309: Building Smarter Performance Systems with Emily Jacobson

About this episode

Emily Jacobson discusses simplifying complex sports science data for practical coaching applications.

This week on the Science for Sport podcast, Richard Graves is joined by Emily Jacobson, Assistant Director of Sports Performance at Marquette University. Emily has spent the past decade building and refining a sports science model within a relatively small department, working primarily with men’s and women’s soccer and volleyball. Alongside her role at Marquette, she also contributes to U.S. Soccer in a high-performance capacity. In this conversation, we explore one of the most pressing challenges in applied sports science: how do you simplify complex data streams so they become actionable for coaches and meaningful for athletes? From acute:chronic workload ratios and GPS monitoring to return-to-play frameworks and Power BI dashboards, Emily shares how she transformed “expensive toys” into effective performance tools. She discusses the importance of visualisation, collaboration with data engineers, humility in decision-making, and why the “eyeball test” still matters in a world driven by wearables and AI. For practitioners working in elite sport, or those building systems within constrained environments, this episode offers practical insight into making sports science more…

People in this episode

Host: Richard Graves

Guest: Emily Jacobson

Topics covered

• sports performance
• data visualization
• workload management
• applied sports science
• coaching tools

Keywords

• GPS monitoring
• acute:chronic workload ratios
• data visualization
• performance tools
• return-to-play frameworks

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Marquette University, U.S. Soccer

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