Marie Burnham
Chair
South West Yorkshire NHS Foundation
- Healthcare & Safeguarding
- Health Systems & Governance
- NHS Leadership & Transformation
About Why Not I
Built by elite sport.
Backed by experts.
Why Not I combines lived elite sporting experience with psychology, safeguarding, governance, technology and behavioural science — building preventative mental performance infrastructure for the organisations that shape modern sport.
Why we exist
Elite sport has mastered measuring the body.
We’re building the infrastructure to understand the human behind the performance.
For decades, sport has invested in physical measurement — force plates, GPS units, sleep trackers, biomechanical models. The behavioural state driving that performance has remained mostly invisible.
Why Not I is preventative rather than reactive. We surface the behavioural signals that shape readiness, resilience and culture before they show up in results or in crisis.
The outcome is a shared source of behavioural intelligence: one that protects athletes and gives organisations earlier, better-informed decisions about the people at the centre of their performance.
Our principles
Four commitments that shape everything we build.
Prevention first
Behavioural change shows up before it reaches results, availability or crisis. The platform exists to make that window visible while there is still time to act in it.
Trust by architecture, not by promise
Participation is a squad requirement set by the club, like GPS and load monitoring. What the system can produce is deliberately limited: no score, no ranking, and no behavioural numbers shown to anyone. Journals are private and inert — they enter no trend, no calculation and no escalation, and no member of staff can read them. Behavioural visibility is walled from selection, contract and recruitment decisions.
Behaviour before performance
Physical readiness is thoroughly measured in elite sport. The human state driving it is not. We measure the second, and we hand it to staff as state and direction rather than as data to interpret.
Better decisions, earlier
The output is not a dashboard. It is a staff member having the right conversation a fortnight sooner than they otherwise would have.
The model behind it
The Behavioural Performance Model
Sixteen measures across five pillars — Preparedness, Confidence, Resilience, Psychological Safety and Alignment — plus a standalone state marker asked at every check-in. All measures use five-point verbal anchor scales written in plain athlete language. The model is not a diagnostic tool and is not designed to identify mental health conditions.
Independently reviewed
01
Dr Hannah Butler-Coyne
HCPC registered and BPS chartered clinical and sport psychologist.
02
Marie Burnham
Safeguarding and governance.
03
Lydia Edgar
Partner and Head of Sport, Brabners LLP.
Three specialists, reviewing independently, reached the same conclusion on the journal.
Founder & CEO
Kofi Josephs
Founder
Kofi Josephs
Founder & CEO
Team England and Great Britain international, 10-year professional basketball player across 8 countries. Psychology graduate. Kofi built Why Not I from direct experience of elite performance environments — and from years spent working with the people, clubs and institutions that shape them.
Great Britain International
Basketball
Team England, Commonwealth Games
National representation
Psychology Graduate
Academic grounding
Speaker & Mental Health Advocate
Public voice
Benjamin Zephaniah Localism Award
Recognition
Founding Engineer
Olasubomi Oluwafemi
Technical team
Olasubomi Oluwafemi
Founding Engineer · Senior Software & AI Engineer
Femi leads the engineering behind Why Not I. He has spent over eight years building production platforms used by schools, startups and financial products — with deep experience in AI-assisted analytics, secure data handling and performance reporting systems for sport.
8+ years building production systems
Software & AI engineering
MSc Data Analytics, Northumbria University
Academic grounding
AI & LLM integration into live products
Python · LangChain · RAG · vector databases
Secure, compliant platform engineering
GDPR · UK & EU data protection · ISO 27001 exposure
Full-stack & cloud architecture
React · Node.js · PostgreSQL · AWS / GCP
Sports performance reporting systems
AI-assisted insight from coach and player data
Advisory board
Leaders from the disciplines that matter most in elite sport.
Psychology, safeguarding, governance, law, technology, data and high performance — each advisor strengthens a specific pillar of how Why Not I is built and deployed.
Andy Etches
Co-Founder
Rezzil
- Founder & Sports Tech Advisor
- Performance Technology
- Innovation & Product Strategy
Lydia Edgar
Partner & Head of Sport
Brabners LLP
- Legal & Governance
- Sports Governance Advisor
- Strategic Partnerships
Ron Thompson
Former Chief Data Officer
NASA (Deputy Digital Transformation Officer)
- Chief Data Strategy Advisor
- Data & Analytics Leadership
- Digital Transformation
Dr Hannah Butler-Coyne
Chartered Clinical & Sports Psychologist
HCPC Registered · British Psychological Society
- Clinical Psychology & Trauma-Informed Practice
- Sport Psychology & Performance
- Consultation, Training & Research
Tegan Salter-George
Senior Software Engineer
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
- Former Lead Engineer, Macquarie Group
- Technical Advisor
- Engineering & Systems
Arun Cowan
Founder & CEO
Empiriq Group
- Strategic Growth & Investment
- Global Business Development
- Entrepreneur & Investor
David Andrew
Founder & Managing Partner
Tiaki
- Former Accenture, EY & IBM Executive
- Strategic & Commercial Advisor
- Business Transformation
Michael Clohisy
Sports & Media Attorney
International Practice
- Former Legal Counsel, NBA & NFL
- International Sports & Legal Advisor
- Commercial & Media Rights
Caragh McMurtry
Olympian & Team GB Rower
Founder, Neurodiverse Sport
- Founder & CEO, Neurodiverse Sport
- Neurodiversity & Inclusion
- High Performance & Wellbeing
Collective expertise
A capability set built for the full weight of elite sport.
Why Not I isn’t built around one founder. It’s strengthened by leaders across every discipline needed to transform athlete performance environments.
- 01Elite Sport
- 02Clinical Psychology
- 03Safeguarding
- 04Technology
- 05Legal
- 06Governance
- 07Data & Analytics
- 08Commercial Strategy
- 09Investment
- 10High Performance
- 11Neurodiversity & Inclusion
- 12Business Transformation
Built for elite environments
Privacy · Governance · Trust
A wholly private journal
Never read, monitored or flagged. It feeds no trend, score or signal.
Role-appropriate access
The right people see the right level — never personal content.
Responsible data governance
Handled with the discretion elite environments require.
Behavioural, not clinical
Structured performance context — not diagnostic data.
Why Not I
Elite sport doesn’t need another wellbeing platform.
It needs better behavioural intelligence.
That’s why we built Why Not I.