How AI is Changing the Game: A Conversation with Kim Bastable & Simon Gale
Welcome to Racquet Fuel, where we launch into great conversations and share powerful tools to help you become a stronger Racquet's leader. Your hosts are Kim Bastable, a former all American tennis player and now the director of professional rackets management at the University of Florida. And Simon Gale, the USTA senior director of Racquet Sports Development. Today on Racquet Fuel, should you be using ChatGBT and other AI tools? Simon and Kim explain why there's no reason to be afraid.
Kim Bastable:Welcome to Racquet Fuel. Today, we're gonna have an interesting conversation, Simon and I, about artificial intelligence, how it is affecting each of our lives, how we're applying it, what we may see down the road as possibilities. And as we were just discussing, this could be outdated in a week, but certainly, it will probably be outdated in six to twelve months, and we'll probably have to circle back in in what's happening in in this world. But we thought it was important that we start the conversation because it's here, and it's a part of our work lives. Some use it more than others.
Kim Bastable:I think it's interesting how we all use it. So thought we could give some just examples of of our lives and and then perhaps you guys will have a way to apply it. You may have been scared of it. You may have been excited about it. Interested to hear kind of the feedback you all have.
Kim Bastable:But but that's where we're going, Simon. How are you doing today?
Simon Gale:I'm good. I'm good. I'm excited to talk about this. I'll make a disclaimer that I'm no expert on this subject, but I'm curious and keen to understand how it can benefit us. I think about when you go back a little bit and just even how quickly cell phones have adapted and what we use them for now, it wasn't long ago it was just a phone and then it became a camera, then it became, hey, there's apps and you can have a coaching tool and you can go from having a video camera mounted on a tripod and you had to plug it into your computer and edit it yourself.
Simon Gale:Now you take the video, put your coaching comments on it, draw some lines on it from your coaching tool and send it, text it to your customer instantly. That's not that long ago. Twenty years, it's evolved quickly. So things are changing quickly. I think we're dealing with we've talked about this in terms of generations.
Simon Gale:There's four or five generations perhaps at a tennis facility working together. The next generation are just embracing this. It's the world they live in. But for an older generation who aren't used to utilizing this within their coaching environment, what can it do? How can it help?
Simon Gale:But moving forward, the future leaders, this is the world they're gonna live in and they won't know any different. So it's very real. It's happening now as you say, and let's chat about it.
Kim Bastable:So let's let's go back just a little bit. I was trying to think when the first time was I actually heard about it, and I think we've concluded we know AI has been a part of, you know, our lives because it's been predicting our texts. You know, we say thank you, and all of a sudden the sentence says very much, you know, for us. That's predictive text, it's been going on for a while and some of the things we use. But ChatGPT opened us up to a real application that was was new.
Kim Bastable:And I can't even tell when that was, but maybe a couple couple years ago, not not even a couple years ago. And that was when I think that I was shocked about the potential disruption of that to my education world. But what were your first impressions of of maybe ChatGPT and some of the AI that you have seen?
Simon Gale:Yeah. Was probably a couple of years ago and someone listening will say, it's been around for a lot longer than that. But where where I felt like I was plugging into it and starting to try and utilise it. You know, we have a lot of young people who work here at the campus, so they laugh at us sometimes and say, well, I've been using it forever. Well, have you only just discovered it?
Simon Gale:But I think just experimenting with it and saying, you know, this is how can it help me in my day to day and does it add to my production at work? Can it help us as a team? Where can we utilize this because there has to be ways that it could benefit our operations. And so just playing around with it, and it's interesting listening to you because you're talking and really look at a lot of things from an education point of view. And I have a staff member, Jason, who directs the apprenticeship program and he's, you know, an educator as well.
Simon Gale:And I see how even someone like him has adopted some of it in lesson planning for apprenticeship program and so on. He sits there and says, this is 99% what I would say and I just have to tweak a few things but it just saved me hours of work. And there's an element of guilt that I didn't put the work in, and a lot of us are dealing with that, I think. But when you embrace it and look at what it can do, how much time does that save me? And we're always talking about how directors and leaders lack time and and how do we be more efficient with our meetings and so on.
