The Content Directory Free articles for your ezine, newsletter and blog.

Sports Aptitude has become one of the most successful companies in delivering a unique measuring tool to sports teams enabling them to accurately assess a player’s personality- which ultimately plays a key role in their ability to work in a team. “Our team includes Dr. David Weiss, who has over 30 years of experience with personality assessments and leveraging them to identify ideal candidates for specific roles”, says Chris Kirschke of Sports Aptitude. There are many companies that provide similarly -focused assessments, but as Kirschke points out, “They are largely consultative. Our differentiator is the fact that we wrap a ton of technology around this methodology and deliver every aspect of our service online.”

CRITICAL CORE DYNAMICS

Sports Aptitude have applied over 30 years of clinical psychology experience to establish the Critical Core Dynamics, the aspects of an athlete’s personality which in turn impact their performance: Team Identity ,Dominance, Coachability, Leadership Potential, Resistance to Burnout, Mental Toughness. Internal Motivation, Locker-room presence, Court Awareness, and Role-player Potential.

THE APPLICATION

“We don’t customize the survey, we allow the team to set the role, expectation and environment on a per player/coach/team basis. SO: SA provides teams with a standard set of personality metrics all mapped to sports personnel processes. They include the assessments, surveys, interviews, reports & analytics all in one open, integrated application. You then have an outlook and implementation for that (individual) player,” explains Kirschke. “One of the more unique aspects of what we do is that we roll up to the team level. Using our Team Chemistry Builder tool, teams can build, save and manipulate player combinations in the effort to find the right ones. All these Team Chemistry Reports can then be analyzed through our embedded analytics.” This is also applied to a compatibility rating between the players on the roster.

CHALLENGES

Kirsche points out that player assessment s is nothing new to the world of sports. “Its always been that piece of paper in the filing cabinet or a blurb on the scouting report. I guess the biggest challenge we’ve had was to get (teams) people to pay more attention to this aspect of it and put as much weight (into this process) as they do with scouts opinions on a player.” One of the ways Sports Aptitude approaches these challenges is not to advise teams on what decisions to make about players, but simply provide the tool by which scientific decisions can be made. Teams are given a unique tool in their player selection process by Sports Aptitude and the results speak for themselves – especially since teams are defining the ideal players to develop a given team chemistry.

SUCCESS STORIES

Kirschke was quick to highlight their success with the Phoenix Suns organization. Sports Aptitude was able to provide the Suns organization with the technology allowing them to build a library of data over a period of 3 NBA Drafts. For a professional basketball team, investing millions of dollars in player selection and development, the Sports Aptitude assessment would become invaluable. This meant that the Suns were able to compare any new prospects against a team-defined standard to clearly identify which players fit into the roster’s chemistry.

MOVING FORWARD

“We’re actually becoming a true sports personnel management system,” says Kirschke. “Not only do we cover all the personnel aspects WITH the report library, interviews, surveys and assessments but Sports Aptitude isn’t stopping there. They continue to improve their Team Chemistry tools and embedded analytic analytics that enable teams to use the stats gathered to simulate specific scenarios for each player.
“We’re also adding in, what we call our “Dollars and sense” feature,” Kirschke adds. “which brings in all the salary, ROI, player contract information, and trade analysis tools.” Sports Aptitude provides teams with the additional dimension of a player’s potential. Team Chemistry is the end result of synchronizing the personalities of the individual players.. It was always believed that the “immeasurable” factors such as ‘heart’ and ‘grit’ could not be quantified. Well evidently they can.

Originally published in Sports Activated magazine: http://www.sportsactivated.com/Magazine