You can take the physio out of Wolverhampton.
You can take him to several other top clubs, including a Champions League final with Saturday’s opponents Chelsea, to the pinnacle of football aspirations with England, to working in basketball and baseball in America with the New York Knicks and Washington Nationals, to then launching and heading up his own hugely successful software company, Apollo MIS.
You can do all that. But you can’t take the Wolverhampton memories out of the physio!
“Y’owm alright?” asks Dave Hancock, at the start of our conversation.
Over 30 years since he landed his first full-time job in the industry, as assistant physio to Barry Holmes at Wolves, Hancock hasn’t forgotten the local dialect! Nor the value of the opportunity he was handed in his early twenties.
“It was Graham Taylor who first gave me a chance, after what amounted to a three or four day interview at Wolves,” he recalls.
“He was such a great person to learn off, so straight off the bat as a manager, and so organised and methodical.
“He included everyone – which I loved – a real backroom team approach, and had already had so much success as a club boss with Watford and Aston Villa and then becoming national team manager.
“It was a really good and valuable insight and opening for me into the world of football.
“I loved it at Wolves, experiencing so many stepping stones which helped me start my career, including making mistakes and learning from those mistakes, but all with so much mutual respect.”
Three decades on, and Hancock can reflect on Taylor being the first of so many high profile and regularly successful managers whom he worked for during a lengthy spell in various dugouts and treatment rooms.
After Taylor and Mark McGhee at Wolves, amongst others, came Graeme Souness at Blackburn, David O’Leary, Terry Venables, and Peter Reid at Leeds, Jose Mourinho at Chelsea, Fabio Capello and Roy Hodgson with England.
“Working with so many top managers delivered lots of different scenarios and was a great learning experience,” says Hancock.
“Different cultures, different nationalities, different ways of working, but I could take something from all of them.
“As I became older and more experienced, working with that calibre of manager I learned how to get on and adapt and aim to be successful within the environment I was operating in.”
And adapt Hancock did. To hugely successful effect. So much so, that after 25 years of working in sport and with athletes, he launched his own business, with Apollo now having offices in New York – where he is based – and Leeds.
Apollo is a cutting edge sports software platform using AI that transforms how teams collect and analyse data on injuries, games, practices and performance.
As Hancock explains, whilst the business is only a few years in operation, the idea and the science behind it was in his mind and consciousness for way longer than that.
“Apollo was my brainchild but linked also to working with the guy who created Prozone, the analysis platform which revolutionised data and was a gamechanger in the Premier League in the early 2000s,” he reveals.
“I went in with this idea and we built a product but my career as a physio really took off and I didn’t really have time for the company.
“At that time, it was run like a ‘Mom and Pop Shop’, with two or three people, and a bit of investment, and not really as a proper business.
“It was about five years ago that I decided I’d done a good stint of 25 years working in sport and with athletes, and so I put the old product in the bin and started again.
“I started building it as a proper company with a proper structure with people on the board, and it has been growing ever since.
“It’s all about doing something quite innovative around data, and tech, and AI, leveraging machine learning and data analytics to enhance performance and prevent injuries.”
Apollo already boasts numerous very high profile clients. Three Premier League teams are signed up, pretty much half of the Championship, teams in the MLS (Major League Soccer), MLB (Major League Baseball), the NFL (American Football), and teams in China, Japan, Australia and Saudi Arabia.
The business and the technology is clearly proving a huge success. But Hancock also believes it is used best – and indeed sports medicine is delivered best – when the data and technology is operated alongside the human eye and human experience.
It’s about finding a balance of the subjective and the objective, utilising the incredible advances in both data and technology of the last couple of decades, but in tandem with the skill and expertise of the coaches and practitioners.
In an excellent recent ‘Strain on the game’ podcast, where Hancock joined former England defender Stephen Warnock and elite performance coach and sport scientist Adrian Lamb, he spoke about working for Mourinho, who possessed a seemingly innate ability to judge training loads.
“One of the reasons we were so good at Chelsea in Jose’s first spell was not because we had a great medical team, but because he was so good at periodisation in training,” Hancock explained.
“He was just so good at it, and so we didn’t have many injuries.
