Dr. Jeremy Bettle: Performance culture

Dr. Jeremy Bettle shares about his unique career as a multi-sport practitioner. Dr. Bettle has worked in the NCAA, NBA, NHL, and is currently the Performance Director at New York City Football Club.

Jeremy has built a reputation as someone that has an incredible impact on team culture, a lifelong learner and educator, his experience across different leagues has been invaluable.

Transcript

Gary McCoy: [00:00:11] If you were an automotive mechanic graduating top of your class, you'd put together a resume. And if you have the slightest ounce of courage and we're really dedicated to your craft, you might reach out to say a Formula One team to see if they were hiring. And to see what difference you could make on their multimillion dollar machines. If you were a really good mechanic midway through your career, you'd see the likes of Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes dotting your resume as they fought over you and your skill set. That's the best analogy I can find for our podcast guest today, Dr. Jeremy Bettle, with a multipart skillset forged at UC Santa Barbara and P3. Let me list off just a few of the stops on Dr. Bettle's career so far. The Brooklyn Nets of the NBA, the Toronto Maple Leafs of the NHL, the Anaheim Ducks of the NHL. These all led to his current role as head of performance for the New York Football Club. Any mechanic for the human body is likely salivating over this resume, and it's far from over. What makes Dr. Bettle so sought after is his attention to detail. He incorporates soft skills with the same sense of priority and verve as the linear physical traits many simply observe and measure. Jeremy is the architect of performance cultures, and when you listen closely to how he explains things, you'll also understand the personal trait that underpins his success, humility. Couple that with a love of profession, and you'll soon know why I keep Jeremy on a small list of trusted advisers and, more importantly, friends. Welcome to the Human Kinesomic project, Jeremy. This is awesome mate we get to catch up live on our podcast.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:02:09] Yeah, super excited to chat Gary.

Gary McCoy: [00:02:11] As always, Mate quick, funny story for you. So ironically, my wife is really she's fallen in love with this TV show. Ted Lasso on Apple TV, right? Absolutely loves it. Asked me last night, she goes, Hey, is Richmond FC an actual team? I had to look at her and say, No honey, hang on a sec. It's not. I said it's a fictional team, I said. But ironically, the characters that are portrayed in that show, outside of your American influence into soccer, which I don't think will ever happen. I said outside of that, I said, it's, you know, that clubhouse effect is pretty right on, you know, it's there's so many characters and so much fun and the reason I bring that up Mate. For our listeners, you have seen it all. I mean, let's go down through a history. Your kind of cumulative history because I know you from the NBA and also the NHL.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:03:05] Right?

Gary McCoy: [00:03:05] Move now to MLS, but there was a whole battery before you hit the shores in North America. You had a whole series of sports you worked with. Tell us about that.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:03:15] Yeah, Mate. So it's been a really interesting journey. Essentially, I did my undergrad in the UK, so I went to Leeds Met and I'm born and raised in Leicester. Worked over there, actually just in the private sector. David Lloyd's in Leicester, right, did that for a year and, you know, just thought that has got to be more to this field than this. You know, and I say it all the time, but that's back when I knew everything after I'd finished my undergrad, you know, when I was really hot?

