By Pieter Couwenbergh

How do you become a champion with your hockey team? Training more frequently didn’t bring success. Observing other sports provided some improvement. But an analysis of an athlete's character under pressure led to the breakthrough. Carla Smits-Nusteling sees a gap in the market, even among top executives.

Carla Smits: "We offer a manual that allows you to work on your strengths and weaknesses." 

It all started to itch again when Carla Smits-Nusteling returned to the hockey fields of HCKZ in The Hague. The former CFO of KPN and seasoned board member (ASML, Nokia, and now CVC) wanted more time for fun activities and joined the technical committee of the youth department at HCKZ. Once, she was a talented youth hockey player and captain of Jong Oranje.
Smits-Nusteling quickly asked herself how HCKZ could once again become Dutch champion with the boys' and girls' teams. The first improvements were quickly identified: better equipment, better coaches, and especially more frequent and focused training. Over the following years, HCKZ climbed significantly in the rankings, but they still didn’t produce champion teams.

Breakthrough
“With fellow committee member Inge van Zuiden (ex-Rabo), I realized that we wouldn’t produce champions if we kept doing the same as other hockey clubs.” HCKZ had only managed to erase the gap they had fallen into. The two sought advice from other sports. At Eredivisie club AZ, they saw how much data is collected daily to keep players physically at their peak. In swimming, they learned about endurance. “Far more than we had imagined.”
The breakthrough, however, came in 2020 during the pandemic, when they took an online course on the Science of Well-Being at Yale University. Van Zuiden: “We learned from top American coaches that the difference between winning and losing is determined by the character of the athlete. It’s great to collect data on things like muscle fatigue and heart rate, but as we learned, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. What really matters is that under stress, people revert to their core personality. We found an American test of personality profiles and further developed it for people in high-pressure environments, such as athletes.”

Rotterdam professional football club
PeakPersonality was born. Van Zuiden resigned as a primary school director, and Smits-Nusteling stepped down from most of her board positions to work full-time together. The initial investment of €100,000 was mainly spent on developing the software.
Two years later, in 2023, they were invited by a professional football club in Rotterdam to assess the players. They won’t reveal the name. “The client doesn’t want that.” But Van Zuiden does explain what the test reveals: “If the defense or midfield only has thoughtful characters, the play will be too lateral. You want at least one player in your team who, in the face of adversity, fires up the team and leads the charge. If the coach is naturally thoughtful and the club’s philosophy is aggressive, you need to consider whether that’s a match. Our analysis provides those insights.”

Data Analysis
Success also didn’t take long at their own hockey club in The Hague. In 2023, HCKZ became Dutch champion with two youth teams. PeakPersonality is riding the wave of the growing popularity of data analysis to plan peak performance and psychologically support athletes. What do they add to the ever-expanding range of tools?
Smits-Nusteling: “Many tools place you in a quadrant without truly considering the pressure of a high-performance environment. If you fill out our list honestly, you get a manual that helps you work on your strengths and weaknesses. But your colleagues and coach also benefit, as they’ll know how you react under pressure.”
They’ve just returned from Paris, where they were invited to present to former Olympians. Proudly, they show a video featuring Carmen Bunaciu, a former top Romanian swimmer who is now a swim coach and professor of sports and management in the U.S. Bunaciu is full of praise. “Truly knowing your athlete is crucial for a coach to be successful. Your tool provides insight into the deeper emotions of an athlete, and that helps me in coaching.”
Smits-Nusteling is already dreaming of the next step. “Wouldn’t our approach be interesting for recruiters to understand the character of potential executives in a way they’re not used to?”