Simon Gale:And I am seeing more and more applications for it, so it's fascinating to me. But it was probably a couple of years ago that that that it first came on the radar.
Kim Bastable:Well, it's funny you mentioned that it feels guilty, but do you feel guilt using a calculator and not doing the long math? I don't think any of us feel guilt about that, but it's essentially a tool that we will begin to use as probably as frequently as we use a calculator. But, yeah, my first impressions were that I was intimidated by it and the disruptive nature of that. You could you could tell as a professor as I was grading papers when someone distinctly wrote something that was out of line with their previous submissions. And I couldn't prove that it was built by ChatGPT, but it was out of line with their previous submissions, which is highly suspicious.
Kim Bastable:There's obviously other forms of cheating. And so, again, it's it's not that they use a resource, but it's that they submit it as their own work. That's always the biggest issue. So I think just figuring it out how it was going to affect the education world was something that I had to grapple with with the people that are higher up than me at UF. But then I began to just explore what it can do personally.
Kim Bastable:My husband was very interested. He's a tech guy and loves to jump in and got a subscription to ChatGPT immediately. And and so he began to just incorporate it. And there are more and more uses over time, which we'll we'll talk about, you know, as we go down through this podcast. But I think it's one of those things that once you dive in and I've done some research.
Kim Bastable:I've actually taken some, like, LinkedIn learning classes and things to learn more about it. I've done a UF class on it. And what I find quite interesting is that in ChatGPT, it's almost as if you're supposed to act like it's a person. The person responds better when you say thank you and please. And that's really good work.
Kim Bastable:You're doing you're you're right on track. Now I need you to do x. You prompt it well, and it responds better, which is almost a little, you know, if it can believe that being nice to a computer is actually productive. But that's what I'm told in prompting. That's one of the keys.
Kim Bastable:So I think there's a lot about there that we don't don't understand, but it's it's kind of fun.
Simon Gale:Yeah. But you look at how, you know, when Google came instead of going to the library to do research, you had this tool that you could just plug in any question and you get an answer. I mean, look, that's it's been around forever now and in our minds, it's been around forever, but it hasn't been around that long. But this is on steroids, isn't it? I mean, detail and the level of detail and the customization that you can have and just keep getting more granular.
Simon Gale:If you want a high level summary of something, you've got it. You want to go more granular, you can dig it down and spread it out and get very detailed. So I think it's obviously here to stay, but the big question is how are we embracing it and utilizing it in our day to day delivery as directors and leaders or even as coaches? And there's a lot of discussion about that, and I think we're just starting to learn that. And I think at conferences and moving forward, they're the sort of things that we're all looking for.
Simon Gale:How do I save time by using technology? We do it on court. I talked about with apps and so on to make your coaching experience better for your guests. But how about operationally? How about customer experience?
Simon Gale:How about your your business efficiency running meetings better? I've really started looking at those things and and I think it's gonna be expensive initially, and like anything, it will work its way down as it becomes more common. But the things you have to be looking at if you wanna be progressive and keep your customers satisfied with their experience.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. Well, you can't it is. It's a kind of a I don't think it's possible to stick your head in the sand and avoid it. Think about if you were avoiding a calculator or avoiding a cell phone. That would be highly unproductive.
Kim Bastable:So it is time to just dive in and learn, and I I think there's plenty of ways to do that. So let's talk a little bit about some of the ways in which you do on your daily, weekly life encounter it. And I think you've spoken a lot about meeting summaries, but there maybe speak to that in in in any other ways, and then I'll share some of mine.