Gary McCoy: [00:03:53] Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:03:54] And so whether it was the hubris of not knowing any better or whether it was just sort of a drive to to be able to do more, I started looking outside of the UK because, you know, sports like like rugby had just turned professional in 95, so there was no real jobs in rugby. And then. Other areas like football, maybe you had your physio and maybe there was a fitness coach, and so there wasn't a ton of opportunity. So I decided to come to the states to do my master's and stay in a year. And that was 18 years ago. So I sort of got stuck. I went to Middle Tennessee, did my master's and PhD. Yeah. And while I was doing that, had the opportunity to link up with USA rugby. And so sort of started my journey there with with the Eagles. And we did the World Cup in thousand seven over in France. The Churchill Cup was still going at the time, so that was a great experience. And then really quickly realised in through that experience that all of my athletes were going to be injured all the time. All right, to some degree, you know, and so it wasn't necessarily going to hold them out of anything, but they couldn't do the perfect lift that you drawn up for them, you know? Right. This is the one this is going to get you where you need to be. Well, I'm a 38 year old amateur rugby player. I can't do that, right? Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, that was the start of my strength conditioning career where I realised I was woefully unprepared.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:05:43] You know so. From there, I actually linked up with one of the physios that we had working with the team and went to work for him in Santa Barbara. So we had a bunch of private clinics in Santa Barbara and spent two years really just sort of studying that transitional period, either from surgery through return to performance or modifying a programme. So this guy has a sore shoulder. We still need him to train. And so how do we modify and what exercises can he do? So that was a really, really important period in my career was learnt in that piece. And then really fortunate to have had the opportunity then as that was sort of running its course, the head strength coach job came up at university in town. So UC Santa Barbara and was very fortunate to get that as sort of an outsider to the US sporting world. So in the interim period there, I've met our mutual friend Marcus, and we'd had some great chats and I've been in three and shadowed a bunch. And so he actually advocated for me pretty strongly for that role. Yeah. And so really fortunate to then take that learning from the private sector and be able to apply it en masse to five hundred athletes with basically just myself and my assistant. So we're we're working sort of 16 hours a day, just applying these concepts and just learning, you know, with a bunch of really enthusiastic young athletes.

Gary McCoy: [00:07:26] And it's and it's a it's a critical part of, I think any athlete's journey is this algorithm from injury. And if it's, you know, depending on where that classification is, from soreness through to pain through to debilitated, I can't move. That's a critical stage that I think it gets underserved in many areas because of, you know, things like we talk about it quite often about like you get an injury. And for some reason in North American sports medicine, we like to treat that. Location of the injury, but in return to play, there's not a lot of consideration relative to the compensation around that relative to movement, and are we having poor motor patterns to go back to the skill or the technical activity that where they occurred? And that's where I think and for our listeners. Marcus is Dr. Marcus Elliott at P three. You can look up three MD and you'll see a very, very nondescript kind of understanding of what P3 do. But Marcus now runs the NBA combine has been incredibly successful with a number of athletes, and I would say today has one of the I'm trying to think of the right word to use here. One of the more proven methodologies relative to understanding the movement's signature and biomechanical movement process of of an athlete. So to have that, to have that ability to basically get through an academic period kind of bridge it with UC Santa Barbara, but then to have him in your backyard. Holy cow. You know, that's you know, it's like having a, you know, a master chef working next door in the kitchen, right, that you're trying to learn how to cook. So, yeah, so tell us a little bit more about that Mate. Let's dive into that to what were the things that P3 there were eye openers for you.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:09:29] Philosophically, we really hit it off. The thing with P3 is that where we shared a philosophy is that the body's just a big engineering project. Right. So you can start to see these movements and the subsequent injuries as just a a physics project. And so if this dysfunctional movement at that basic biomechanical level, we can point to the spot that's likely to break under high load, right? And so there was sort of the combination of having the better understanding of the post rehab piece, which gives you an idea of what your susceptibility to injury are, but then really, really digging into minute detail with Marcus on the individualisation piece. And so having that understanding of the biomechanics and being able to see it putting in practise a P three on a very individual personal level and being able to take both of those previous experiences of group strength and conditioning, individual rehab and injury susceptibility, P 3's attention to detail and then learn how to put those three together into a system and take them to UCSB and apply that en masse to five hundred athletes. That was where those three sort of fed into one another with with P three really, really been a massive influence in terms of how do we take these team sport athletes break it down initially by sport, which is surprisingly uncommon, right then by position as we got more time with the athletes and then as we got to know them better, each individual would have some sort of tweak that we'd hadn't written into his programme or her programme that over time, as we got to know them better, we just got to learn what they could and couldn't do and what they needed.

