There’s a common challenge NCAA mid-major athletic programs face – high expectations on and off the field with limited resources. Canisius College, a member of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, is no stranger to this. The softball and baseball programs have experienced success, and investments are continually being made to build hockey and basketball championship-caliber programs.

DIRECTOR OF ATHLETIC PERFORMANCE FOCUS

Director of Athletic Performance, Sergio Merino, is focused on the welfare of his student-athletes including educating them about the important role sports science plays in their sport performance regiment. With a small staff and almost 300 student-athletes, the Golden Griffins coach was pulled in many directions and in need of a comprehensive solution. He approached CoachMePlus to help him streamline his workout plans and become more efficient with all of the data he was collecting.

HOW WE HELPED

Beginning in April, 2015, CoachMePlus worked with Merino to implement the CoachMePlus athlete data management platform into the Golden Griffins sports performance program. They worked together to develop a daily questionnaire which would allow Merino to have a faster and more accessible look at the various lifestyle factors (sleep, nutrition, hydration, etc.) the department wanted to track to make more accurate and informed decisions in support of the emphasis on student-athlete welfare.

CoachMePlus also populated the program builder function with individualized workout plans and support videos for each of the Golden Griffins sports programs utilizing the system. In-season and out-of-season workouts can be uploaded and easily changed in the event of necessary rehabilitation or program differentiation.

Athlete dashboards and customized reports based on the Merino’s algorithms were developed to eliminate the vast amount of spreadsheets and data crunching he was doing on a daily basis. These dashboards and reports, along with the daily questionnaire and program builder were all supported with the assessment monitor which was installed in an accessible location for all student-athletes and coaches to view. Click to learn how CoachMePlus helps coaches make the most informed game-day decisions.

“By far, CoachMePlus has been one of the best companies I have dealt with in the performance industry.”

RESULTS

As of June, 2015, 7 of the 16 Golden Griffin teams – about 150 student-athletes and 20 sport coaches – are utilizing the CoachMePlus system. The student-athletes’ response has been overwhelmingly positive. The ease and access of the program builder and training function allows them to follow through with workouts on or off campus, and the step-by-step videos are available if they need reinforcement about how an exercise should be completed.

The assessment monitor has helped the coaches quickly and efficiently determine program compliance. It also has played a major role in educating the student-athletes. They can now easily visualize all of their data and have developed a better understanding about the important role their lifestyle, along with training plays in their performance.

The testing feature has allowed Merino and his staff more time to coach, learn and develop programming as opposed to entering data, crunching numbers in excel and creating charts. The unique reports and athlete dashboards provide a level of customization and centralization for all of the data received from the daily questionnaire, heart rate monitoring, in addition to the previous days and weeks training loads from practice and performance training. There is now an ease of access for the sport coaches, performance coaches and athletic trainers which has streamlined communication and allowed for proper interventions and adjustments being made before student-athletes even enter the weight room or practice.

This improved communication between athletic trainers, strength & conditioning coaches, sport coaches and administration is a critical component in improving student-athlete welfare. Knowing the “what” and “why” behind an athlete’s performance (both on and off the fields of play) allows all of those involved in creating a balanced experience the ability to make faster and more informed decisions. CoachMePlus helps athletes achieve optimal performance.

The sport coaches can also use these dashboards and reports for recruiting. Prospective student-athletes can see the success current student-athletes have achieved and they can also get a sense of the strong commitment Canisius has in their personal development as an elite athlete and exceptional student.

“I see CoachMePlus becoming a must-have system for any sports performance department.”

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Of the hundreds of universities that fall under the Division-I umbrella, there are huge differences in the size. Some have 50,000 students, some have 5,000 students and all of them want to be relevant in the sports landscape. Niagara University falls under the smaller school category with around 4,200 students, but has been highly competitive in many D1 sports. The Western New York school has appeared in the NCAA Championship tournament 14 times in seven different sports since 2000 with four of those coming from hockey and three from volleyball.

Niagara Strength and Conditioning coach Matthew Wietlispach, an army of one in the athletic department, took time out of his crazy-busy schedule to talk with Matthew Coller about how the university has utilized the CoachMePlus system to track and maximize health and performance with many athletes despite a small budget and staff.

INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW WIETLISPACH

HOW WERE YOU ABLE TO GET THE COACHING STAFFS TO BUY INTO PURCHASING AND UTILIZING THE COACHMEPLUS SYSTEM?

Every team is going to have their own setup. Mine is unique because I don’t have a very big budget at all.  So I went to hockey, baseball, softball, lacrosse and volleyball. I went to those coaches and pitched them the idea and told them what we could do with it. They said, “That sounds great, we’re in.”  It has worked out.

WHAT WERE THE COACHES LOOKING FOR IN TERMS OF IMPROVING THEIR TEAMS’ HEALTH AND PERFORMANCE?

A big thing for (hockey head coach) Dave Burkholder is injuries. In my interview, he said, “I think we lead the nation in injuries.” So a big thing is reducing injuries. We do questionnaires, weigh-in and weigh-outs, we measure grip strength every morning at the same time when they wake up. We do that for CNS fatigue. That’s been really helpful.

