club play to optimise player welfare and performance outcomes.”

If it helps to turn England’s serial near-misses into wins, the deal will be worth its weight in gold. “It's enormous,” enthused Kitman CEO and founder Stephen Smith about their RFU expansion. “When you have a league and a governing body deciding that collectively for club and country, it showcases the value of bringing that data from what is happening in the club set-up every day into the international environment.

“It allows the international team to make better decisions and likewise, as players are moving back to their club sides, allowing them to make better decisions. It highlights that everybody places a huge amount of value on the data.

“They need to have that data translate back and forward, and it really helps everybody to understand when teams and governing bodies are all placing an enormous amount of value on the role that it plays in helping them to improve the game, to manage their athletes, to accelerate performances.

“It showcases the ambition of the RFU as well, the ambition of English rugby, and that is only good for the game. They are already a powerhouse in world rugby and for us now to be working with all of English rugby, all of South African rugby, all of Irish rugby, all of Argentina rugby – we have four of the top seven or eight nations in the world leveraging our platform across the entirety of their ecosystem – that says something!”

Will it definitely solve this English club/country fitness gap alleged by Borthwick? “It will help them to understand what that looks like even in the build-up to that so that he knows what they are looking like. When he says something like that, obviously the different game models at different clubs or club and country are going to be different, so if he is taking in players from clubs that are playing a completely different game model, a completely different set of outputs, that is going to create some level of discrepancy.

“So for them to understand how wide that is or how variable that is from where there are today allows them to develop better programmes to integrate those players and get them where they need to be as quickly as possible, so it should be hugely valuable within that context.”

Essentially, Kitman are your one-stop shop when it comes to number crunching. “We help organisations to bring together all of the information they are collecting on their athletes and their organisation, so everything from their fitness data, tactical, technical, medical data, operational information. We let them bring it to one place so they can build a 360-degree of their athletes.

“From there we help them to start to generate their insights to help them improve decision-making around the things that are most important. So how they identify talent, how they develop talent, how they manage their talent from a performance perspective or how do they protect them from injury and keep them healthy, so we have become an operating system for a high-performance operation.”

The current flow of information is extraordinary. “When we first started the company an average client was transmitting about 95,000 data points per athlete per year and we are seeing today clients generating 10 million data points per athlete per year in the system. That tells you the size of the problem that needs to be solved.

“We integrate with over 150 different companies today but an average team is using somewhere between seven and 20 different systems, so pulling all that together in one place becomes more valuable. That is why we are excited every day when we wake up. We have already made an important impact so far, but what we want to do is be truly transformational.”

Kitman is now a 150-staff organisation scattered across the globe, so its reach across a variety of sports is vast. For example, jerseys from LA Galaxy, Portland Timbers, Columbus Crew and University of Alabama provided the backdrop when the 40-year-old Smith spoke with RugbyPass about his company’s transformation from a small acorn to an industry leader.

A Carlow IT graduate in Ireland, Smith’s voyage began as an injury rehabilitation coach at Leinster in March 2008. It was very much the right time, the right place as the Irish province were desperate to shed its status as European under-achievers. By the time he left in 2014 to go full-time with his Kitman idea, they were serial title winners.

“There was probably two, three years’ worth of just me banging my head against a wall with an idea,” he said about the genesis of Kitman. “I had learned how to write some initial code, so we had a very ugly and basic version of what we have today.

“I stayed working full-time at Leinster at that point and was trying to build out the technology and test it every day in that environment, see how it worked, get feedback from the other staff at Leinster, get feedback from the players, understand how it needed to work, how we needed to procure the information back from what people really valued.

“I was very lucky to be involved in an environment that just had so much ambition that everyone was willing to try anything to get better and really that is what afforded me the opportunity to be able to do this, the group of people that were around me and supporting me then.

“We were trying to turn over every single penny to figure out where do we gain the competitive edge. You could see that in the group built through that period, the amount of success developed in that organisation.

