FromSportsManagementtoTechnologyLeadership

Every transformative career has unlikely bridges — moments where seemingly disparate expertise converge to create something new. My journey from sports management to technology leadership has taught me that innovation doesn’t follow straight lines. It emerges from the intersection of unexpected domains.

The Sports Management Foundation

My career began in sports education and institutional leadership. As CMO & CTO at TennisDNA, a tennis education company with 11 locations across Virginia, I managed operations, strategy, and technology at a growing sports school. The focus was clear: how do you develop young athletes, create effective training programs, and build an organization that scales while maintaining quality instruction?

This wasn’t about analytics or data science. It was about pedagogy, coaching effectiveness, facility management, and understanding what it takes to build a sustainable sports education business. I learned to think institutionally — about budgets, staff development, liability, insurance, and the practical realities of running a sports school.

The management toolkit I developed included:

• Operations management and facility coordination
• Staff training and program development
• Athlete registration and progress tracking
• Financial management and business scaling
• Customer experience and community building

But the most valuable lesson wasn’t operational — it was human: you can’t scale what you don’t understand. Building TennisDNA taught me that the technology should serve the mission, not the other way around. Systems succeed only when they align with how coaches actually teach and how students actually learn.

The Bridge to Healthcare Technology

This institutional thinking became my compass as I transitioned toward healthcare technology. When I joined IdoniaHealth as Frontend Tech Lead on CDTI-funded medical imaging projects, I brought that same focus: how do you build technology that professionals will actually use?

Working on healthcare AI taught me a hard lesson: the technical backend is only part of the equation. Frontend design, user experience, and explainability are non-negotiable. Clinicians need to understand what an AI system is showing them, why, and how to act on it. That realization — that trust requires transparency — became central to my work.

This drove my PhD research at Universidad San Jorge, where I’m exploring explainable AI methods for biomechanical analysis. Instead of just building better prediction models, the research asks: “How do we explain predictions in ways that help clinicians understand the model’s reasoning and verify it against their domain expertise?” This work combines my interests in healthcare, AI, and human-centered technology design.

The Sports Management Leap

The next bridge appeared through my involvement with RFEJYDA (the Spanish Royal Federation of Judo) as Director of Innovation. Working with athletes in a sport I’m passionate about — judo — I discovered that digital transformation in sports institutions is about far more than technology. It’s about governance, multidisciplinary coordination, and cultural change.

Leading EU-funded projects with CSD Spain taught me how to align nutritionists, physiotherapists, psychologists, physicians, and coaches around shared data platforms. The technical challenge was real, but the leadership challenge was bigger: getting diverse professionals to trust and adopt new systems that fundamentally changed their workflows.

As President of the Aragonese Judo Federation, I learned institutional strategy from the inside. Managing budgets, negotiating with governing bodies, developing athlete pathways, and representing a sport at the regional level — these are leadership skills no technical role could have taught me.

What Sports Management Taught Me About Technology Leadership

Looking back, the sports management chapter wasn’t a detour from technology leadership — it was preparation. Building and running TennisDNA taught me lessons that proved invaluable as I transitioned into healthcare and AI:

1. Alignment matters more than perfection. A simple system that everyone understands and uses beats a sophisticated one nobody wants.

2. The end user is your arbiter of success. Build for coaches and teachers, they’ll reject solutions that don’t match their reality. Build for clinicians, they’ll demand rigor. Build for institutions, they need sustainability.

3. Domain expertise must be respected and integrated. The best outcomes come from technologists who listen to coaches, scientists, and professionals — not telling them how to do their jobs differently, but understanding their needs deeply.

4. Trust is earned through transparency. Users adopt technology when they understand what it does and why. This applies to sports programs, medical systems, and everything in between.

5. Scaling requires documentation and infrastructure. What works as a one-off solution must be built to last and evolve. This is true whether you’re scaling a tennis school or building clinical AI systems.

The Convergence

Today, as CTO of Oniria Studios, Director of Innovation at RFEJYDA, and PhD researcher at Universidad San Jorge, I see these threads weaving together. The opportunity is to lead at the intersection of technology, sports, and healthcare:

• Applying institutional leadership experience to digital transformation at sports federations
• Building healthcare technology that professionals understand and trust
• Researching explainable AI methods that bridge technical models and human expertise
• Leading multidisciplinary teams through complex organizational change

The journey from TennisDNA to IdoniaHealth to RFEJYDA to Oniria Studios isn’t a career pivot — it’s a progression toward understanding how technology actually gets used in real institutions by real professionals. And that understanding is where meaningful innovation happens.

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Cristina Berrocal Elu is a technologist, researcher, and innovation leader. Her career spans sports education, healthcare technology, institutional management, and digital transformation — always focused on building systems that professionals actually trust and use.