“We have gotten to the point with questionnaires where it is just normal. It actually helps them be more cognizant of how they sleep and how they eat because you can’t baby sit them.”

Dave and I sit down every morning and we go over how the team is feeling, what they’re saying and what their grip strengths are telling us. That has helped a lot with practices. When we first started, I gave him examples of people not playing well because they were fatigued. We were playing well on Friday and Saturday, but not well on Sunday. Coach’s philosophy had been that he would skate the team harder. I gave him examples with numbers and he bought in right away.

HOW HAVE OTHER SPORTS RESPONDED?

Every sport is different. Baseball and softball both wanted to focus on lifting. So we use the app for summer and winter lifting, which is a huge portion of the training. I’m also doing a case study with the baseball pitchers to focus on elbow and shoulder fatigue. Volleyball does CNS fatigue with vertical jump every morning. We do the urine specific gravity test with them because they have dehydration issues. The lacrosse coach loves the lifts too, so the offseason program was huge.

HOW DO YOU SORT THROUGH ALL THE DIFFERENT PROGRAMS AND COACHES NEEDS?

“How CoachMePlus helps is: I don’t have the time to type numbers into an Excel sheet. If we were trying to track questionnaire or grip strength using that or paper, there’s no possible way I’d be able to do it.”

I work from 6AM to 6PM, then have some sort of planning to do at home so I wouldn’t have time to plug the numbers into Excel and be able to tell the coaches what I see. Instead the teams can do it themselves through the app or with hockey we have iPads in the locker room where they can come fill their stuff in there and the coaches can log in and see the numbers themselves. I don’t even really have to talk to the coaches a lot on a day-to-day basis. Without CoachMePlus I wouldn’t be able to do half the things I do. CoachMePlus lets you take control of your player’s information.

HOW HAVE YOUR PLAYERS BENEFITED FROM COACHMEPLUS?

We want them to be able to govern themselves. So they will know when they are tired and need some sort of recovery like an ice bath or foam roll.

“Before we had CoachMePlus, the players would just say they were tired and complain the coach is skating them too hard. Now, instead of complaining, they try to do something about it. That’s what we wanted to create.”

I explain really early on to the players that they have to enter the numbers properly. If they enter them wrong, then Dave (Burkholder) won’t have the right information and he is going to end up making practices harder on them. Plus if we do it right, we won’t have as many injuries. I explain the purpose, what we’re looking for, that it is here to help them not to criticize their grip strength or things like that. It’s to help them maintain weight, it’s to help them hydrate, to help them improve performance.

You know how it can be in college. Sometimes they don’t get enough sleep, they have finals for three days and they play Friday. It is not worth us beating them down. They know we are trying to help, so they have all bought in.

HOW DO YOU TRACK YOUR PLAYER’S PROGRESS?

Testing has been huge. We have the day where everyone runs the 60-yard dash and home-to-first, and then we’ll wait until we have a shortened week to do that – we do it three times with baseball, softball, and lacrosse. With lacrosse, the conditioning is big. All those results go in there so coaches can look up tests whenever they want, they don’t have to contact me.

“We also do a lot of rep maxing at the end of cycles and I enter that data into CoachMePlus and the coaches can look at that, too. They can look at progress, like, say a freshman was benching 45 pounds when she came in and she is now benching 85 pounds. That has been good for the athletes. The feedback and them seeing the numbers.”

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Strength Coach Jay DeMayo is responsible for the strength training, conditioning and flexibility development of the men’s and women’s basketball team at University of Richmond. He has used the CoachMePlus system to collect and analyze data with the goal of maximizing both teams’ performance. DeMayo has also presented at many seminars and clinics and coached/lectured for a month at Ningbo University in China.

The Fairport, N.Y., native, a thought leader in the sports performance industry, sat down with Matthew Coller to discuss how Richmond has used CoachMePlus and some of his philosophies in working with coaching staffs and athletes.

Interview with Jay DeMayo

HOW HAVE YOU IMPLEMENTED COACHMEPLUS WITH THE DATA YOU ALREADY ARE COLLECTING?

“The biggest turn on when it came to using CoachMePlus was the ability for it to have multiple things mixed in. We were able to bring different viewpoints under a microscope so we would be able to determine good, bad or indifferent and where we were going with certain information.”

It allows everything to be completely simple. You can set whatever parameters you want and get an overall green, red, yellow. We look at their questionnaire, training load at practice and readiness based on Omegawave data and it gives us the green, red, yellow and from there it allowed us to have dialogues and move forward that way. CoachMePlus lets you monitor all of your athletes on one simple platform.

HOW HAS THE COACHMEPLUS IMPLEMENTATION WORKED OUT?

We’re moving in a good direction with it now. I think the biggest thing with it now is that whenever you are utilizing any of these things, you need to be in a high level of communication and very open as to what you are seeing, why you are seeing and what adaptations need to be made in training based upon (the data). If there is a situation where you need to be more incognito with what you’re doing, it will handicap the process.

