By Glenn Hunter

The research and innovation specialist in sport-related health has drawn on tough lessons from his early sporting life to help land Podium’s message with a new generation.

It was the moment I had been waiting for – the Thursday summons to the manager’s office ahead of the big Saturday game. It was 1975 and I was a 16-year-old football apprentice at Blackpool FC. Back then, a Thursday call only meant one thing. “My God, I’m going to make my first-team debut,” I thought. I knocked manager Harry Potts’ door, but when I entered my mum was standing there. She had gone to the manager to tell him I had been crying every night over an unresolved knee injury.

Six months earlier I had left school at 16 with no qualifications to sign for my hometown club. In the mid-70s, Blackpool were around the top of the English First Division and regularly played against the biggest teams like Liverpool and Manchester United.

After I signed, I developed a sore knee so I went to see the physio. He wasn’t qualified in any way. In fact, he used to be a stand-up comedian. It was the professionals who received all the treatment. As an apprentice, I was not at the top of his list of priorities. He sent me to stand in the sea. I put on a pair of shorts and walked in up to my thighs. I stayed in for 45 minutes. I always faced inland, and people would wave at me (if you faced outwards, people thought you were attempting suicide). I did this for about four or five weeks and then the doctor said, “oh, it’s still not better”. I persevered and it got worse. I continued to suffer in silence, but mums hear everything.

As I stood in Potts’ office that day and my mum’s pleas finally moved the club to action. I had an operation soon after, but the blood supply had stopped to a part of my knee. It turned out to be something called Osteochondritis dissecans. Had they caught it earlier, they could have pinned it back in place, but it was too late. My football career was over before my 17th birthday.

Reflecting back now – as I prepare for retirement from a career in sports medicine – it’s obvious that I didn’t receive the best care from Blackpool, but I learned an important lesson for my future: everybody matters. When I later became a physio in professional sport, I made sure that I focused on everyone equally, even the young kids.

In the early 80s, there was only one qualified physio at any of the 92 clubs in the English Football League. That was Gary Lewin at Arsenal. At 22, I came straight out of physio school and went to work for Reading FC.

A football club is a very intimate environment. You work seven days a week. You can’t discharge people – unlike in the NHS – so, you learn a lot about how people’s moods fluctuate due to injury, and you feel the pressure of getting somebody back fit. I learned a lot about communication and the need to not over-promise. The question you get asked every day when somebody’s injured is ‘When will they be fit?’ And in the early days, I found myself committing to a timescale that wasn’t realistic – then, when they are not fit by that point, you are suddenly considered a bad physio. 

During my time working in innovation within the Olympic sports system, the challenge was to try to understand how that person sees or feels the world. So, if they’re a very logical person, they might want precise details. Someone like Olympic cycling gold medallist Sir Chris Hoy would say, ‘show me the evidence before we do it’. Others might want to know how it was going to feel. Sir Bradley Wiggins was somewhere in between. Again, it’s about communication. How do you get people’s buy in? How do you help them to understand where the risks are? Help them reduce the likelihood that they will get injured?

That's a large part of our work at Podium Analytics. The Podium Institute for Sports Medicine and Technology at the University of Oxford is brilliant. They generate really insightful but often complicated findings. From something complicated, we aim to find a way to relate it in simple terms: ‘In five seconds, what this really means is this. And if you do this, it will really help.’ As part of the Podium mission, we need to get into the hearts and minds of young people, PE teachers, grassroots coaches. We need to land those key messages.

With the work Podium does in schools, we find there are three levels of engagement around young people and sport:

• First, there are those who don’t really like sport. Here, the challenge is to encourage them to be active, so they’ll be healthier as they get older. The challenge is: How can we redefine activity, to make it more meaningful and fun – to get the heart beating a little bit. Schools are getting really creative in their approaches.
• Second, there are the kids who are not considering a future as an athlete but enjoy the social aspects. Often, the consequences of injury for this group are felt on the social side, when they are deleted from WhatsApp groups, or their teammates don’t speak to them anymore. For this group, the challenge is to keep them engaged even when they can’t be competitive.
• Then, in the final group, are young people involved in organised sport at a more elite level. Here the questions become: How much can we push them? How much better can we make them?

What injuries do for all three groups is take time and effort away from doing the things that keep them healthy, create enjoyment, and perhaps even lead to excellence.

At Podium, our aim is to give some of that time and effort back, to liberate people so they can enjoy being active. Everyone matters.