THE CHALLENGE. 88.5 million people play a team sport in the US (basketball, football, soccer, volleyball, and baseball) and 1.1 million people play rugby in South Africa. Sport is recognized as one of the greatest forms of entertainment with the level of competitiveness continuing to increase with seemingly no end in sight. This meteoric growth in sport has resulted in revenue growth for sports clubs and athletes, and making a career of sport is a keen ambition for many young people. However, this exponential growth has resulted in intense pressure being put on athletes to perform at the highest level. Athletes are becoming more prone to injuries because of the risks they take while training and during games. The desire to be and deliver the best can often result in the greatest setback of an athlete’s career and life. With athletes’ careers and clubs’ investments potentially at risk, the conversation about early injury detection and prevention has developed from research to a growing business area with a huge opportunity. Nkholise recognized the opportunity to be at the forefront of technology with her sports tech start-up, 3DIMO.

THE PROCESS. When she started 3DIMO, Nkholise’s original idea was to create pre-surgical planning models (either digital or 3D printed) to support Orthopedic surgeons with surgery planning to speed up surgery time, reduce the cost and increase the accuracy of surgery. Nkholise partnered with some Orthopedic surgeons to help with pre-surgical models. She learned that most of the patients were professional sportsmen who were having surgery when their injuries had graduated to severe, career-threatening injuries. She realized that most athletes would incur a minor injury, ignore it and continue to play injured for a prolonged time until it had affected a large region of their body and had become more severe. 

Her research forced her to take a step back in order to address the root cause. She changed tack to develop wearable, injury-sensing software that could predict, in real-time, injury risk potential. Her basketball experience further enabled her to add features to her product that would allow her to predict performance targets of athletes based on the sport they play, their position on the field and physical attributes.

She reached out to her network to form a team of highly skilled software engineers who fell in love with her vision and the opportunities of being able to predict injury risk and athlete performance.

THE RESULT. Nkholise and her team are currently running early tests of both their product and software and have partnered with the Stellenbosch Academy of Sport’s rugby 7s team for pilot testing. They would like to run more pilot tests with more pilot partners to enable them to gather as much data as possible in order to build data patterns and model them in such a way that their software will have depth and intelligence. 

The team is planning on running four additional pilots with the goal of launching their product in October 2020. This will, however, depend on their ability to raise sufficient funding. “Getting investors in South Africa has been difficult because Sports Tech is not a sector that investors have paid attention to on the continent. However, we still believe that in the long-term, there are significant benefits to be realized, including enabling coaches to develop tailor-made insurance plans for elite athletes, helping sports clubs to reduce financial losses due to injuries and reducing athlete injury rehabilitation.” 

Nkholise will focus her initial marketing efforts in the US college sport (NCAA) arena. Almost 480 000 athletes participate in college sport each year and of that number, 78% of division 1 athletes sustain injuries that restrict participation, with 60% of them reporting chronic injuries. With the NCAA being the talent funnel for the best athletes to make it to major leagues, such as the NBA and NFL, injuries are setbacks that every team wants to avoid at all costs.