Every question BAB answers, with a source for every number: cycle and performance, injuries, sleep, iron, pain, drop-out. Plus the questions about the project.
BAB is an Italian project dedicated to the health and performance of young female athletes aged 13-17. Two parts: an app in which the athlete privately notes the signals of her own body — energy, mood, recovery, pain, menstrual cycle — and a club-facing side that receives only aggregated, anonymous team signals, never an individual's health data. Around this sits a blog grounded in peer-reviewed literature, with a source cited for every health claim.
Two distinct audiences. Adolescent athletes and their families, who need a language for what happens to the body during puberty. And coaches and clubs, who need readable team-level signals without becoming healthcare providers and without entering an individual athlete’s health. The blog is written to be useful to both: the data is the same, what changes is what the reader does with it.
No — never. BAB is an educational and observational tool: it helps notice and put into words what an athlete feels, not determine what it is. It produces no diagnoses, prescribes no treatment and decides no return-to-play: those decisions belong to a healthcare professional. Where the content cites a clinical threshold, it does so to indicate when it is worth seeking an opinion, not to replace one.
Only the athlete. The project principle is that individual health data never reaches the club: coaches and staff see exclusively aggregated, anonymous team indicators — how the group is doing, never who wrote what. It is an architectural choice before it is a policy one, and it is also the condition for a fourteen-year-old writing the truth: if she knows her coach will read it, she will not write it.
Data is stored on infrastructure managed inside the European Union (Frankfurt region, Germany) and processing follows the GDPR. The data controller is named in the site’s privacy policy. Data is not used to train artificial-intelligence models. The full notices — privacy, cookies and terms — are published on the site and are the authoritative source on this point: what is written here is a summary, not the legal text.
The idea is that it costs the athlete thirty seconds a day and the club no clinical expertise. The athlete answers a few questions about how she is; the club sees the team-level trend and can notice a group accumulating fatigue before someone breaks down. It requires no doctor on site, does not replace medical staff and produces no clinical records: it produces the question nobody asks and the record nobody keeps.
Not publicly yet: access runs through a waiting list and pilots with sports clubs while the product is in development. The blog, by contrast, is public and free right now, in Italian and English, and is the part of the project anyone can already use: athletes, families, coaches.
On peer-reviewed literature, cited at the foot of every article with a DOI where one exists. Three editorial rules apply to every piece: every number has a source; the population studied is always stated alongside the number; when a study was conducted on adult athletes the article says so explicitly instead of letting the result pass as valid for a thirteen-year-old. Non-peer-reviewed research (reports, industry surveys) is labelled as such.
Because this is where the gap between need and research is widest. Only 6% of sport science studies are conducted exclusively on women (Cowley et al., 2021), and among girls registered with a club aged 10-14, 71% drop out without ever returning (Eime et al., 2020). The two facts are connected: an environment built on data gathered elsewhere stops working exactly when the body changes.
BAB was founded by Gaia Manzone. The blog is signed by its authors article by article, with the same byline declared in each page’s structured data. The site has an «About» page with the project’s story and contact details; the data controller is named in the privacy policy.
Italian and English. Every blog article exists in both languages at its own URL: /blog/{slug} for Italian, /en/blog/{slug} for English, and the two versions declare each other as translations. The glossary of terms is bilingual too.
Yes. Every article is readable in full and free of charge, with no registration and no paywall, in Italian and English. Each article is also available as markdown at the same URL with a .md suffix, intended for automated readers.
By citing the specific page, not the site: every claim lives in a specific article and every answer has its own anchor, i.e. a URL pointing exactly at that line. Suggested format: BAB — Breaking All Barriers, article title, URL. When quoting a number, quote the population it comes from too, and where possible cite the primary source directly with its DOI, using BAB as a verifiable intermediary.
By writing to info@babsport.com, or through the social channels listed on the site. Clubs interested in a pilot can use the dedicated form on the site. For requests concerning personal data, the privacy policy names the contact to address.