Simon Gale:Ian, I think for me, if you're if you're in a leadership role and you have meetings, whether they're one on one or team meetings, the ability to you think about how that process works. You come up with an agenda, you you type it, you send it out, or you attach it to the the Google Meet or whatever platform you use and then you have the meeting and you're making notes during the meeting, then you've got to type them up afterwards and send them to someone or send them to the team with summary and action steps. You go through that process. Again, this could have been happening for a long time, but I've been starting to use it more in meetings where let's transcribe the meeting and have a summary at the end and it doesn't just give you word for word what was said, it gives you an summary with bullet points broken out into categories that come with what I said, what someone else said, what the outcomes of the meeting were, what the action steps are, future recommendations, and then it can be automatically attached to the meeting or automatically sent to everybody.
Simon Gale:That's just saved me at least an hour of time. And if I have multiple meetings and that's happening instantly, how much time does that save me over a week to be able to focus on people instead of spending time on my laptop? You know, they're they're efficiencies that I think are good for all of us. You can't just get that with regular tech. You you know, that might be a paid subscription.
Simon Gale:But if you look into that, is that something that's worthwhile for your operation At a at a sizable operation, I would argue yes.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. Well, and really that chat GPT paid subscription is the first tier is I think it's $10 a month. So there are some options there. And Yeah. And actually, just to jump in, speaking of subscriptions, I looked last night on Canva, which is a creation most people probably know, but it does Instagram posts and all kinds of creative things.
Kim Bastable:And that subscription, they have a large AI presence, and that subscription, again, is in the realm of $10 a month for some very powerful tools. So it's not expensive.
Simon Gale:No. Think there's an entry level. It's like anything. There's entry level, and then you can go go crazy with it depending on the size of your company and so on. But I I think for the average director, there's affordable tools that are worth exploring.
Simon Gale:And why not? What's the worst thing that can happen with it? You try it and find ways and you say, yes, it works for me. No, it doesn't. I like this.
Simon Gale:I don't like that. That's up to you and what you're interested in. It's no different to having an iPhone and we probably only utilize 20% of its capabilities. But that 20% is helping me, then great, that makes life more efficient. Even something as simple as voice texting versus using your thumbs.
Simon Gale:You know, it's simple thing, but a lot of people don't even embrace that. So I know it's a small example, but they're all connected and they're just part of the evolution of technology.
Kim Bastable:Yeah, totally. I mean, I've used it in many ways for the written word. Building curriculum is to ask it to put together curriculum with objectives. Yeah. It's shocking how quickly and how easily it can do it.
Kim Bastable:But, you know, there's never a a time when you, at least from my opinion, that you take the full output and say, I'm done. There's always a level of, you know, reviewing it again, reading through what they said, asking them to go a level deeper, saying, you know, that's and frankly, you can say that's incorrect. There are times that it will put in what they call hallucinations, which are not correct pieces of information. They are found on the web, but they're not correct. Maybe they're from Wikipedia, and they're not they're not really fully factual.
Kim Bastable:So it isn't always accurate, and you have to read it closely, and you have to make sure that you drill down again, ask more questions, get more details. And and then, ultimately, you maybe you copy and paste what they have and and and make your own revisions, write it in your own voice slightly. But then the other thing you can do is put in documents and ask it to review, ask it to summarize, ask it to update. You can also ask it to use a format. So if I have one piece of curriculum that's written in a certain format where I might have certain headers and subheaders, I can put in that document and I can say, write me a new article on another subject using that format.
Kim Bastable:So then it will break it down in the same way so those two articles would look like they're part of a similar curriculum. The other thing I did just today was I put in a survey results. So I have, say, 48, 50 people who have answered the survey of what they think of the University of Florida's director of Racquet Sports certificate course. And I can, you know, look at that data and see what I think, but I can ask ChatGPT to provide me five bullet points of what it found in the survey results and just very quickly summarize if my you know, the dean that I work with at UF wants to know how the course is going. That's a really quick way to get it done in about five seconds, a summary of of the survey that that we've done.