“The initial plan was just to keep building this internally at Leinster and keep making us better as an organisation but then I met a guy called John Malloy, a managing partner at an investment firm called BlueRun Ventures. Jamie Heaslip was giving him a tour of Aviva Stadium as part of the Web Summit. He was a Web Summit speaker and Jamie and him were speaking about investments. He asked about innovation in rugby and Jamie told him about us.

“When I met John, he gave me a real sense and belief that this can work everywhere. He was asking questions about why other leagues, why other teams haven’t done this. I gave him my rationale as to why it hadn’t happened yet and after a couple of months of getting to know him, he offered us our initial $4million investment and wanted us to grow the business into other sports.

“At that point in time, I had never really thought about growing it out but it made me pause and think, ‘Why shouldn’t I? If I don’t do it somebody is going to do it.’ Also if I don’t do this and take this opportunity, will I regret it for the rest of my life? That was probably the overarching rationale, if I don’t do this I will think about it forever and I will regret the fact that I just didn’t take a chance.”

A decade later, what is Smith's perspective now? “How I view success is I’m still looking for it. We have grown hugely and I’m really proud of everything we have achieved so far but it’s probably like any industry, the further you get in it the more opportunity you see to do more and more. The opportunity for data to really transform this industry is only in its infancy.

“We have spent the last 10 years trying to help organisations get that organised, get it standardised, create better ways to manage data and information, and we are starting to generate some really interesting insights into what that information means. We just want to continue to get better.

“The reason we started the company was to help organisations unlock the value of the information they are collecting and that hasn’t changed to this day. Nothing has changed apart from the fact we are a little bit further along the road. I’m loving it.”

Cian Healy is an example of the success that can be achieved using data. He was touted for retirement in 2014. Instead, he came through and last week’s equalled Brian O’Driscoll’s Ireland caps record.

“You are trying to understand how we should adapt somebody’s training, being able to look back and see every aspect of what is going on medically, being able to understand what they did in training yesterday, how does that change the way that they have recovered today, what is needed from them in the next game, how do they compare to their peers and other people in that position? Like, that’s everything!

“Being able to see that information and make that decision. When I look back on athletes that I have worked with and the impact that it has had, there are real critical moments in people’s careers. I just had a back-and-forth with Cian Healy, congratulating him on equalling Brian O’Driscoll’s record for Ireland.

“He texted to let me know he doesn’t celebrate equalling records, but I said he needs to suck it in and enjoy the moment because I remember probably 10 years ago that one of the surgeons he was speaking to, because he had issues with his neck, was recommending that he potentially retire.

“We were able to look at data at that point and have a conversation with Cian and say, ‘This is what we are seeing, this is what you are still capable of’. We weren’t making the decision. He was, but we were able to provide him with a wealth of information understanding that Cian has incredible belief in himself. What a shame it would have been for him, for Irish rugby, for Leinster if he retired 10 years ago. Look what he has created.”

Smith was like a sponge working at Leinster. “Michael Cheika was a phenomenally charismatic individual. He has an unnerving sense of belief in himself, in what he is doing. It was incredible to see how he operates, just see his unwillingness to settle for second best. Also, his ability to build culture and environment around him.

“Joe Schmidt and the level of detail he applied, just how hard he works and how smart in a tactical way, he is a real strategist, a real tactician. Being able to see both those styles and the success they created in completely different ways was just incredible to see. In the career I’m in now, working with some investors who have built billion-dollar organisations, seeing what they have done and what is important for them, being an entrepreneur for me means every day is a school day.”

The final word goes to player welfare and safety. Has the data industry made rugby safer? “Without a doubt. Rugby and American football, two different sports that 10 years ago people would have said were extremely dangerous, are you going to let your kids play, you can see the rule changes being brought in.

“They are looking at games, looking at training information. The work we are doing alongside some of those big partners, some of the core principles of what they do is injury surveillance. They are trying to understand how those injuries are occurring, where they are occurring in games, what actions they are occurring from, who they are occurring to, and then changing the rules and regulations within the games.

“They are also trying to understand what medical practices are working; also trying to understand what return to play protocols are safe and all of that. There is an entire ecosystem behind the scenes looking at this data and information, trying to improve the standard of care and improve the health and safety of our players. That’s really impressive. We are so proud to be a part of that.”