“He knew when to push, or when to pull back, and would phase the training days, so one day might be all neural where the warm-up and the training was really quick and fast, and 40 minutes later the players were back in the dressing room.
“Another day might be a strength day when everything would be based around body strength, with contact, and he would manipulate the pitch to help with that intensity and contact.
“His periodisation of training – and remember this is a long time ago now – was the art of a great coach, and meant that he would have more players available to him.
“The more players available to him, the more he could utilise and rotate squads, and the more he won trophies.
“You need data, it massively helps, but Jose’s art, the way he would periodise his training, was so important for the success of Chelsea at that time. He was revolutionary in what he did.”
That time at Stamford Bridge with Mourinho was the most successful Hancock enjoyed at a club for honours, with Chelsea winning the Premier League, League Cup and FA Cup, and reaching the final of the Champions League before losing on penalties, to Manchester United in Moscow.
This followed a spell at Leeds which included reaching a Champions League semi-final, along with designing and implementing their state-of-the-art training facility at Thorp Arch.
“Before getting to Chelsea I’d been involved in that ‘nearly’ phase of winning trophies, and then I discovered what the difference was between nearly winning and actually winning,” Hancock reveals.
“The top coaches are those who can use the data but are led by their experience, and that was definitely Jose Mourinho.
“Some of the best half time speeches I ever saw were from Mourinho, he could just flick a switch.
“He was able to predict exactly what was going to happen, and nine times out of ten he was right.
“It was very motivating, and I used to sit on the physio’s couch and look into the dressing room at the faces of the players – it was almost like theatre.
“For all top coaches, you have to be able to motivate the athletes, find out what makes them click, and create an environment and culture that allows them to operate under pressure.
“Mourinho was also excellent at deflecting that pressure from players, and protecting them from difficult situations.
“He didn’t do that to make it ‘me, me, me’, he did it because if they were talking about him, then it was removing any of the heat away from the players.”
And there once again is the importance of the personal touch, of the human element alongside the data, which is what formed such a key part of the first half of Hancock’s career when working in physiotherapy.
It was a career which was motivated by growing up playing rugby, and getting injured! That prompted a keen interest in treatment and recovery, leading to attending medical school and working in orthopaedics and rehabilitation at St James’ Hospital in Leeds.
“From that time, I just knew that I wanted to work in sport,” Hancock recalls.
Landing a part-time role in Rugby League with Leeds Rhinos, he was soon recommended to Wolves, and came through the successful recruitment process to pass the Taylor test.
Wolves reached the play-off semi-finals twice during Hancock’s time at the club, losing out to Bolton and Crystal Palace.
Alongside results though, and so much learning, came the memories. So many memories. He enjoyed working not just with the managers but also coaches like Steve Harrison and Colin Lee, and on the medical side with Holmes and Dr Ackroyd, then the club doctor.
And that mix of being a professional physio but also building strong working relationships was a balance which Hancock negotiated particularly successfully. He was labelled ‘Mad Dog’ by the players, both a friendly sign of respect, but also a nickname which, as he explains, was down to his relentless drive in improving their fitness.
“That’s probably what I love most about having had a career with some great football clubs, the memories,” he reveals.
“Even just talking to you now, all the memories of Wolves come flooding back.
“The Mad Dog nickname came from Steve Harrison because of how hard I worked the players, because I was really fit, and would always do whatever it was I was asking the players to do.
“Graham Taylor loved it, and it meant the players were working harder when injured than they were when they were training.
“I remember being in the gym with Tony Daley, who unfortunately had a lot of injuries as a player at Wolves, and then going up to the old Health & Fitness Club and doing some boxing.
“The lads used to hate it, but I loved it, and the view was that if the players were working hard, they were going to be moaning!
“Mad Dog was something that then stuck with me throughout the rest of my career, but I also think the players appreciated it in the end.
“When they got back to fitness after injury, it never took too long to be back to their best, and that’s when they realised how important all that work was.”
There are also many other experiences from the time which Hancock cherished. His love of rugby saw him link up with Wolverhampton and, if Wolves didn’t play on a Saturday, turning out at Castlecroft for the seconds or the thirds.
