There is not one competitive athletic program in this country that accepts the status quo in the weight room. No team is handing out participation trophies in film review, and nobody is shrugging at the training table when nutrition is off.

Programs are relentlessly committed to optimizing every variable that touches performance.

Except one.

And it is, quite literally, the variable their athletes wear every single day.

The programs pulling ahead right now are the ones brave enough to question what everyone else has decided to tolerate, and what everyone else tolerates is actually more expensive yet still goes unquestioned.

Last week, I asked what you'd want most from a sizing intelligence system. Here's what you said:

What struck me is that the majority of you are already thinking beyond how things have always been done.

Before we talk about solutions, it's worth slowing down on what the status quo actually looks like day-to-day, because it has become so normalized that most programs don't even see it anymore.

An athlete pulls at her jersey mid-play, not because she's nervous, but because it won't stop shifting.

An equipment manager places the same order she placed last year with the same sizes, same brands, and same issues because nobody in the program gave her any reason to do it differently.

A coach notices that half the team is constantly adjusting their warmups, thinks quietly, "that's just how warmups fit," and moves on to the next thing on her list.

Here's the data underneath all of that:
73.5% of female athletes rank fit as their #1 or #2 priority. Yet over a third say their gear consistently fails to deliver it. That gap is not a failure of effort or intention: it's a failure of systems. The current system was never built to surface this problem, which means programs are absorbing real costs without ever seeing them on a report.

None of these costs show up in a budget line, but they are real, recurring, and they compound.

The performance tax. The mental energy an athlete spends adjusting, readjusting, and fighting her uniform is energy she is not spending competing. This is not a small thing. Focus is finite, and every distraction between her and the game is a distraction her opponent doesn't have.

The recruiting tax. Athletes talk, and they talk honestly when they're on visits. Gear that fits well, gear that signals a program actually thought about them, is quietly becoming a differentiator. The programs that have figured this out are leveraging it. The ones that haven't don't yet realize it's being evaluated.

The retention tax. This is the number that keeps me up at night: 61.7% of athletes simply deal with ill-fitting gear rather than saying anything. They absorb the discomfort, say nothing, and your program never learns that the system is broken. So the same order goes out next cycle. The same problems arrive in the same box. The silence is not satisfaction — it is resignation dressed up as acceptance.

The culture tax. Standards are contagious, in both directions. When a program accepts "good enough" in one area, it signals to every athlete, every equipment manager, and every coach in that building what the bar actually is, and that signal travels further than anyone intends.

The University of Florida launched AI-Powered Athletics in 2024 through a $2.5 million investment, a partnership between the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and the University Athletic Association built on wearable sensor and health data from student-athletes.

During the Gators' national championship run, coach Todd Golden and his strength and conditioning team used AI data analytics from the regular season to inform postseason workouts, so players didn't feel like they were exerting that workload for the first time.

What I love about this: UF already had the data, and they decided to do something with it.

Every program has information it isn't using. How the product has historically fit. Athlete feedback that never makes it up the chain. The question isn't whether the data exists. It's whether someone decides to do something with it.

The programs I find most inspiring right now, as well as the athletes, are the ones who press the envelope when they know and feel a system in place could be more efficient, better suited, or just feel more right.

They are asking better questions at fittings that aren’t just "What size are you," but how do you want this to feel? What doesn’t work? How do you want it to fit? Questions that treat fit as a way to improve the athlete experience, not just a box to check.

And, perhaps most importantly, coaches are actively backing equipment managers, who are backing their players, when they push for something better.

The domino effect starts from listening to the athletes, and taking their understandings and opinions to the top in all aspects of sport.

I learned through sports and life: don’t stick to the status quo.

✍ Sign up to have your team fitted! We work with programs to build fit systems around real bodies, real movement, and real sport demands.

📩 Forward this to a colleague! If someone on your team might find this interesting, feel free to share.

🤳 Instagram - Behind-the-scenes, industry insights & cultural shifts

📹 TikTok - Where I post daily!

🔗 LinkedIn - Newsletter highlights, updates on what I’m doing…