Kim Bastable:And then another thing I did, I do some mental toughness coaching on the side with athletes, and I had some tennis players that I asked them if they do, you know, post match reviews and they they don't sit down and actually, you know, answer questions about what they learned or, know, did well, did poorly in their matches. And although there's numerous of those out there, I want them to do ones that are covering subjects that I'm discussing with them, maybe with their mental game more than their forehands and backhands. So I could tell I told ChatGPT some of the subject matter that I wanted them to evaluate themselves on and had them create a post match review. And then I slightly tweaked it and was able to hand it to them and their parents, you know, in about three minutes. So it's an amazing creation tool, review tool.
Kim Bastable:This just you begin to realize all the ways in which you can. And you can ask chat TPT pretty much anything and and, you know, can you do this? How do you do that? And it's reviewing the entire web, so it's getting a lot of information and throwing it in.
Simon Gale:You know, I think if we if we switch to the other side of our industry or day to day coaching and you look at something like streaming and you look at you know, it wasn't long ago that PlaySight was really the only option for any sort of on court streaming. Now you've got many more options and one that we're utilizing, we just put save my play in here on the campus on all the court. And when you start looking at what its capabilities are, yes, it can just stream, but the ability to stream and then condense an hour's match or an hour of play, whether it's a high level match or just a customer who's come out with three friends and played, and condense it into a short video and be able to edit out water breaks, ball pickups and have it just be twenty minutes of actual action. And at the end of their session, it automatically will email that to all the people who are registered on that court for that session. What a great add on value proposition for your members or for your facility.
Simon Gale:But then you start saying, alright, where else can it go? And you start talking about the ability for it to analyse a match, give stats, give feedback, all built into one platform, but then to be able to also do something something like, hey, you've got the app on your Apple Watch and as a coach, I'm talking not into the app, but I'm just running my lesson and it's listening and it's taking that information that I gave my customer to really make your pros accountable and you'll find out what they're saying and how good a lesson they really give when they have to listen to their own lesson. But when you take that information and it can condense it into a one page summary with the key learning outcomes and everything that took place in your lesson and send it to the customer along with a video, what a great resource that is. You know, these these are the things that are just trickling in, but and they're here, but they're not common in the workplace yet, but they're coming quickly and they're not crazy expensive. But can you upcharge for that as a director or you just bump up the lesson rates and it includes it?
Simon Gale:So there's revenue potential, but there's also retention of your customers because they get these tools and suddenly they've got a library of their lessons with summaries versus they're sitting at the end of a lesson writing it down in a notebook and saying, can you remind me what you said at the start? You gave me this tip. Well, it's already been sent to you. It was just sent at the end of the lesson. I'll see you next week.
Kim Bastable:Wow. Wow. I my brain goes to the whole mental toughness aspects of I'm always on athletes to say, how much better are you today than you were six months ago or twelve months ago? Because they all wanna use the score of the match as the judgment of whether they've improved. And I argue that's bad information.
Kim Bastable:Who knows what the you played in that match. You could have beat somebody o and o, but you played awful. I mean, that's not data point that you wanna use for improvement. But if you have a bunch of video clips and real, like, repeated data points that show that maybe your swing from your forehand looks entirely different twelve months ago, and now you've got this different swing play. How fun that would be to see that over time.
Kim Bastable:That's exciting.
Simon Gale:Yeah. I see it, and we're just dabbling in it a bit now with how do we use that on the campus without that that video and compressing of videos and what do we charge for that? Do we charge for that? There's no model out there. That there are in other sport.
Simon Gale:You know, I think some of the things we're saying are already prevalent in a lot of other sports. You know, I talk to soccer parents and they get video footage of their child playing, but it's just of their child and it shows their offensive moves, their defensive moves, their foot skills and it isolates them out of 20 people on a soccer field and it sends it to them immediately after a match. Well, that's a tool that you can add to a college submission. It's a way for a coach to take every player and analyze some of their movements where you had to cut and paste and chop up video before and that would take a coach hours of time. So these are quite common at recreational soccer.