He viewed the rugby as important, because it brought a social group away from football, and indeed, became a flatmate with one of his team-mates Richard Chambers. with whom he still maintains a friendship Across the Pond.
Although, as a similar age to the players, at times Hancock also found himself dragged into the off-field lives of those he was working with!
Staying in the Mount Hotel, he once returned after rugby training one midweek night to the sight of John De Wolf, standing at the bar, and keen to head into town.
“I said I would go with him and he was driving, but was driving on the wrong side of the road,” Hancock recalls.
“I was telling him and he was saying that he was Dutch, so it was o-k – I’m really not sure how we got back safely that night!”
Hancock has, despite that motoring mishap, remained in touch with De Wolf and spoke to him as recently as six months ago.
Another former Wolves defender Brian Law also reached out with a professional query recently, while Hancock also tries to see Don Goodman at least every other year.
The friendship with Goodman is particularly poignant given it was Hancock who treated him and accompanied him in the ambulance when he suffered an epileptic fit after fracturing his skull playing for Wolves against Huddersfield. One of those memories, and experiences, which is understandably difficult to forget.
There are many other links as well. When Hancock moved on from Wolves, it was to a role as Head of Athletic Development and Medicine at Blackburn, working with Tom Finn, Bobby Downes and Robert Kelly.
Hancock also helped later Wolves and England physio Steve Kemp land his first job at Preston, and has been delighted to see how his career has also developed to the pinnacle of the English game.
And then there are those social memories. Of which there are many fond ones. Visiting the Le Monde menswear store in Tettenhall for a clothes purchase and coffee with owner Jason. Time spent in his local, the Mermaid at Wightwick. Heading into town to Amici Mai, the Canal Club, Chambers and Chancellors.
On the pitch, it was the perfect launchpad for a career which propelled him to success with other clubs, and then four years with England in a position which you don’t apply for, you get approached. A proud moment indeed.
By this point, Hancock had already started gravitating Stateside, having been approached to do some work with American athletes, and joining the Performance Board of Nike in Oregon.
He was then headhunted, upon recommendation from a contact at the Los Angeles Lakers, for the new role of Performance Director at the New York Knicks basketball team, where he once again pushed the envelope with new approaches and techniques.
“Once I had been with the Knicks for a year or so, I took over another guy from Manchester and we managed to bring in new products and new ideas that could cross over from football,” he says.
“It was quite innovative for the NBA (National Basketball Association) at the time, but is now being used by pretty much everyone.
“Again, that was such a good learning experience with different coaches, different athletes, different mentalities.
“And a lot more games, about 80 per season!
“We’d be travelling around the United States, playing three or four games a week, including back-to-back, suffering from sleep deprivation and having to get used to losing more games than I was previously accustomed to!
“In basketball you might lose eight on the bounce and just keep going, whereas in football you’d be in big danger of the manager, and yourself, getting fired!
“It was a completely different experience but another great one, and I ended up spending seven years there before later becoming a Performance Consultant in baseball for the Washington Nationals.
“All these opportunities have not only helped me progress in my career, they have brought me to America, allowed my kids to grow up here, and become an American citizen.
“I feel very fortunate.”
From Wolves to New York, via many other sporting outposts, all of which have helped Hancock on his revolutionary sporting journey.
At Leeds, he was the youngest physio in the Premier League. Now, he is pretty much world-renowned, the result of being able to mix his skills and personality with the advances in data and technology.
“I have always been one to air my opinions – a lot of people don’t – but it’s important for me to stick to my personality and my morals,” he explains.
“Working as a physiotherapist you are always under pressure, because if the star player is out, it is up to you to get him back fit as quickly as possible,” he explains.
“Injuries can be devastating to a coach and put even more pressure on them, and under pressure people can crack and make mistakes.
“In anything in life, any business, you learn from the mistakes and the support of the people around you to make sure you get better in what you do.
“And the most important thing, is to always aim to try and keep moving forward.”
With a continuing thirst for knowledge, and one which has underpinned so much of the Hancock story from those days at Wolves to developing such a revolutionary company out in America, the old adage is clear for all to see.
You can, indeed, teach a Mad Dog new tricks!
