My grandson Petey is eleven years old, weighs ninety-two pounds in wet shoes, and according to a piece of software his stepfather paid $79 for at the consumer electronics show this week, he has a Competitive Fire score of 61. Out of 100. The app explained, in a little pop-up with a flame icon, that a 61 places him in the ‘developing intensity’ tier. A tier. My grandson has a tier now. I found this out over breakfast on Thursday and I have not fully recovered.
The app is called GridIron IQ, or Gridirion IQ, I cannot tell because they spelled it with no vowels and a little helmet where the ‘o’ should be. It grades kids on fourteen metrics. Fourteen. Competitive Fire is one. Another one is Pocket Poise, which I think used to be called ‘not crying,’ and another one is Locker Room Presence, which in my day we called ‘whether the coach remembered your name.’ It syncs with a mouthguard. The mouthguard is $149. The mouthguard has Bluetooth. I wrote that sentence down on a napkin to make sure it was real.
I called Ray Kowalczyk about it, because I call Ray about everything. Ray coached freshman football at St. Aloysius for thirty-one years and once made a kid run a hill until the kid admitted he’d stolen a Gatorade. Ray listened to the whole thing about Competitive Fire, and there was a long pause, and then Ray said, ‘Duke. My competitive fire was my father. My competitive fire was a man named Earl. You cannot put Earl in a mouthguard.’ Then he hung up, because Ray hangs up on everybody.
Championship Sunday is tomorrow. Two football games will be played by grown men who, as far as I can tell, were coached up the old way, by other grown men yelling at them in the rain. Nobody on the Chiefs has a Locker Room Presence score. Nobody in the Bills defensive huddle is checking their Pocket Poise tier between series. And yet somehow those organizations have produced functional human adults capable of executing a slant route under duress, which is more than I can say for the Competitive Fire product team, who as far as I’m concerned should all be made to run a hill.
The pitch, per my son-in-law Brendan, who showed me a YouTube video about it with the reverence most men reserve for a eulogy, is that GridIron IQ uses ‘movement data and biometric signals’ to give parents ‘a full picture of their athlete’s mental makeup.’ Their athlete. Petey, the athlete. Petey, who on Tuesday told me very seriously that he believes a raccoon lives in their dryer vent. That athlete. The one whose full picture we now require.
I asked Brendan what a parent is supposed to do with a 61 in Competitive Fire. Like, mechanically. Do you slide the printout across the dinner table? Do you sit your boy down and say, son, the algorithm has concerns? Brendan said the app ‘suggests drills.’ I asked what the drills were. One of them, and I swear on my mother, was called ‘Visualize the Touchdown.’ My grandson, whose Competitive Fire is apparently lagging, has been prescribed guided imagery by a mouthguard.
Coach DiMaggio ran a drill we called Nutcracker. You do not need me to describe Nutcracker. Coach DiMaggio’s prescribed visualization was the bus ride home if you lost, and he described it in detail, and it worked. I am not saying we should bring back Nutcracker. The lawyers have made that impossible and probably correctly. I am saying that the replacement for Nutcracker cannot be a cartoon flame on a phone telling an eleven-year-old he is in the developing intensity tier. There has to be something in between. There used to be. It was called a coach.
The CES booth, according to the tech blog my daughter sent me to shut me up, had a ‘youth data specialist’ on hand named Corbin Vance, who holds a master’s in applied performance analytics from a school I had to look up twice. Corbin told the blog that the goal of GridIron IQ is to ‘democratize the psychological edge previously reserved for elite programs.’ I want to be clear about what this sentence means. It means: your kid’s head was not being harvested for data fast enough, and they have fixed that for you, for $79 and a monthly subscription.
Here is what a kid’s Competitive Fire actually looks like, in case anyone at the Gridirion IQ offices in Palo Alto is reading. It looks like my buddy Petey Corrigan, whom my grandson is named after, going into the boards in a junior hockey game in 1962 against a kid twice his size because the kid had insulted Petey’s sister, who was, in fairness, insultable. It looks like getting up. It looks like doing it again in the third period. Nobody measured it. Nobody needed to. His sister saw.
There is a version of this column where I tell you the app is harmless, that it’s just dads being dads with a new toy, that Petey will turn out fine and the mouthguard will end up in a drawer next to the Fitbit and the protein shaker with the little battery in it. That version is probably true. I still don’t like it. Because the next version of the app won’t be harmless. The next version will be the one high schools buy, and the one some coach in some district uses to bench a kid who deserved to play, because his Competitive Fire score came back a 58 the morning of the game. And then we’ll all act surprised.
Tomorrow I’m going over to my daughter’s to watch the Chiefs game. Petey will be there. I am going to ask him to throw the Nerf ball at me as hard as he can, for no reason and without warning, and I am going to grunt like it hurt, because it will, a little. That is the only Competitive Fire assessment I recognize as valid. I will not be taking questions from the mouthguard.
Denise is bringing chili. She says she got the recipe off a podcast. I’m going to eat it anyway.