Every coach has a different vision of how they want to handle practice load.

“Philosophies differ and from the standpoint of the strength and conditioning coach. You have to do your best to work in lockstep with that philosophy, which can sometimes mean dialing things back or turning them up with the athletes in their training so they are getting the proper levels of load per week.”

We have had a very high success rate by making sure the players are not getting killed in the weight room if they are being run hard at practice.

HOW DO YOU HANDLE PLAYERS WHO WANT TO PLAY THROUGH INJURIES?

At a high level of college athletics, there are times when a player is going to be forced to play while they are dinged up – everyone at some point in their career has to play dinged up. It isn’t about finding a way to get players out of the lineup, it is about finding ways to load them better so they are able to progress in a useful and meaningful manner.

HOW DO YOU PREPARE ATHLETES TO PLAY LOTS OF MINUTES WHEN THEY ARE USED TO SITTING ON THE BENCH?

You need to look at overall readiness. Just because you think you’re ready to go overall doesn’t mean you are ready to adapt to things. So if you think you are ready to go but you are not ready to adapt to high-level CNS work, we can do high volume aerobic work or high volume weight lifting. Understanding that, if they are ready to go, you need to train them in the areas where they are best suited to handle the volume or intensity or whatever it may be. It is not a situation where we are going to allow them to trump it, but we are going to give them the leeway to feel things out.

HOW DO YOU HANDLE WHEN BIG-MINUTE ATHLETES COME BACK FROM INJURY?

It is based on where they are in their readiness curve and how they feel that day. You need to be able to look through the whole looking glass and provide the best stimulus for that day for that athlete. What Derek Hanson said about (former Olympic sprint coach) Charlie Francis was that one of the things he was best at was looking at something and say “that’s enough” and walk away from practice or he would be able to say “this is not the avenue we need to go, who cares about the plan, this is what we are doing instead.” I couldn’t agree more with that. You need to be able to take a step back and figure out what the best thing is for right now. CoachMePlus allows you to manage hundreds of athletes to make the best game-day decisions.

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ERIK KOREM,
HIGH PERFORMANCE COACH

Erik Korem, High Performance Coach for the University of Kentucky football program, has been working with the team at CoachMePlus to develop unique reports and player dashboards to transform the way he monitors the Wildcat football players.

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Interview with Erik Korem

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN USING COACHMEPLUS?

We have used the system for 8 months.

WHAT IS “RESPONSE TO LOAD” IN ATHLETICS?

External load is what the athlete is subjected to during a training session.  For example: the distance covered, tonnage lifted in the weight room, player load calculated by Catapult or any other training variable.

HAS THE COACHMEPLUS SYSTEM HELPED YOU SHARE RECOVERY INFORMATION WITH YOUR ATHLETES?

More than anything it has helped me show the players WHY they need to recover.  By allowing the athletes to “own” their data it makes our job easier in regards to getting athletes to do the extra things required to perform at a high level.

HOW HAS COMBINING THE DIFFERENT SOURCES OF ATHLETE DATA HELPED YOU MONITOR YOUR ATHLETES?

I can make quicker decisions.  Instead of going through three or four databases I can quickly see all of the data I need to see.

WHAT DO YOU LIKE ABOUT USING THE COACHMEPLUS INTEGRATION WITH HRV AND READINESS MONITORING DEVICES SUCH AS OMEGAWAVE?

The integration of seeing the Omegawave readiness data over-laid with wellness and other internal load metrics gives me greater confidence in making adjustments to training.  And it saves me TIME!

“If monitoring is not part of your daily rhythm then it is hard to know where the athlete is trending, and without regular monitoring it is like closing your eyes and throwing a dart at the board…good luck on hitting a bullseye!”

By integrating with numerous wearable and measurement devices, CoachMePlus develops unique reports and dashboards for teams that allow faster, more accurate and all-encompassing data delivery; ultimately improving an athlete’s game-day readiness.

The ideals and research behind sports performance and exercise physiology have been around for decades. Today, the use of technology is transforming the practice of sports performance evaluation. Playing a leading role in the arena is CoachMePlus. Headquartered in Buffalo, NY, CoachMePlus works with professional and collegiate sports teams to manage their athletes’ sports performance data.

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RICK FRANZBLAU,
DIRECTOR OF OLYMPIC SPORTS STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING

Over the past four years, Clemson University Men’s Soccer has emerged as an elite Men’s Soccer program, making a jump from six straight years without an NCAA Tournament appearance to winning an ACC title and landing in the Sweet 16 in 2014 and playing in the National Championship last year. Throughout their growth as a program, the Tigers have increased their use of technology and are using CoachMePlus’s dashboard system to efficiently analyze their data.

CoachMePlus’s Matthew Coller sat down with Director of Olympic Sports Strength and Conditioning, Rick Franzblau, who is in charge of training for the Men’s soccer team as well as baseball and track and field sports.

