In sports, injury prevention is one area that teams and players are constantly trying to improve. An Australian company called KangaTech is hoping that they have the formula to continue this improvement.

KangaTech was founded after North Melbourne Football Club of the Australian Football League launched a world leading sports science program. Headed by Steven Saunders, the goal was to get maximum benefit from the club’s limited resources. Saunders, who is known as one of the leading sports scientists in Australia, wanted to focus on measuring and tracking a number of proven, modifiable and easily testable risk factors, and then improve these risk factors through targeted intervention. In order to create the platform, Saunders and NMFC teamed up with a technology company called Biarri to create something that they felt didn’t yet exist.

Read more: SportTechie

HE’S been called the football equivalent of a horse whisperer. One former colleague swears he has ‘Zen Master’ qualities; another insists that if the human body was an engine, he would be the mechanic fine-tuning it.

His name is Steve Saunders, and if you haven’t heard of him, don’t feel left out.

Few footy fans know who Saunders is, other than hard-core North Melbourne supporters contentedly watching their team streak to a 6-0 start to the 2016 season off the back of a healthy playing list, the best injury-prevention program in the AFL and a core of veterans playing some of the best football of their careers.

But the AFL industry — indeed the sports industry as a whole — knows a lot about Saunders.

For more than two decades, he was one of the leading go-to men for groin injuries — he was once dubbed ‘the groin guru’ — and he is now into his sixth season as North Melbourne’s high-performance coach and managing director of sports science and medical services.

Read more: Herald Sun