US Figure Skating and Ex3 Sports Initiative

Tuesday, March 03, 2016 2:30

U.S. Figure Skating announced today that it is working with Efficient Enterprise Engineering, Inc. (Ex3), an industry leader in the fields of environmental, health, safety, security and productivity data management. The two organizations have come together to work on a sports science initiative that will help analyze data and correlate the relationship between athlete performance, sports science and medical data.

"One of our ongoing objectives is to infuse new ideas into how we develop our skaters to compete globally," said David Raith, U.S. Figure Skating executive director. "This relationship with Ex3 will not only provide U.S. Figure Skating the ability to analyze data from a sports science and medicine perspective but also correlate the relationship between performance, sports sciences and medical data."

U.S. Figure Skating's Athlete High Performance Department has spent the past six months developing the technical requirements for an athlete tracking database, powered by Ex3.

"The scope of the project is massive," said Mitch Moyer, U.S. Figure Skating senior director of athlete high performance, "and it is based on a plan for long-term data analysis and a close working relationship between U.S. Figure Skating and Ex3."

As part of the first phase of this initiative, U.S. Figure Skating recently developed a comprehensive competition performance profile database that will be linked to an individual athlete's Skater Talent and Athleticism Recognition System (S.T.A.R.S.) testing, seasonal injury/illness data, a medical registry and other sport sciences and medicine initiatives. By combining the data sets into one source, U.S. Figure Skating hopes to gain a competitive advantage by analyzing and comparing specific athlete profiles to performance.

"Tracking athlete testing along with performance data will not only support athlete development and high performance programs, but also provide the athletes and coaches with information that will help them customize their training regimen," Moyer said.

U.S. Figure Skating has received funding assistance from the Unites States Olympic Committee (USOC) to assist with this initiative. In time, Ex3 hopes to develop similar database management systems that can be applied to other sports and be implemented by other national governing bodies and professional sport organizations.

"Integrating the data associated with athlete testing and athlete performance is a large undertaking," said Nathan Giles, founder of Ex3, "but in some ways, it is very similar to the challenges that we take on managing environment, safety, medical records and wellness data with our fortune 500 and government clients like NASA, Textron, Intel and Visteon every day."

"This initiative puts U.S. Figure Skating in a pioneering position in the U.S. in terms of linking sports sciences and medicine to actual performance," Giles continued.

About U.S. Figure Skating - U.S. Figure Skating is the national governing body for the sport of figure skating in the United States as recognized by the United States Olympic Committee and the International Skating Union. U.S. Figure Skating is comprised of more than 700 member clubs, collegiate clubs, and school-affiliated clubs and more than 900 registered Basic Skills skating schools representing approximately 170,000 members. U.S. Figure Skating is charged with the development of the sport on all levels within the United States including athletes, officials, sanctioning of events and exhibitions, and establishing the rules and guidelines by which the sport is governed.isa