Interview with Rick Franzblau

WHAT LED TO CLEMSON’S DECISION TO USE COACHMEPLUS?

Over the past few years we’ve added a number of different technologies and we found that, while we were getting a lot out of them, so much of the day was spent emailing reports to our coaches, to our trainers, a lot of the day was lost just trying to communicate this information to our coaches for different sports and other support staff. So we did a little research and one of my assistants Stephanie Mock brought CoachMePlus to our attention. We spoke to some other universities and professional teams that are using it.

“Two things came across: One was great customer service and the other is how much the system would be able to help with organization and cutting down on unnecessary meetings and emails and making us a lot more efficient day-to-day with our process in collecting and using information.”

HOW DOES THE COMMUNICATION WORK BETWEEN DIFFERENT COACHING STAFFS AND MEMBERS OF THE TRAINING STAFF?

It’s really allowed communication to speed up. The most important thing for us is to get a snapshot of the guys and all the information before they roll off to practice. This is particularly helpful for Men’s soccer because our training block is from 8 A.M. to 11 A.M. so we have to have a system that can pull all this information in quickly so we can ask the guys some questions before they roll out to practice and make some adjustments. Another team that practices in the afternoon, you would have all day to look at the information and digest it.

“Particularly having the dashboard is helpful for us in that situation where guys are practicing in the morning and we need the assessment monitor that can take a quick snapshot of some important information.”

It definitely allows information to reach all the people that will have their hands on the athletes and make decisions with the athletes without having to email, call, text or walk up stairs.

CoachMePlus lets coaches manage hundreds of athletes all on one platform.

HOW DO YOU ANALYZE THE EFFECTS OF USING MORE DATA AND MORE INFORMATION AS IT RELATES TO THE TEAM IMPROVING OVER THE YEARS?

I think the mindset we have in using different technology and assimilating them with the CoachMePlus dashboard is that you aren’t looking to change everything you do but you are looking for that small marginal percent that can help you get better.

For us, a lot of it is looking at the loads that we are putting on the players both internal and external, so heart rate and GPS mechanical stuff, and allowing us to see an issue a little bit before it happens. Whether it’s a player is getting sick or some hamstring tightness becomes a hamstring strain or some groin or abdominal issues become a sports hernia. It allows us to get a great snapshot of all these different factors. The goal is that it allows you to stay ahead of the curve and be smarter in your decision making, which allows you to keep your players healthier and train them harder. That gives you a better chance to be on the right side of the scoreboard.

HAVE THERE BEEN PLAYERS WHO FOLLOW YOUR FOOTSTEPS AND PURSUE CAREERS IN FITNESS?

Absolutely. We’ve had a lot of former athletes get into training, conditioning, physical therapy and actually a player that just graduated and was drafted in the MLS draft is interested in sports science and that type of stuff. Our guys have been awesome. We have a former player who is with the new Atlanta MLS team in their front office, so you have guys going off into a lot of different professions that, in some way shape or form, comes back to this type of information and being able to know it and learn it is helpful.

DOES THE TIGER’S PUSH ON NUTRITION PARTNER WELL WITH COACHMEPLUS?

A huge thing, particularly with soccer, is making sure the guys are getting enough calories. With the heart rate system, we track calories burned. That’s something that pulls into the dashboard so our nutritionist has that information and we can build a plan for the guys by using that. We have some bigger guys and defensive players that might be 190 or 200 pounds and others who might be 150 or 160, so there are different caloric needs.

“You can pull that up on the dashboard every day and help make better decisions for the student athletes.”

HOW HAVE THE PLAYERS REACTED TO THE USE OF MORE TECHNOLOGY?

Our experience has been really positive. I can speak on behalf of the Men’s soccer team that, being as they have been a successful program over the past couple years, a lot of players want to go on to play at the professional level and they know these are some things being done at that level. Whether it be Omegawave, GPS, heart rate, questionnaires, they know a lot of these things are being done in the Premier League and MLS.

There is motivation to get to that level, so there is an easy buy-in on their part. Give Coach Noonan credit for that. Also we have a pretty cerebral team in their overall approach to training. Guys like to learn about a lot of different things and we try to give them a chance to see some of the data and involve them in the process.

If it was just collecting the data and digesting it, maybe it would be an issue with them buying into it, but we show them the heart rate and GPS stuff and questionnaire. We tell them up front: We’re collecting this information so we can make better decisions about their training so they know the ultimate goal is to be healthy and have a higher level of fitness.

CoachMePlus is integrated with over 50 devices and is always first in with the newest sports science technology.

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MELISSA TERRY,
ASSISTANT WOMEN’S SOCCER COACH

Ole Miss Assistant Women’s Soccer Coach, Melissa Terry, has seen sports science from different perspectives, starting her career as a Strength and Conditioning coach at Florida State, then later joining the coaching ranks for the Rebels. Since her time as a player at University of Central Oklahoma, she has seen the industry take leaps and bounds in the way that data is collected and analyzed.