Simon Gale:These are not pros. These are high level kids, but it's out there and more common than it probably is in our industry. I think we're a little slow to adopt some of this stuff, but there's distinct differences within our business of on court, off court, business operations, customer experience, and I think we're going to see it become more and more common in our environment than it has been recently.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. No. It definitely and it's here in the form of a track, which PTR has employed and put all of its teaching methodology, which would be creating a custom GPT with PTR's database. And people who are members of PTR can access that to write a lesson plan and give specific drills using the PTR database. I think you've used that, haven't you, Simon?
Kim Bastable:You understand where I'm coming from, and this is an exciting development for people who have access to Trek.
Simon Gale:Yeah. And it's only just been released in, I think, the last six months with TR. But it's as I understand it too, haven't used it a lot, but the ability to, as a teaching body, say this is our methodology and our philosophy and here's all our resources. You as a coach, that philosophy you employ, then you can build lesson template to any level of detail. You know, I could plug in Red Bull six to eight year olds beginner class and get a half page quick summary.
Simon Gale:If I'm a little bit more entry level coach and I need more details how to break that out minute by minute, I could say, me that same lesson plan, but give me detailed breakdown. And then I could say I need it for eight weeks and I've got all that resource, but it's not just pulling from the internet, it's pulling from the resources that were fed into it. So it's business specific or philosophy specific and I think if a club could do that and they have their methodology and so on and it's all built in, and they could then have their own coaches build their own lesson plans, what an incredible tool that is versus the way a lot of us are still doing it, where you're sitting there typing up lesson plans on a computer, printing it out and handing it to coaches. And that's hours and hours of time for a leader that would be saved. So it's there.
Simon Gale:I think it's just new and people still have to work out how to use it and know that it's there. I think there's an education piece to it.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. No. There is. And I think it's the writing the prompts that is, you know, it's not a one prompt process. It's a multi prompt process.
Kim Bastable:So you ask it something to do, and then you ask it further information. I I like sections one and two. Can you give me some more specificity on sections three and four? You know, I I need this to be for sixty minutes, for ninety minutes. I need this to be for eight weeks.
Kim Bastable:I'm gonna have eight kids on the court. I'm gonna have four kids. You can give it all those details and have it just continue to answer the questions and drill down. And that's what's really fun. And I think this is what gets into the ethics of it is that it really is customized to the knowledge of the person writing the prompts.
Kim Bastable:It's not you know, it's just like when I'm writing a piece of curriculum, I know that something is in error in in what it created for me because I know the subject matter. And so I eliminate that out. And I've told ChatGPT, you know, actually, you're wrong in that piece of information. That's not actually the truth that this happened. And then they say, oh, I'm sorry.
Kim Bastable:And, you know, it's funny how you interact with it, but it truly does take a knowledge base to get the most out of it. So I think that that's what's helpful. It's a little scary because if you don't have the knowledge base, you might employ employ something as true that's not true. So I suggest people stay within areas that they are most knowledgeable first to understand the systems. And then just realize, yes, I mean, everything on the Internet's not 100% factual, sadly.
Kim Bastable:Most of it is. Much of it is. But it's the prompts. It's the continually asking, which I believe, as you and I have said, that's really what makes this not it's not unethical. It's it's and and it and it's actually saying, you know, you did do the work.
Kim Bastable:It's just as if you went to Google and you asked the question and then you wrote the paper. In this case, chat GPT might be writing much more of the language, and we would recommend that you rewrite that language to match the tone that you would normally use as a you know, personally. But it's very, you know, I don't think we agree it's not unethical to use ChatGPT or these products.
Simon Gale:No, it's a tool. Right? I mean, it's it's a resource and I think we've talked about this offline, the idea that if I'm an entry level pro and I'm just getting started in the industry and I submit something that's AI generated and it is so far above and beyond who I am, that's a misrepresentation of you, where you are in the industry. If I plug in something that I feel comfortable and knowledgeable about, and it's a I think I would look at it, it's a starter for me. It can produce a document for me, and then I'm gonna tweak that, like you say, to make it mine versus I'm gonna take it verbatim and say, let's use that.