Gary McCoy: [00:11:30] Yeah, no, exactly. And I had a great discussion last week with the gentleman that will probably get on a podcast here at some point. Dr. Todd S. from New York and it was interesting, he said. One sentence that really stuck with me, he said the only thing that's random in the body is trauma. And I was like, Wow, OK, when you put it into that perspective and understand the patterns that emerge, you know, from injury or patterns that emerge from overuse of a specific skill and what they do quantifiably for imbalance in the human body. Yeah, P three, i think look at that and and understand the fundamentals around this engineering problem, as you is, as you suggest. So you take that Mate you, you hit it en masse at the collegiate level. So you've got a lot of good, a lot of good collagen existing at the collegiate level. Right. So you've got these 18 to 22 year olds who are resilient, right, can go out. Or maybe they remember us at 18 to 20 two in the environments we grew up with. I mean, 20 beers the night before the big match. No worries. Rock up. Here we are, right. I remember that with the ranking with Liverpool Football Club was like these guys were hammered. What's going on there? They got a quarter cup final tomorrow night. Just right, right? Right. And that's the beauty of being eighteen to twenty two. So now you move from there. What was your next step along the journey and taking that experience? And what were you modifications like for older athletes?

Jeremy Bettle: [00:12:59] One of one of the other pieces that I should have said on the the P3, but and the rehab that was was also the realization that those rehab processes we could put in place before the athlete got injured. And so we could be doing these things that we were doing with injured athletes, with healthy athletes who presented with similar movement patterns, right? So that was I think the real power of it was was training people out of their injury susceptibility versus rehabbing them from the injury. Right. So so that was a real critical piece. And then so the next move from UCSB three was actually into the NBA with the Nets,

Gary McCoy: [00:13:51] And it was the first time we met. And I remember this, like all of a sudden, you know, we're putting catapult monitors all throughout the NBA. I think you were one of the earlier adopters. I want to say Mate. This is like 20, 14, 15.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:14:04] Some people might have been earlier than that.

Gary McCoy: [00:14:06] Yeah, yeah, it could have been. Yeah, might have even been 20 13. But I remember meeting you and we were looking at the data for the first time and then you took it away. You were processing a lot of information. You said to me, I'll never get this. Hey, Mate, come back. You would you would try and understand if Falguni, if that collapsed during, you know, by the jump or land, is it a is it really an issue for my athletes and how many of them I remember coming to a Brooklyn Nets game actually brought my wife and daughter with me and was sitting there and I was examining waist down. On every single athlete, I didn't know what the score was, all I was doing was trying to look and quantify, is that a problem? Because I think that's one of the pathways that is problematic for a practitioner is everyone's looking for good or bad or binary solutions to evaluate any good or bad. And you know, you are you asking that question ahead of the curve for me. But that was our first interaction. That's when I kind of thought, Okay, this is someone special, someone who's got a deeper investigation going on. So getting to the NBA, so you've got you go from 500 student athletes into the NBA Mate. That's a different animal. Totally different.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:15:23] Yeah, you go from. Five hundred athletes to 15 athletes, essentially, yeah. Now the way I wanted to approach it and I always thought, UCSB, you should you should be training for the job you want now, right? So don't wait to get to the NBA to start acting like you're in the NBA. So we tried to individualise as much as possible. So I tried to view it as basically 15 teams, right? So each athlete was an individual. It wasn't that you. It wasn't that you just had. A team of basketball players. Right, so we really tried to dig into detail on each athlete.

Gary McCoy: [00:16:11] What was the variability on those programmes for that? Those individuals, like, if you had to say there was common because I have this question in baseball all the time, right? It's because of the rotational specificity of the skill. There's a certain amount of exercises that will be common and cross over, but there will be a high percentage that are very specified to the individual. So how did that look? I mean, how much of a day to day programme for an athlete was individualised versus common?

Jeremy Bettle: [00:16:38] Yeah, that's that's a really good question. So. My philosophy essentially centres around doing the fundamentals really well. And so there are certain movement patterns that we need to train and we need to have an athlete be really proficient in. From there, the specification comes in so everybody might do some sort of triple extension exercise. And I look more at patterns than exercises. But can Deron Williams do the same? Movement pattern as Brook Lopez, in terms of do they both need to be back squatting? Probably not. Right. So so there's massive variation in the NBA based on body type. But then also the limiting factor for each athlete is so different. And particularly in the NBA, you might have a guy who's very, very strong and could do with being a little more springy. Or you might have an athlete who's incredibly springy and needs to be a little stronger. Right. Because right, the issue with being able to jump 40 inches off the ground is that at some point you have to land right and you're landing there with with 10 times your body weight, right? So that's the moment when your system is going to be exposed if there are energy leaks. And so that was the variation with what was each athlete's limiting factor to being optimized. And then as I got to learn the style the coach wanted to play and how does the coach want Brook Lopez to perform? Then we could tailor his training a little more based on some guys wanted him to be much, much bigger and heavier and stronger and and be really effective down low. Yeah. Whereas other coaches wanted to be a little more mobile and and faster and more athletic, and so now we start to train them specific for the demands we expect them to be able to perform under as well as his general athleticism and injury susceptibility.