Terry discusses her career and how she uses analytics to keep the Rebels, who went 14-5-4 last season, in top shape.

Interview with Melissa Terry

HOW HAS COACHMEPLUS HELPED YOU GATHER AND ANALYZE THE DATA YOU COLLECT?

As a general rule of thumb, strength coaches do a really good job of gathering data, it’s just a matter of it being consistent and (organized). Even testing data, it becomes, “did I save it under ‘Fall 2015 Testing?’ or did I save it under ‘Testing Fall 2015?’” There are so many ways you can forget where you put your data in an Excel spreadsheet. To have a consistent place to put things and always having the testing dates and it is readable, understandable and simplistic is so huge for coaches. If we were in season right now, the girls would fill out a daily questionnaire. If I pull up Monday morning before practice and see the whole team color coded with different colors. It lists everyone’s name, their hydration levels, the overall mileage they’ve accumulated and how they slept. CoachMePlus allows you to use data to make an impact with your team.

Our head coach can go in and at-a-glance, for example, see that our top 6-8 players are at an eight or nine then it is super easy for us to make a decision to say, “OK we need to back off or maybe we need to hold this girl out for practice.” That is the thing that initiates us to say, “Why do you feel like an eight today?” It has been really cool for that purpose and our coaches and strength staff all have access. When you click on individuals, we have specific breakdowns for different things we want to look at. If somebody pulled their hamstring on Monday and by Thursday they are still rating it an eight or nine, we can go to the trainer and ask if she’s been doing the treatments and doing the rehab.

The biggest thing it’s done is made everyone hyper aware of how everyone’s feeling, including the athletes. They have to be in tune with how they are feeling in order to accurately show on the questionnaire how they’re doing. People have asked: “What if they say they are more sore because they just don’t feel like doing things?” We’ve found that if they don’t want to do something, there’s a reason. Maybe it is because they got in a fight with their boyfriend or pulled an all-nighter studying. There is a reason they are reporting they feel poorly. It doesn’t really matter. If we push them over the edge because they aren’t feeling well, the outcome is still the same whether we think their answer on the questionnaire is legitimate or not.

HOW DO SPORTS SCIENCE, WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY, AND QUESTIONNAIRES HELP YOU KNOW YOUR PLAYERS’ CONDITIONS DAY TO DAY?

We have had players who walk into the coaches office and say, “I feel fine,” then we show them their survey that shows their knee is at an eight. They say, “I can still play, but yes it hurts.” They still have the feeling that they don’t want the coaches to think they are pulling themselves (out of the game). We have had our trainer come into the coach’s office and say, “(The player) wanted you to know she’s not pulling herself from practice, I am pulling her from practice.”

“It is their mentality of not wanting to let coaches down or miss out on any opportunities and that comes from being competitive. There have been plenty of times where we see their responses on surveys and make decisions without calling out players.”

We can back off or format practice to give certain people extra breaks. We don’t want them to be in a position where they are giving answers they think we want to see. We feel pretty confident that the majority of players put on the questionnaires how they actually feel.

HOW DO YOUR PLAYERS ADAPT TO THE USE OF THESE SPORTS TECHNOLOGIES?

Initially they felt like it was an additional mental strain. When they started to understand that people are getting extra attention or treatment whether it be massage, chyrochamber, chiropractic, or time off (we have spent thousands on recovery systems) – they start to understand that we’re doing this so players can be more physically more prepared to play. It was definitely met with some pushback, but they understood that this type of thing is here to stay. They started to notice on YouTube highlights that the US Women’s National Team was using Polar and different articles would come out about tracking their sleep and hydration. They thought, “If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.”

HAS THE ACCESS TO DATA ALTERED IN-GAME STRATEGY?

When we first got the system we thought it would take the whole year before we would be able to make anything out of the data, but about one-third through the season when we started to realize at halftime – looking at the mileage – we could predict who we needed to give extra rest to. When we were at home, there were one or two players that we would shut down for the last five minutes of the half so they could get a 20 minute halftime and doing something to aid in their recovery before the second half. Our head coach got to the point where he could ask how certain players were doing. He might not know the specific numbers on a player but he knows that we can figure out whether we need to give that player a break.

WHEN DID YOU PERSONALLY BECOME ADEPT AT USING SPORTS SCIENCE AND WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY?

I like to think that soccer has been trying to use wearable technology for awhile. I first started using it at Florida State in a strength and conditioning capacity. We got the Polar Team 2 system and I got very familiar with that and things like training loads and creating intensities for the week leading up to the game and how to unload prior to the game and how to  detect if there was something like two overtime games in a weekend – things that you can’t predict.  Sometimes you end up using a player more than you wanted to. There are so many things in a game you can’t predict. You want to have a season plan and be able to make adjustments to it as the season goes along.

