John Abbott doesn’t take the obvious path. He never has.
He spent years deep in the research and development department of one of baseball's most analytically sophisticated organizations, writing code, building dashboards, and proving physiological theories through data before anyone in the building would sign off on them. He earned a PhD in sport physiology and performance at East Tennessee State University. He became one of the driving forces behind what grew into the largest GPS tracking operation in Major League Baseball.
And then he went to the MLS.
Abbott is now Director of Health and Performance at Atlanta United FC, overseeing first team, second team, and academy operations across sports medicine, fitness, strength and conditioning, sports science, psychological services, and nutrition. One department. One mission.
It’s a long way from writing APIs for the Chicago Cubs. And, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
The Cubs, the Code, and the Data That Changed Everything
Abbott joined the Chicago Cubs in 2020, walking straight into a COVID disrupted season and a blank canvas. He was hired as a strength coach for the rookie league, but within months he was doing something nobody had asked him to do: building the infrastructure to make sense of all the high performance data the organization was collecting.
"We didn’t really have time to wait on R&D or anyone else to build out the resources we needed," he says. "So, I just started doing it myself. I had been coding quite a bit. I was building the APIs, building dashboards, and sending reports to different members of the front office."
After two and a half years of doing it himself, the R&D department noticed. They pulled him in to facilitate all sport science operations across the organization. From there, the Cubs built what Abbott believes became the most extensive pitcher workload monitoring system in the league, with GPS units covering every position player and eventually pitchers too. The organization reached over 95% compliance across the system, capturing nearly every bit of work a pitcher produced in practice and in game.
The harder challenge was not the technology. It was convincing a room full of mathematical geniuses and data engineers that human physiology is malleable. It’s able to be changed and specific adaptations targeted with training need to be taken seriously.
"They're all geniuses, but the human body wasn’t necessarily their area of expertise, and there was some skepticism about the applicability of research," he says. "So, I had to reprove a lot of these physiological theories through our data and then get signed off. Once we got past that step, the franchise saw the value in what we were doing, and they pretty much opened up resources for us to pursue our goals."
That experience, more than anything else, shaped how Abbott thinks about data, leadership, and the relationship between evidence and decision-making.
Baseball to Soccer
When Abbott made the move to Atlanta United, people assumed the transition from baseball to soccer would be jarring. He found the opposite.
"There's a lot more crossover than people initially imagine," he says. "With a starting pitcher, you're on a five or six day rotation, and most of our soccer players are on six or seven day rotations. The verbiage between the two sports is very different. But when you come back and realize we have high days, we have low days, we have days where we're really focusing on a small technique, it's the same thing."
His mental model for managing congested fixture periods came directly from baseball. A starting pitcher maps to a player in a one-game week. A mid-relief pitcher maps to a player carrying two games in a week. The physical principles stay consistent. The language just changes.
"Once I learned the different verbiage, I was able to understand that when we're talking about a typical Saturday, we're talking about a starting pitcher. And when we have higher congestion, we're talking about a mid-relief pitcher. It connected immediately."
The one area where he thinks soccer has the edge is specificity of coaching. The best soccer coaches are remarkably intentional about how they achieve physical outcomes, balancing physical, cognitive, and emotional stresses simultaneously in ways that baseball doesn’t always.
"The technology and data in baseball is raising awareness, but I think soccer is further along in understanding how specific you can be about how you're achieving what you're achieving."
The Transition to Leadership
Abbott's first year as Director of Health and Performance has required a different kind of thinking than anything he did with the Cubs.
He went from being one of the most technically specific people in the building to being responsible for connecting an entire department. Sports science. Sports medicine. Nutrition. Psychology. People, not just data.
"In a PhD program, you can run the risk of learning more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing," he says. "Going from there to now stepping back and thinking, ‘we have good people, we have good processes, and we're speaking the same language across departments,’ that's the new focus."
He describes the transition as a relief as much as a challenge. The small specifics that consumed him for years matter less now. What matters more is knowing where to pull the right strings, how to ask the right questions of the right people, and how to keep the whole department moving in the same direction.
