Utopia, as Phil Wagner sees it, is a world where those who play sports professionally can take their broken bones, tweaked muscles and recovering bodies to a place resembling a pharmacy specializing in ailing athletes.
There, they’ll be prescribed something far more specific than the series of general preventative movements, ice and rest. It will be an action plan down to the effort, time and frequency of the stretches. It will be free of guesswork, able to save seasons, prolong careers and free players from days needlessly lost to injury.
You can dream like this when you have millions of impressions' worth of data logged in a cloud that stores injury-risk assessment scores from athletes, military members and other hobbyists from around the country, as well as their own personal data and treatment plans. Wagner works with dozens of NCAA programs across multiple sports. He has his Sparta force plate technology in at least a handful of NFL training rooms—the Steelers, Ravens, Lions and Washington among them. They are also a mainstay at the NFL scouting combine during centralized medical testing. High school and youth sports programs are beginning to popularize the use of his technology.
Players jump on square plates connected to a centralized data hub and are instantly provided with scores that measure their load force (bending down to begin the jump), explode force (converting from the bended-knee stage into the jump) and their drive (the force with which they can come through the jump and into the air). From those scores, it can be determined if the user is exerting too much of a certain muscle, is weak at another or, inevitably, if they are at a heightened risk of injury in a certain area. The data provides a risk assessment score to trainers as well.
“We need to find the heart rate of movement,” Wagner, the company’s founder and CEO, a former collegiate football player who struggled with nagging injuries himself, says. “Something we can base decisions off. We want to establish Be the hub of all the different spokes. What exercises do you do? How much sleep should you get? How hard do you need to practice?”
While Wagner is not the first person in the world of health and injury prevention to catch the critical eyes of both cash-armed venture capitalists (Forbes reported in January that Sparta raised almost $16 million before the pandemic, bringing their total to over $25 million) and teams hoping to gain an edge on the field, he may be one of the best positioned to corner the market. His clients range from team trainers who use it as a complementary tool to absolute evangelists who believe that Sparta is the future of sports science and medicine, a salve for an industry constantly searching for better ways to protect and lengthen the careers of athletes who have become multimillion-dollar investments.
While he did not mention Sparta specifically, Texans general manager Nick Caserio said at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference this year that force plate technology, like the kind Wagner’s company wields, represents the most significant room for organizational growth on the analytical front over the next five years. Wagner says that one of their clients, the Colorado Rockies, once hid their Sparta system from a camera crew working on an all-access documentary in fear that other teams would find out about it (a Rockies spokesperson did not respond to an email seeking comment).
The world of Sparta and the idea of how predictive and proactive we can become with player health are worth examining. How far away are we from teams' drafting players who are a ticking time bomb of injuries becoming a thing of the past? How long before we can see a tangible limit to the kinds of preventable, soft-tissue injuries that plague so many of the sport’s best players? At what point does the ageless Tom Brady become less of an outlier, as more and more players are armed with high-quality, customized data pertaining to their own health?
Wagner laughs when asked about the difference between now and utopia. When it comes to player health today, how often are we still just stabbing in the dark?
“When we stabbing in the dark?” he asks.