Because I’m kind of a science nerd, my undergrad was kinesiology and health studies and I enjoyed classes that most of my classmates really dreaded. I really loved biomechanics and kinesiology and practical application, so I got my Master’s in exercise physiology. At the time, Baylor was one of five programs in the country that had a Master’s in strength and conditioning. You could go two routes: Clinical or strength and conditioning. The clinical side would spend time in the lab while the strength and conditioning would spend time in the weight room.  The S&C group would have more practical application courses like speed and agility, quickness and learning how to create and implement plans for specific types of athletes. Baylor had a high academic standards and I always kind of saw myself as a jock and I didn’t really challenge myself in high school and college. I kind of skated through.

When I got to grad school, I had never really learned how to study before but there had to spend six weeks studying for a physiology class. So getting deep into that and challenging myself and learning so much about the human body and the performance side of it was so cool. I thought: How can we use this more? I learned in grad school that there were tons of researchers willing to do research that would have application to athletes. For the most part they were using the general population, not something like a Division I soccer team. The findings could be incredibly different. So it was a combination of becoming more academic at Baylor and being pushed by my mentors to try new things. Then when I got to Florida State, the head coach there had been using the Polar Team 1 system, but they didn’t have much of an idea what to do with the data. I said: “I know lots of things we can do with this data.” I took it on as my pet project to organize things. Then when we got the Team 2 system, things were far more advanced. There was Bluetooth, so you got the data live and we were able to apply it within a session, which was big time because we were able to apply it within a game or practice.

HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHAT SPORTS TECHNOLOGY IS BEST FOR YOUR TEAM?

Because of my experience with Polar and seeing top ranked teams using Polar – it’s the company that the US Women’s National Team and Men’s National Team uses and a lot of international teams use – I knew I wanted to go with them. I met up with them at a coach’s convention and they said, “We’re releasing a GPS/heart rate system together.” It’s the only system that has heart rate and GPS together. I had done research by going to company websites and speaking with people from those companies. I found the Polar system is 100 hz (frequency), so you can see where it would be effective for soccer. It is not a sport that has athletes running specific routes like football. Everything is free motion and reactive. It is hard to predict where somebody is going to be moving. More signals mean more accurate data when it comes to direction and duration. I was sold on that. Plus the unit is only about a 1.5×3 inches. Players snap it into the chest strap and don’t really notice it. So within that unit it has the GPS, 360 degree gyroscope, accelerometer and Bluetooth heart rate.

It is pretty impressive. I was blown away by, not only the data that it provides but the manner in which they have been able to visualize it. You bring out an iPad out and each person that’s wearing a unit has a box and it’s very simple. Even if you don’t have someone like me that understands what spending 90 minutes at your heart rate max means, it is color coded and they kind of make it idiot proof. CoachMePlus integrates with all of the best sports science technology.

“The visualizations they use are very simplistic…. CoachMePlus has made it really easy to import the Polar data in and they build out the graphs and visualizations however we want.”

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CHRIS WEST,
DIRECTOR OF SPORTS SCIENCE

After spending 14 years as Associate Head Coach of Sport Performance at the University of Connecticut, Chris West was given a new title in 2014: Director of Sport Science.

West is a prominent thought leader in the sports science community and is in charge of implementing sports science at one of the, across-the-board, most successful universities in the country.

Interview with Chris West

WHAT MADE YOU CHOOSE COACHMEPLUS TO GATHER AND VISUALIZE YOUR DATA?

The innate problem is: If you have seven different types of measures and you have seven different types of software, it makes things a little bit complex. CoachMePlus lets us manage all our athletes on one central platform.

“The beauty of CoachMePlus is that it can integrate all these technologies, all these measurements like testing, training reporting and different imports into one common database so that you’re not switching between multiple programs.”

My interest was trying to find a system that could do this for us. CoachMePlus gave us a simple option. We could get our information in and we could visualize it. One of the biggest things, too, is that the support is outstanding. They are always there helping to make things better. It isn’t like they give you the system and say, “Good luck!” I’m on the phone with them like once a week, whether it’s a two minute question or 20 minute conversation.

“You ask how I found CoachMePlus, well, I was looking for a software piece that could help us with data management from multiple sources and give us a clean display and this was the one that I found to be the most useful for us.”

HOW DO YOU TEACH YOUR COACHING STAFF TO USE COACHMEPLUS?

This is definitely a process, yes. It is going to develop as we go along. The more I go to them and say, “Here is what I’m seeing,” whether it is a stress or fatigue trend or soreness trend or training load pieces, if I do that enough, they will be able to jump on any time and say, “I get this now.”

“I tend to think that just showing someone a chart doesn’t mean they will understand what it means.”

One of the big things that I try to do is: Rather than say, “Go on, check it out,” I will go over it with them and point to things we are seeing and show them the value of what I’m trying to get out of this graphic on the dashboard or whatever it may be. The more I do that, the more they can go through on their own and make decisions based on some of that information.

HOW DO YOU GO FROM COLLECTION OF DATA TO DECISION MAKING?

“The beauty of CoachMePlus is that we can import information, whether it be from GPS or heart rate system or both, we can see what those trends are over time.”

