Young, talented athletes overworking themselves has been a long-standing concern in Jamaica. United Kingdom (UK) Sports Institute Director of Athlete Health Dr Craig Ranson says leveraging data and technology is important not only to protect athletes’ health but also achieving peak performance.

The issue has largely been associated with track and field, primarily with the country’s premier high school competition, the Inter-secondary Schools Sports Association (ISSA)/GraceKennedy Boys’ and Girls’ Athletic Championships (Champs).

Over the years, coaches at the senior level and medical professionals have expressed concern that junior athletes struggle to make the transition to the top level due to the intense workload at the junior level, which has led to serious injuries and long-term physical damage.

In a recent symposium led by the The University of the West Indies Faculty of Sport and Mona School of Business and Management, Racers Track Club Head Coach Glen Mills says he has seen the issue first-hand.

“I have quite a number of young sprinters coming out of the system who are injured, and when taken to the medical, the injuries are years old that have not been properly dealt with, serious scar tissues and so on,” Mills said.

“[Additionally], after they come back from international competitions, they’re left on their own and there’s no structure that will follow up to see to it that they get the treatment and rehab that is necessary to get them healthy.”

In recent years, ISSA, which governs high school sports in Jamaica, has tried to address the issue by significantly reducing the number of events an athlete can participate in at Champs.

Ranson, responding to the Jamaica Observer, says coaches need to introduce personalised plans for athletes rather than using a generic approach.

“One of the things about all funded athletes within the UK, which are our Olympic and Paralympic athletes, is they have an individual athlete plan where the coach will sit down with the athlete and the support staff and agree the training programme that’s going to allow that athlete to develop optimally but also have the best chance of success without getting injured and staying on the training track,” he said.

Ranson says athletes and coaches need to take advantage of the technology available to them, which will greatly improve the way they perform.

“Most of the athletes in Jamaica have a smartphone and that’s pretty much all you need nowadays,” he said. “Systems are available through apps and it’s actually good if the athletes can be responsible for collecting their data.

“For example, one we use in the UK is an athlete reporting system on the athletes’ phone where they can record how well they slept, how well training went, whether they’ve got any current injuries or not, and what they did in their training session. It then gets recorded in a central database which can be analysed automatically and fed back to them and their coaches. Nowadays we’re lucky with the new technology and systems that you don’t need lots of IT [information technology] and data brains and power to do that. The systems are available through smartphones and cloud services that are relatively cheap to buy and can be utilised by athletes and coaches.”

Since it’s not just a track and field concern, Ranson says various sports associations can collaborate to oversee athletes by implementing a unified monitoring system.

“Some of the shared services that are available in the UK are around IT and data,” he said. “So we have a health surveillance system that goes across all 50 sports and all 1,200 athletes. They all input to the same system so we can monitor workload, injuries, and help to support sports that way rather than every single sport having to have their own IT system, their own medical record system, and their own workload management system. There are some very good ones that are off the shelf which you can buy.

“Countries like Wales and Scotland have done that, where they use those athlete management systems across all sports and the athletes take advantage of those economies of scale and not rely on every sport having to do that themselves.”

Ranson says all stakeholders need to approach the situation with seriousness and efficiency if they are to achieve success.

“It goes back to good planning, good data collection, and good administration,” he said. “That feedback of the insight goes back to the coach and athlete so they can have that consensual agreement about what the programme is going to look like and why it’s designed that way.”