Catching a decline before it's an injury.
A signal isn't a diagnosis. It's a flag that says: this is worth a second look, before it turns into something worse.
Sprint time, T. Rowe — flagged automatically
What actually gets flagged
A signal fires when a player's numbers move the wrong way — a testing metric trending down over several sessions, or a wellness score drifting lower than it's been. It's not a single bad day; it's a pattern, which is exactly the kind of thing a busy staff can miss when tracking twenty or thirty players by eye.
Measured against the player, not the squad
Every signal compares a player to their own recent history, not to a squad average. That distinction matters more than it sounds: a naturally slower player who's declining gets flagged just as fast as your fastest sprinter having an off month. Neither of them quietly falls through the cracks just because their raw numbers were never the highest or lowest on the team.
What a coach does with it
A signal doesn't make a decision for anyone — it puts a flag in front of a human who can. From there it's the same judgment call it always was: check in with the player, loop in medical staff, adjust load for a session. The signal's only job is making sure that conversation happens before the problem gets bigger, not after.