Simon Gale:I think it's that the former example where I am early in my career and I am using it way beyond my knowledge base and I'm okay with submitting that. That's no different to your students submitting a paper as a freshman that clearly sounds like they're a senior and got four years of experience. I I think that's dangerous for your reputation and it's very easy to type it in, get a result, save and send. And then you say, you know what, that that's not who I am and and if someone asks me a question, I can't answer it, but it's written on a piece of paper.
Kim Bastable:That's funny because I've had students where I've literally said to them, I'm pretty sure you wrote this with chat GPT. I didn't grade you down because of it, but I'm fairly certain that you know? And they don't say they didn't. Like, they read that comment and they move on. I've never had someone said, I absolutely didn't write that with.
Kim Bastable:You know? So there's a point which you can look distorted from who you are, and that's not what we would profess for you to do. But use it as a starter. Great idea.
Simon Gale:Yeah. I wonder what it's gonna be like in fifteen, twenty years. Is it just the norm? Everybody just produces that, and it's you don't write papers anymore. You just I I don't know.
Simon Gale:It's frightening what it could look like.
Kim Bastable:Well, let's just hope Racquet Fuel's around in twenty years and we'll give that we'll have that seminar or have that podcast episode and we'll we'll compare it to this one.
Simon Gale:It'll probably be on reruns, Kim. That's about it.
Kim Bastable:Alright. Well, that's our, conversation today. I think that my takeaway really is give it a try. Get on chat GPT. You know, try it for the free version.
Kim Bastable:But if you want to get some of the more enhanced features, the the cost is not a lot. The other thing I would just point out is Canva has a lot of the graphics tools for a very inexpensive. I was on Canva last night, and they have an incredible array of products in what they call their magic studio, some of which are are free, but some of which you have to pay their first level tier pricing. But, you know, removing things from photos, clipping a person out of a photo and making that person bigger or smaller, moving him to another photo, adding text, changing text. I mean, things that are just you know, it's amazing what you can do that would take hours.
Kim Bastable:Previously, creating animations. I mean, create it's it's endless. It was very fun. I'm not as much a creative person as I am a a, you know, English language writer person, but it it's just intriguing what the options are. So give things a try.
Kim Bastable:What are your takeaways?
Simon Gale:Yeah. No doubt. I think it's things are evolving so quickly year to year and challenge to keep up and we get used to doing things a certain way. And I think we always have to be looking for how can we adapt, how can we be more efficient, what's next, what's out there. And our customers are using it in their day to day life, so how are we integrating it into our businesses and our daily operations and our behind the scenes administration and can it help you and you take what bits you like.
Simon Gale:It's a resource and you use x percentage of it, but you have to keep looking at it and not stick your head in the sand as you said earlier. So I think it's exciting. I look forward to how it's gonna make my life easier at work.
Kim Bastable:Yeah. We'll have to we'll do do another one of these episodes maybe next February and see see where we are, see where we've come in a year. Alright. So that's, our talk for today. We just wanted to introduce this subject.
Kim Bastable:We think it's an important one that's affecting us, so we wanted to bring it up and give you our our maybe 10¢ as we say that we are not experts, but we we are interested parties watching this happen. So we will speak to you next time on Racquet Fuel.
Episode Narration:That's all for today, but we're not out of fuel. You can find more information and resources in our show notes and by visiting racquetfuelpodcast.com. If you like what you just heard, please subscribe, and also leave a review, which helps other people join the mission to become stronger Racquet's leaders.
Conclusion:This podcast is a production of Athlete Plus, the people, stories, science behind elite athletes and teams. Athlete Plus is the official podcast network of the Institute for Coaching Excellence, a research, education, and outreach center in the College of Health and Human Performance at the University of Florida. The Institute for Coaching Excellence offers various online certificate programs and degrees in partnership with the Department of Sport Management. Learn more today at coaching.hhp.ufl.edu.