Gary McCoy: [00:18:51] And that was like one of my first interactions just to circle back and close off the P three discussion. As one of my first interactions with Marcus at E3 was with the athlete, James Harden. And we were looking at metrics relative to him and we were breaking it down. Marcus got to the point of saying breaking it down easy, a hip jumper or a knee jumper. And I said, So you're looking at angle change angle, a change for production of velocity. But then the risk was all relative to how he landed right and what those landing points were. But it's really interesting because with Marcus have brought up a great discussion around what we'll call first audit metrics for an athlete and quite often, like even the NBA league office where Marcus, I remember being in this presentation with Marcus and we were talking around. Marcus was running the NBA combine and it got to a stage where the discussion points, where everyone wanted to see who jumped the highest and who ran the fastest down court. And James Harden's, an all star based upon being really poor in those two metrics. So how are you evaluating this guy and where does he fit into the picture? So I mean, it's a great it's a great discussion for even like the things that have got to come into context, like even contract length resource application to that athlete. How much are you going to apply? What's the age and fundamental neurological pattern for that athlete is and when you see an energy leak, can you modify it right? These are all very, I think, significant questions that are asked in terms of two categories managing risk and then optimising performance. Yeah.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:20:28] And that's that's a huge piece that that risk management piece and I think. I think in the NBA, certainly, we can actually go a little too far down that road and actually make them more fragile because we protect them from load. And we everything we do is around removing that load.

Gary McCoy: [00:20:49] Exactly. It's it's there's this process. I think load management is a buzz word and it is the most misunderstood term across North American professional sports and coming from baseball. You know, pitch count became a load management, and it's like also the rate limiting factor to adaptation as soon as you as soon as you're devolving your athletes by thinking that there's only so many bullets in the gun, there's only, you know, this is not about bullets in the chamber. For me, it's about building a bigger chamber. So you're seeing the same thing in the NBA. That's really interesting, right?

Jeremy Bettle: [00:21:27] Absolutely. And the problem is, you know, sports science is a relatively new thing in North America. And when I say that I'm talking more about the data side because we also forget that at one point, strength and conditioning was a sport science. And so it was sports medicine. Yeah, that's right. So we were relatively strong in some of those areas. But the data side of it was very new coming in into North American sport and this was a piece where. You could intuitively understand it, and so it became sports science like Catapult did an unbelievable job of becoming sport science in North America. Yeah, and and that was it. And so the problem was as soon as we could put a number on something, our next goal was to try and reduce it. And right, that's not how training works, right?

Gary McCoy: [00:22:24] Right? Yeah, yeah.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:22:25] What happened to us being in phenomenal shape, right? Yeah, we used to train really hard and be in great shape, right?

Gary McCoy: [00:22:33] Exactly. And that, to me is the, you know, I try to explain this. A catapult all the time was like, Guys, this is not linear mathematics. This is not standard algebra. Even this is chaos theory. If you change a variable, we've got to understand its impact. Is it are you changing that variable for injury management or are you changing it, trying to de-risk injury? Or are you changing it to optimise performance? So yeah, Mate look, we could go we could go hours on load management and and and probably not change anything immediately in North American sports. But over time, I'm I'm hoping that does come around. But let's talk about the transition for you then to like, go straight out of Brooklyn into the Toronto Maple Leafs, right? So you're going into you're going from a wow, you know, 500 student athletes, multiple sports. You take those learning fundamentals, you transition those over into a high profile team in an incredible stadium in Brooklyn, working with 15 athletes and looking at the individuality of those programmes. Now these guys have skates on. Right? So this is a different kind of. This is a different kind of athlete. Tell me about that transition because I think I was right there talking to Alex McKechnie about you when that transition was occurring. And yeah, how how difficult was that? How much re learning did that take to move from the NBA to the NHL so much?

