The Intersection of Technology and Sports lifestyle

Exploring what happens when a career in technology meets a lifelong belief in movement, sport and community

For most of my professional life, I have worked in technology.

Data, AI, enterprise platforms, automation, transformation. Much of my career has been spent thinking about how technology can help us solve complex problems, connect fragmented systems and make the way we work a little simpler.

There is another part of my life that, on the surface, may seem completely separate, but has always been a background process keeping my physical and mental engines alive and kicking. I love to move. I enjoy running, playing tennis and dancing, as well as working out — lifting weights, strength training and, more recently, exploring animal flow movements. Some days movement is about challenging myself; other days it is simply about feeling good. But through all of it, I’ve come to appreciate that movement gives us something that goes well beyond fitness. It creates energy. Confidence. Discipline. Friendship. Community. It gives us reasons to get outside, to learn something new, to meet people we may otherwise never have met and, hopefully, to remain active throughout our lives.

Lately, I have found myself thinking much more deeply about the intersection of these two worlds: Technology and movement — technology that creates more room for movement.

Seeing sport from a different perspective

Part of this curiosity has come from being the parent of a student-athlete pursuing competitive tennis.

When you spend enough time around a sport, you begin to see everything that happens beyond the court. There are coaches, athletes and parents coordinating schedules, courts to find, lessons to arrange, tournaments to navigate, progress to track, fitness, nutrition and mental performance to think about.

And then there are the coaches themselves. I have developed an enormous appreciation for just how much they do. A great coach doesn’t simply show up and teach a forehand: They observe. They remember. They adapt. They communicate. They plan. They mentor. Many of the coaches are doing all this while simultaneously running a small business — scheduling lessons, managing cancellations, coordinating courts, communicating with families, keeping notes and handling administration, often between hours spent actually coaching. We have multitudes of news articles that talk about racquet sports booming but the technology that supports them has not kept up.

Coming from the technology world, it is difficult for me not to look at that and wonder if some of this could be made easier?

And then AI arrived

We are living through an extraordinary moment in technology.

AI is rapidly changing what can be automated, what can be understood from unstructured information and how naturally people can interact with technology.

This opens up some interesting possibilities for sport. Imagine a coach finishing a session and simply speaking a few observations into a phone:

Her serve was much more consistent today. We worked on moving forward after the return. Next session, focus on transition volleys.

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The technology handles the rest — capturing the notes, organizing them, connecting them to the athlete’s history and making them available when they are useful again.

Or scheduling that understands courts, coaches, athletes and availability without endless text messages.

Or systems that quietly take care of routine business administration while the coach is on court.

Technology should disappear into the background

If AI can save a coach an hour of administration, that is potentially another hour available for coaching, mentoring, or simply having a life outside work

If technology can make it easier for someone to find the right coach, training partner, running group or community, perhaps that person stays engaged with an activity longer.

If it can help a young athlete better understand their development, perhaps the sport becomes part of an educational journey as well as an athletic one.

And if technology can make participating in sport easier as we move through different stages of life, perhaps movement becomes less something we schedule ourselves to do and more simply part of how we live.

This is the intersection I’m exploring

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and, in many ways, that is exactly why I am starting this blog.

I want to explore what happens when we bring together ideas from technology, AI, sport, movement, health and community: some of that exploration will come from my professional world in technology, some will come from my own passion for an active lifestyle and some will come from being a parent navigating competitive youth sport.

And, importantly, much of it will come from conversations with the people who understand these worlds far better than I do — coaches, athletes, trainers, sports organizations, technologists and people who simply believe that movement should remain part of our lives for as long as possible.

Because I increasingly believe that the opportunity isn’t to bring more technology into our lives, but it is to build technology thoughtfully enough that it gives some of our lives back.

More time to move.

More time to play.

More opportunities to connect through the activities we love.

And more ways for sport and movement to become pathways to health, community, education and personal growth.