Not too long ago, WNBA performance staffs were filled by transient and seasonal practitioners, noted Keith D’Amelio, who joined the New York Liberty as chief innovation officer five years ago with the charge of “reimagining how we actually care for athletes in the W.”
With the backing of owner Clara Wu Tsai and general manager Jonathan Kolb, the Liberty have led the way in that growth, tripling performance staff in the first year after D’Amelio’s hire. His background included stints with the Celtics, Raptors, Stanford basketball and Nike, where he was the longtime director of performance, working closely with its contracted athletes such as Ndamukong Suh, who played 13 NFL seasons without missing a game due to injury.
“One of the things Clara and Jonathan both expressed is they wanted to set the standard for the WNBA as an organization and force everybody else to try and keep up to raise the floor for how players are cared for and how organizations operate in the WNBA,” D’Amelio said.
D’Amelio has stayed close with Suh, who played for five NFL teams, was named to five All-Pro teams and won a Super Bowl with the Buccaneers. Suh, an active investor in the space, spoke at SBJ Tech Week in 2025. He and D’Amelio recently offered SBJ their insights from their varied team experiences on how modern organizations should operate.
Communicate with and empower players
When it comes to training plans and athlete monitoring tech, D’Amelio said teams most often fail when they are perceived as imposing it on the players. “Make it a two-way conversation as opposed to a one-way conversation,” he said.
Anytime data will be collected, it’s incumbent on the coach to explain the rationale behind it and the way it will be used so that athletes are comfortable.
“My job is always to make the athletes, teams, companies — whoever I’m working with — better consumers of information,” D’Amelio said.
Many top athletes also have a private fitness coach in addition to support from the team. D’Amelio has done both — worked for teams and served as the outside guru for Suh and others — and emphasizes that collaboration is best.
Differentiate
Sports is often a copycat industry, but the innovators are the ones who tend to rise to the top. “A lot of teams are afraid to be different — lean into that,” Suh said. “When folks are open to it, they start to unlock the great things about their organization.”
Teams too often worry about keeping up with the Joneses, D’Amelio added. Trying to mimic what works for another club often falls short because the other roster has players with different skills, and that staff has likely put a lot of thought and planning into the system. He also cautioned against overvaluing any one particular tactic.
“You can’t just go replicate what they’re doing,” D’Amelio said. “It’s impossible. It’s another pet peeve of mine in the sport world when people are like, ‘Oh, it’s our secret sauce.’ No, stop. Your secret sauce is management, the thought process, the coaching staff implementation and players’ skill sets, but also it’s the uniqueness of that organization that makes things successful, not just the idea.”
Incubate
Take time for R&D, ideally formalizing an innovation program like an accelerator for startups, akin to what the Dodgers and Thunder have.
“There’s so much technology that’s coming out there,” Suh said. “So why not build an incubator where you can have this band of people or advisers that sit in the middle between experts in sports and in technology?”
That can be especially powerful in multiteam ownership groups, where the sample size of adoption is higher — even if, hypothetically, it’s a group like Kroenke Sports & Entertainment that has teams across multiple sports. D’Amelio says that interdisciplinary approach can be very beneficial.
“It really boils down to, how fast can we accelerate our organization’s ability to learn?” he said.
Bifurcate daily and focus on long-term planning
When D’Amelio joined the Liberty, the team put in a five-year plan to implement change over time rather than all at once, he said, so it wouldn’t be overwhelming for the players and the organization.
That tiered and structured approach should be overseen by someone removed from the grind of preparing the athletes for each practice and game; that staff typically doesn’t have the bandwidth to think on a five-year plan.
D’Amelio likened the separation to the dichotomy described in the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow.”
“You have to [balance] what are some things that we can do to address immediate problems, innovate and problem-solve in the moment, but also having that long-term view,” he said. “It’s sometimes hard to do when you are in it on a day-to-day basis. This is the role that I serve with the Liberty, who’s not really in the weeds on a day-to-day basis because when you are, you’re just putting out the fire of today to try and get to tomorrow.”
Joe Lemire can be reached at jlemire@sportsbusinessjournal.com.