Jeremy Bettle: [00:24:09] You know, you go from a. A sport that is. Very predominantly vertical. Into a sport that has absolutely zero vertical or linear aspect whatsoever, not one thing happens going up and down. Not one thing happens going forward and backwards. Everything that happens is left. Exactly so. Just learning the demands of the game and hockey is also a very, very old school, antiquated sport. Very, very few people were using the catapult system. A few people dip a toe in the water, but it was questionable whether it was actually ready for hockey at the time. Exactly. Yeah. So there were a number of people, sort of. Tried it and got back out because they couldn't sort of make it fit, and there was also no no precedent for the high performance model. You know, it was still a very traditional athletic trainer, physician, strength coach led model. Everything was about the grind. Everything was about grinding. And, you know. Very little thought to what are the actual demands of hockey? How did training at goalkeepers to be explosive, how training our guys to be able to. Not just grind at one speed, but be explosive within that ship. It's not just 30 to forty five seconds on. And thirty forty five seconds, oh, it's it's variable within that, you know, and so being able to really write down those demands and then use the data that we bring in from other sports to say, here's what injuries susceptibility looks like, because it's very much a tough guys sport, or at least they like to present that image. Yeah. Right, right. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And so you play if you you fight through concussions, you do all this stuff. And so his me saying this guy's not hurt, but he might be tomorrow, so let's shut him down. You know, those were interesting conversations initially.

Gary McCoy: [00:26:31] Yeah, I'm sure they were and transitions us really to this concept of of sport and team, probably more so focussed on team culture. Right. We hear that word used a lot. It doesn't matter. Know Championship teams will say, Oh, we have a great culture, but you never hear losing teams saying our culture is bad, right? And common friend who was also in the NHL, Dr. Ben Petersen. I recall, you know, from our time at Catapult trying to firstly, we we had a call from the Philadelphia Flyers who wanted technology and I said, Guys, I don't even know if this accelerometer will work on the ice for what you're trying to measure. So I said, I'll give it to you for free. You capture the data, will analyse the data, you know, over the next six months. I think it was halfway through a season in twenty thirteen fourteen. I said, we'll have a look at it there and. And I gave it to Ben, who was working with us at the time. I said, Mate break this down, I said, but break it down backwards. Let's reverse engineer from what's the what's the biggest injury that you've seen in hockey at the time? And it was like there were kind of two he was looking at was groyne injury and low back injury, right? He was looking at those two and I said, Well, let's try to understand there's asymmetry. Play a part in that. Let's remove, you know, one of the accelerometers and try to pull the data sets out and objectifying motion laterally so we can see if there are imbalances. And potentially that will tell us something. But that's this Segways Mate into a discussion around technology. You've been kind of on the front end of. It's almost technological validation and then data validation from that technology, so how do you go about that process, like starting out? And we want to get to obviously your new role with New York Football Club and culture, but does technology and data play a part in that cultural thread?

Jeremy Bettle: [00:28:27] Yes. Very much so. Very, very much so. And it's such a challenging piece, especially at really highly resourced clubs. Yeah, because it can reflect your culture where you can go and buy everything. Right, right. And what should you buy more importantly? So. Are you a team and this is where it's reflected, are you a team who just wants new shiny toys? They got one. We need one. Yeah. And you just drop all that technology on your coach's desk and great. Now we do sports science and. We on the flip side, are we really thoughtfully trying to solve a problem? Right, so what are the issues we're trying to take on? What are the current resources we have? And then what are the gaps that need us to innovate? And then. From that. Are we in a culture that is interested in learning and that goes from the coaching staff, the general manager through the staff? And if so, how are we modifying our day to day practise based on the technology that we have gathered? Right. And I think that that's for me how culture is reflected in technology. Yeah, either we we buy a ton of stuff. We gather a load of data, and it does absolutely nothing. It sits on my laptop. And we're just collecting it to collect it. And that's that's really indicative of a culture whereby you've got certain people within the culture trying to drive some change and innovation. And you've got other aspects of the culture that are sort of rooted in in tradition and in their own philosophy.

