Move the Needle: The Human Performance Podcast Eric Renaghan: Data Streamlining at The 'U'
Mar 11, 2026
Eric Renaghan, Executive Director of Sport Performance at the University of Miami, brings high-level sport science expertise from pro hockey to collegiate football and track. He walks through core data streams like force plates, infrared thermography, eye tracking, GPS and internal load. Multiple short workflows and scaling strategies for integrating these tools are discussed in clear, practical terms.
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Thermography Solved A Mystery Cramping Case
- A player had repeated cramping despite hydration; thermography showed daily hypothermia after hard sessions and labs revealed high CK, suggesting perfusion issues.
- Interventions (warming therapies, topical bicarbonate) improved perfusion and ended the cramping without changing hydration protocol.
Composite Cox Model Flags Emerging Risks
- Miami built a composite flagging model (Cox hazard regression) that ingests multiple data streams to predict injury risk by learning from timestamped past injuries.
- Successful interventions reduced injuries and paradoxically degraded model performance, forcing model retraining and more data nuance.
Centralize All Data In One Analytical Environment
- Centralize diverse streams (12–15 daily objective datasets) in a single environment to ingest, clean, visualize and analyze; Miami uses Microsoft Fabric with an internal server.
- Build in-house infrastructure if resources allow to avoid fragmented tools and manage the 'tsunami of data'.