For one day’s session, we will have a number for that or point on the graph, but how do we tell whether that was too much or not enough or just right? That’s why it is big to visualize. For example, we can see that today was 20% more than yesterday or this week was 15% less than last week. And we can ask: Is that a trend we are comfortable with seeing? Data doesn’t paint a good picture, you need to turn the data into information as far as training load goes.

Over the course of time, you develop knowledge on what that information means. The wisdom piece is that coaching piece. We can ask, “Do you like the trend that you’re seeing?” and “What do you want to do about it?” What I’m getting at is that this system allows us to make better, more informed decisions on what we’re doing from a training standpoint.

DO YOUR ATHLETES UNDERSTAND THE VALUE OF THE DATA YOU TRACK?

It’s important to give feedback. When you’re asking a player to wear a heart rate monitor and they aren’t getting any feedback on it, there isn’t really much investment from the player. Use the soccer team for example. We have 15 players who get in the game and a roster of 25 to 30 players. The 15 players that don’t play have to make up some of that fitness so they are ready when called upon. We looked at high intensity distance covered during practice and we set a minimum of how much they needed to cover.

At the end of a session, I had a report from them that showed which guys had done enough and which needed to do, say, more sprints or something like that. It gives them the idea that we are trying to get to a certain level and it gives them feedback. It also gives them motivation. If you get it done in training, you aren’t going to have to do it after training. Also players being able to go on their iPhone and immediately see what they did during practice, which is nice. They are also competitors. So they go in and look at it and say, “I’m 17th in high intensity distance, who is No. 1?” There is motivation through the technology.

HOW DO YOU MANAGE OVER 400 STUDENT ATHLETES ACROSS 22 TEAMS?

This is something we’re continuing to work on. One of the things I’m finding out from a testing standpoint is that we have tests across teams and sports that are relatively consistent. We also have tests that individual sports do that others may not do. The big thing that I’m working on is: We want to keep things consistent. For example, some of the questionnaire pieces in there. Each coach can come up with their own questionnaire. We could have 22 different teams with 22 different questionnaires.

“I think there is value in flexibility, but there also needs to be consistency.”

Everyone may have a question about stress or sleep, so we should have some standard templates across all sports. The more information we get, the more data we have and we can get more meaning out of that data because you have a larger number of data pieces to make sense out of.

We need a basic screen and assessment. It’s like when you go to the airport. You go through the screener and either they say you are good to go and you move on or you’re not good and we have to take a look and why you’re not good. We don’t have time to do a ton of tests – think about if they did every available test at airport security, the line would go on forever. The idea is: We want a test that is a basic screen that gives us a baseline. The vertical jump is very simple to administer and very quick and we can see if we need a further analysis.

The vertical jump test has been a very good indicator of something that we had trouble measuring across sports before. Take the women’s rowing team for example. They may not have the highest vertical jumps, but that doesn’t really matter, what matters is that the vertical jump indicates readiness. If it is a 20 on one day and then it is an 18, then there is an issue and we need to dig deeper into why that issue happening.

HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHICH SPORTS TECHNOLOGY TO ADOPT?

There are some fundamental things that I need to know. Whether we want to do a strength test or power test or whatever, what we want to be able to do is look at trends over time. Are we maintaining qualities that we want? The issue with different technologies is that, there are some things that are pretty cool, but we have to ask how they are actually useful for us. From a training standpoint, we also want to know:

Are we doing enough?

Are we doing too much?

For example, we want something that is going to give us meaningful information on training load. Well, we can do that through heart rate monitoring and questionnaires that look at internal load. CoachMePlus integrates with over 50 sports tech devices.

“The game-changer now is in GPS and accelerometer data that actually gives you the amount of work that the athlete has done.”

If we can know where they are in terms of load by doing our testing, we can prescribe a certain amount of training load that we can measure and quantify then look at what affect that load has on readiness. One of the things we use is the vertical jump test. We found that there is a connection between that jump and how much distance players covered in a match.

See, we can capture the training load and to capture the effect of that training load. Anyway, when we are looking at any technology piece, we are asking how it helps us measure either the training load or how that load effects readiness, not just whether the technology is cool.

The post University of Connecticut appeared first on CoachMePlus.

In January 2016, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish made a significant addition to their athletic department by hiring Duncan French as Director of Performance Sciences. Prior to signing on with the Fighting Irish, French was a technical lead for strength and conditioning at the English Institute of Sport. Amongst working with many sports, French worked as the Strength & Conditioning National Lead to Great Britain’s Taekwondo and basketball Olympic programs, and served as head strength and conditioning coach for Newcastle United FC of the English Premier League.

At Notre Dame he is working to support the coaches and performance staff from Strength & Conditioning, Sports Medicine, Nutrition, and High Performance Lifestyle Advisors to apply scientific research and analytics in search of a competitive advantage.

French, who has a PhD in Kinesiology/Exercise Physiology from the University of Connecticut, chatted with Matthew Coller about his philosophy and how the staff from each of the performance services are using CoachMePlus to accomplish Notre Dame’s sports performance goals.