Gary McCoy: [00:30:28] Right? How much of that direction is driven by fear? Emotionally fear of loss of job, fear of risk. Fear of innovation. When you come into a team, this is is that common for the teams or is that a pre-selection criteria to where you're going? Do you see fear being a constant? Cultural issue.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:30:58] Yeah, I think I think that's a big part of it, I've found a lot of times where where medical scouts are resistant to technological advances within the field. It can be down to avoiding the accountability that comes with. We measured. At the start of this intervention, we measured at the end and nothing changed. Yeah, yeah, it's. If you're not psychologically safe within your role, if you're in a culture that doesn't allow you to make mistakes or admit mistakes and learn from them. Who wants to be the guy that says, Wow, this is fantastic, my treatment did absolutely nothing. Right, exactly. I just wasted six months rehabbing this app. Yeah, right. Nobody wants to be that guy. So you can't blame people in that instance for not wanting to measure because it's it's risky. Yeah. Within the right context. And it's hard to create, and it takes a lot of time within the right context. People are interested and right and people will want to say. He does this intervention actually do what we think it does? So I'm going to measure, treat and immediately measure again rather than wait for these big passages of time. And we'll say, wow, that actually didn't do what I thought it was going to do. And so maybe we do need to start looking at something different. We need to learn a new skill. Right. But I think it takes time to get there.

Gary McCoy: [00:32:41] No, I think you're right. Mate and. You used the term psychological safety, and I think it's it's a brilliant term, especially for almost like cultural awareness for an organisation and especially for like a team of practitioners who you now putting in place and and developing right to enable their psychological safety and to create a an environment where that exists. Have you been in an environment where that exists? Have you created an environment where that exists? And if you've created it, what are the steps to doing something like that? Hmm.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:33:31] Well, that's a tough one to answer. I've definitely been in ones where where it didn't exist. Yep, it's really challenging, you know, the the psychological safety piece really has to come. From an overall coach, both through management and the coaching staff. And through. The staff within performance know, so it really is a holistic thing, it's it's fine, it's being able to have open and frank conversations in the back of the house, which sometimes it's not possible. But then are we willing to have those same conversations if the GM walks into the room or the head coach? But. There's a very, very big power dynamic there, a power imbalance. And huge pressure whereby the head coach doesn't necessarily understand that he can't blow up every time something happens or the GM saying it doesn't really matter what I do. It's going to very much depend on the general atmosphere at the club. But so, Ron, I think the first thing is understanding. What the culture is that you're coming into, and this has been one of my key learnings of moving between so many clubs, it is the change management process. It's not so much. It's not that I have a great system that works really well because it doesn't everyone. You have me come in and assess the situation you walk into. Spend time observing, documenting the culture, seeing what's done really well already. And then over time, introducing. Your system sort of into the cracks, into the gaps that you see within that current system. But in the context of the organisation,

Gary McCoy: [00:35:41] Would you call that a performance audit? Or does it really extend beyond that? Because in times historically when I've coming into a situation fresh, the first thing I try to do is audit. You know, look at things like injury rates, injury history of the individual players, and I'll look at the mechanisms of those injuries and I'll look at the training methodology on the back side and you start to unpack the the functional elements of the culture to see potentially. Is this from mis learning, not enough resources? You know, where where are those errors occurring? The ones that are tougher are the is that soft skill side, right? Is that soft events? And there was one organisation I interviewed with two years ago that looked fantastic on the surface. But when I was in my one on ones, in a in an open setting with these individuals, they would look over both shoulders and then lean in and tell me all the negatives about the organisation. The owner, like they didn't want to be heard by anybody else. But, you know, one on one they were they felt safe with me to say, Oh man, don't come here. This is a quote unquote shit show. You know, this is what you know, this is a problem. And so ta ta ta. And it stopped me from signing a fairly lucrative offer with that team. And it's actually been two situations for me like that. But it's been a gut feel, right? It's been a gut feel. I don't know if I'm asking the right questions or whether it is is am I in tune with this? And it's hard because I've walked away from the opportunity and don't know, right? And both both those organisations have gone on to have some pretty good success, and I'm happy for them, but I just knew I wasn't going to be a part of it. So. In your audit process, is it it? Does it start with the function of day to day practise or does it really start with, OK, let me get a sense emotionally of how everybody is interacting. What do you start them?