"It's so much less on those small specifics and more jumping in where I can in each department, each role, each person and asking what are we working on, what are we thinking about, how does this fit into the larger system of all our departments? It's been a big adjustment, but to me it's much more enjoyable."
Why PlayerData
Atlanta United started using PlayerData at the academy level before the relationship grew to cover the first team and second team as well. For Abbott, that continuity was more than a nice-to-have, it was essential.
"We were looking to make that change regardless," he says. "There's so much switching of players between teams and when we had two different systems, it made the ability to use that data so much more difficult. Now we don't have to think twice about our two different systems. That's huge."
The continuity of data across the organization means research done at the first team level can be applied directly to the academy, because they're all working with the same numbers, the same flow, and the same processes. That connection from U15 all the way through the first team creates a development pipeline that Abbott sees as one of the organization's competitive advantages.
But what excites him most about PlayerData is what the platform makes possible.
"The reason PlayerData became so instrumental or interesting to me was the ability to access the API live," he says. "We're building our own custom dashboards, our own analysis. There are all these generic things every company provides you. But, we love having the ability to pull that data live in a time series format and do any sort of manipulation we want to get exactly the information or context we need in a format that we want, live during the session as compared to retrospective analysis. It changes how we create our action plans during session monitoring. The customization is literally endless when you have that ability."
The infrastructure itself has changed how the staff operates day to day as well. Data flows live to the cloud. Reports generate automatically. In preseason, entire sessions were downloaded, cut, and emailed before Abbott walked off the pitch.
"At worst you're still saving 20 minutes," he says. "At best, everything is done before you leave the field."
He's also been using PlayerData's LPS system at the stadium, making Atlanta United one of the only MLS teams to do so. And the relationship with the company itself has become something he values as much as the technology.
"It seems quite intimate," he says. "The ability to talk to the team about any challenges we're having, and solutions that would be helpful for us in the workflow. It's pretty cutting edge adjustments almost daily."
What Comes Next
When Abbott thinks about where the technology is heading, his mind goes to the GPS-enabled Connected Ball and what it unlocks for a position that GPS tracking hasn’t been great at measuring properly.
Goalkeepers.
"One of the things we're most excited about is combining the integrated ball with the sensor for our goalkeepers," he says. "There are days that look like super high dive days, but realistically that might not be a big workload day for the goalkeeper because there's another day where he's doing half the amount of dives but three times more striking. Being able to account for striking is something I don't think any other company can provide."
Pair dives, jumps, and IMU movement data with ball contact, intensity of striking, and eventually accuracy and you have a goalkeeper workload picture that has never existed before. For a department that measures everything, that’s a significant gap about to close.
The Philosophy Behind the Work
Abbott's definition of player development is thoughtful and important to any sports organization.
"A lot of people put player development into its own bucket," he says. "But to me it's a system of the entire organization. The purpose of having an academy is to develop a player to eventually contribute to first team success, and that's a broad statement. It could mean they get promoted directly. It could mean they raise the level of everyone around them. It could mean they get transferred and create revenue that contributes to the first team."
He describes it as a cycle. The organization identifies the types of players it wants, builds the system to develop them, tracks whether the process is working, and feeds those findings back into how it scouts and recruits. Research to development to performance and back again.
The one thing he keeps coming back to is the tension between winning now and developing for later.
"Particularly at the youth level, we can optimize and craft our strategy to beat whoever it is on Saturday," he says. "But that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be better players. You have to keep two lenses. Let's be good, because winning in itself is a skill and also bolsters positive emotion and team growth. But if our players are peaking too early and they drop off later, we have to remember we're still developing them for two, three, four, five, six years down the line."
When asked what one message he would give to anyone working in or aspiring to work in sports performance, he doesn’t reach for something technical. He reaches for something simpler.
"The game's made up and the rules don't matter," he says, laughing, a nod to the improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? "Every day is new. As much as you want to be prepared, you'll never be fully prepared for anything. Having your processes and your principles deeply ingrained is everything. And being able to answer why you're doing what you're doing and feel confident in that, it changes everything."
He loves what he does. This much is clear. And in a department that moves as fast as high performance sport, that love for the work is not incidental. It’s a requirement for anyone in John Abbot’s orbit.
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