Jeremy Bettle: [00:37:47] Yeah, so this is an area that I've I've spent a huge amount of time and hopefully have evolved a lot during my career, and I think one of the key mistakes we can make is just to do the performance audit. And that's certainly what I've done in the past. As you go in right and you, you assess the functional components. On the expertise level and why are these injuries happening and you think great, there's a ton of low lying fruit? Let's change everything. You know, I know exactly how to fix this, but if you fail to do that within the greater context. Of the organisation. That's where the soft skills just run right into a brick wall. You know? You have to be able to assess the readiness for change of an organisation. Number one, if there's a ton of low lying fruit. And there hasn't been a lot of staff turnover. There's a reason it's that. Right, so. Ok, this is an established programme you've got you've got a management structure and a medical staff who've been together for for 10 plus years. Everybody saying, Hey, we need to change, we need to fix this.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:39:13] But what you need to understand is, well, why haven't you what what is it that has led to this pattern of results that are sort of happening currently and don't take that into effect? Sorry, you don't take that into account. You run in thinking you've got all the answers and the whole system gets rejected. Brian was actually going about a process of observing the culture scene where the readiness to change is and going about structure change management process, where you, you bring people along with you a little more. And and so that that's the accumulation of that experience is what I've brought here into New York. Yeah. You know, and it was part of my interview process, as you alluded to on, is this a situation I want to come into? Yeah. You know, do I want to be a part of this, this club in this culture? And do I feel that they're ready for change? Or is this going to be a massive arm wrestle to be able to bring this system that people say they want, but they don't necessarily want to change how they act today?

Gary McCoy: [00:40:31] Yeah, we want we want better results with the same system, right? We want better results with the same people in the same system and you make that happen. And that's that's sometimes difficult, especially when you're put into a role where you are, quote unquote the conductor of the orchestra. You know, there's some you're going to sing different songs now. There is some parts of that orchestra that need to be shut down. And you know, it's it's in making the decision to come to New York Football Club, which I think a spectacular move for you personally. And when we were chatting prior to that transition, it just sounded like this was you're being presented with a clean slate and all the opportunity to create a clean slate. What's being the biggest challenge to date for you? And it, you know, is it being coming into now football and for our listeners, European football, which is soccer coming into this sport? What's been the biggest challenge so far?

Jeremy Bettle: [00:41:27] You know, this is one of the first roles I've been into, where this is pure strategic and leadership. And so there's not like that anchoring task that you have each day. You know, it's not a hands on role at all. And so it's all about leadership and strategy with the senior management of the organisation, which I'm thoroughly enjoying. But it's it's quite hard to come in and not have a job to do initially when you are used to being very integrated with the team, that very close relationship with the players. You're now a couple of layers removed from that. And so finding new ways to be in that mix? Yeah, more more as a leader than it's that's a challenge right off the bat. But then practically. I like to educate and bring people right. And so we have a very young team. What I've found, which is somewhat different to many of the other sports I've been in, the language barriers can be such a hurdle to being able to develop players.

Gary McCoy: [00:42:42] So you've probably got what, Spanish, French,

Jeremy Bettle: [00:42:45] Portuguese, English? Yeah, yeah. And varying levels of English competency. And so that that really brings in to sort of start you, your career arc where you, you spend so long becoming very technically proficient. And then you have to start looking outside of your technical proficiency to what is limiting me from applying that technical knowledge. And for me right now, if we've got if we've got a young player who doesn't speak English. It doesn't matter what I. As I it to him. Right. So these are the parts of of your expertise now that need to start growing. You need to have much more self-awareness now on what am I blind spots? How am I applying what I know and how can I best serve the player and help to educate and bring them along? And that's been a massive challenge.

Gary McCoy: [00:43:48] Mate How will you measure your success in this role? I mean, coming in, like you said, not having that day to day job or that day to day, OK, it's like a strength coach would say, Yeah, I've improved his back squat by five per cent, and we hope hoping that translates to some technical ability with everything being measurable in sports as it is. How do you measure your effect like season one to a long term kind of target and goal? How do you measure that?

Jeremy Bettle: [00:44:19] So I think in this iteration of the performance director role, it has to be. Multilevel. Will be expected to produce results on the pitch. You know, what are our injury rates, the guys in great shape and we can measure all of that. These these are things that I think are going to be the the measurable number that I'll be ultimately like,

Gary McCoy: [00:44:48] Yeah, you'll be. You might be judged by that. But how do you measure? Is that different? What do you look at it the same way?

Jeremy Bettle: [00:44:54] No, absolutely not. Those for me are the by-product of the day to day processes that we undertake. But if we have the right systems in place. Our injuries will fall. I mean, that's just how bad it is if we take out, you know, a contact trauma. We shouldn't have guys getting hurt in a non-contact situation, soft tissue, joint, otherwise. Right. So for me. I judge myself on what are the processes that we have in place to systematically achieve our objectives? And how are we executing those as a multi-disciplinary organization and that and I say organization relevant department because the head coach and the management are involved in that spectrum of injury prevention. So, how are we bringing in practitioners who usually aren't a part of that process? And making them a part in helping them understand how they contribute to some of the problems that we're facing and how they can be a part of the solution to those problems.

Gary McCoy: [00:46:14] I think in those statements, Jeremy, you've kind of unpacked high performance as a discipline, right? And as you know, that's to me having written role delineations for high performance directors for a few different organisations now. And, you know, probably wrote some of the first ones for that role in North America. What you outlined is exactly the way I've always approached it. Is look at it from a how do you conduct that orchestra of multiple musicians, write multidisciplinary professionals and how do you grow them individually? That will evolve the whole overall high performance culture. I think that is, you know, that's something that you're best in class at Mate. And I think your journey kind of like this podcast in which we are out of time. But I think your journeys. It feels like we've talked for ten minutes. Your journey feels to me like your ten minutes in, as well as much as you've achieved and done so far. Mate. I think you just get off the launch pad. I think the future is going to be for athletes and the evolution of sport is going to come from individuals like you who are going to change the game, change the process, change the culture of an organisation and fans will see it. And it will kind of be, wow, what's different about this club? And I think anybody behind the scenes will point back down and say, Yeah, it's Dr. Jeremy Bedell.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:47:53] Well, I don't know about that, but hopefully I'm helping along the way, but I agree I I do feel like this is. Physical state, it feels like it's been a long road. Yeah, but you just become more and more aware of what you don't know and then you change that. You keep learning these new lives in this business, and I have no idea where it's going for me, but I love it for the industry. But it's it's just such an exciting field to be in. I just it is loving the journey.

Gary McCoy: [00:48:26] Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Mate Well, look, I can't thank you enough for joining us today. Like I said, it felt like a ten-minute chat for me. For us, I know we've got a lot more. We will unpack in the ensuing weeks on various phone calls, but Mate, you're on Twitter. What's your handle on Twitter? Where can people kind of follow your follow you through social media? For what it's worth, do you get on there a lot? Do you do a lot there? Where can more people find out about you?

Jeremy Bettle: [00:48:56] Yeah, I mean, I guess technically, yes, I'm on Twitter @DrJeremyBettle. The occasional retweet, and occasionally I'll put some thoughts out there, but nothing much. If you want to see some pictures of my cat, you can see me on the on Instagram.

Gary McCoy: [00:49:14] I love it. That's awesome.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:49:16] @jezbettle LinkedIn you know the usual places. I'm a pretty behind the scenes guy though honestly Gary. I don't, I'm not out there a whole bunch of just I tend to focus in on whatever job I'm doing at the time.

Gary McCoy: [00:49:32] Yeah, no, I get it. Well, again, it's been awesome to connect today, buddy, and we will chat soon.

Jeremy Bettle: [00:49:37] Likewise, Mate, I really appreciate you having me on. Thanks a lot.

Gary McCoy: [00:49:41] Thanks for listening to the Human Kinesomic project. Our music is provided by the incredibly talented Joanna Magic. I hope you will join our community at Discord.gg/Kinetyx team. The game is just beginning.