Interview with Duncan French

HOW DO YOU BUILD A COACHMEPLUS DASHBOARD THAT IS UNDERSTANDABLE AND ACCESSIBLE TO EVERYONE?

The critical thing is: Data that is not used is data that doesn’t exist. The thing our staff has tried to do with the CoachMePlus platform is to look at data visualizations that can enhance our awareness and support to the coaches.  What I mean by that is: Ultimately it is the single lens to look through, which is fantastic for all the service providers, the coaches, and the athletes themselves. Click here to learn how CoachMePlus puts you in control.

“By utilizing a platform like CoachMePlus, we are all able to look through the same lens at the same data.”

The way we’ve tried to build out dashboards is by having really positive discussions with the key partners of that dashboard. For example, your strength and conditioning coaches, the athletic trainers, the nutrition staff, myself as Director of Performance Sciences and the coaches. We refer to the coaches because we want them logging in and looking through that lens as well. Fundamental for building out our dashboards is capturing the critical pieces of information and insight that those respective staffs want to see.  It’s a multi-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary approach to athlete insights. That’s kind of Step 1.

Step 2 is to work with (CoachMePlus staff) to build out our dashboards, be creative with data visualizations and work back and forth between the respective shareholders to make sure everyone’s comfortable with the way it’s visualized and presented and the frequency in which it’s uploaded.

“We really use CoachMePlus as a single lens for everyone, and our philosophy is that we need to empower people with data.”

It shouldn’t be held away and kept in a vault somewhere. We have to allow people to see it and create good discussions and make sure everyone has a voice.

HOW DO YOU HELP YOUR STAFF UNDERSTAND THE DATA AND TECHNOLOGY AVAILABLE IN COACHMEPLUS?

This is where we view my role to be the technical interface between coaches and the technology, as well as Matt Howley, our Director of Sports Science and our strength coaches. We are the technical interface between the data and the coaches to really try to educate as to what the data means and how it can be of value to helping the coaches make more informed decisions. Some of it can be rudimental and simple like capturing hours of sleep exposure, but some data requires more in-depth conversation around what it means if we are starting to see negative trends in the data. For me this is where we have to demonstrate the value of the ‘science informing the art’.

It comes back to a needs analysis. The way we’re developing our structure here at Notre Dame is very much modeled on performance and a strategic approach to answering the critical questions that impact performance. A rowing coach might have a very different set of metrics that he is looking at as opposed to a swim coach, or what our ice hockey coach is looking for.

“This is where I try to bridge that gap in my role – to work with the coaches to understand what they are trying to get after. For each sport, it’s going to have a unique look. That’s where CoachMePlus is a great tool for us – that individuality per sport and where we can house the specific information the coaches are looking for.”

WHAT IS YOUR APPROACH TO EDUCATING ATHLETES ON HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE USE OF DATA?

Our athletes are educated and very aware. As support staff we value their compliance and they are certainly involved in the process. We have to share the data with the athletes and let them look through the lens too, so that they can take ownership of their own development and metrics. We are comfortable with our athletes being able to handle that and do that effectively. We try to use the technical skills of our respective experts in nutrition, high performance lifestyles, strength and conditioning and training to say, ‘we need a uniform message of metrics that are going to be valuable to us.’ Most of the time our student athletes engage because there is faith and we educate them on what we are measuring, why we are measuring it, why it is going to be valuable to the coaches and yourself. We have compliant athletes and the power of the data is longitudinal monitoring and longitudinal study of trends and baseline shifts. What we’re trying to get at is: It’s easy to collect data, but we have to get to a point where we can act on that data.

HOW DO YOU DECIDE WHICH NEW SPORTS SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY TO INVEST IN?

The sports science landscape is ever changing. Technology is moving so fast that 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the last three years or so. That being said, my job is to turn over every single stone on the sports science landscape to make sure we are aware of what is going on and how we can look at competitive advantage. Even if we turn over every stone and say, ‘We’re not going with any of these things,’ I have done my job because we are still aware of the situation. At Notre Dame, we try to align our investment and our sports science initiative around specific priorities. We are drilling down on detail because if we try to do a lot of things we will end up doing nothing very well, but if we can have priorities, we feel we are going to get a lot of return from that. CoachMePlus lets coaches integrate all of the best sports science technology.

“At Notre Dame, we try to align our investment and our sports science initiative around specific priorities. We are drilling down on detail because if we try to do a lot of things, we will end up doing nothing very well, but if we can have priorities, we feel we are going to get a lot of return from that.”

HOW DO YOU HANDLE YOUR ATHLETES’ BUSY UNIVERSITY SCHEDULES?

It’s an interesting challenge in collegiate sports because of the logistics you’re dealing with, and because of the large number of personnel and players. These athletes are also not full time professionals. They are pursuing their academic interests, they are investing themselves in service to the community, and they are doing a lot of other things that bring enjoyment and help them grow as people as part of their student experience at Notre Dame. That is the great thing about the collegiate athletics environment – trying to solve all of those problems and find solutions. If used efficiently and effectively, sports science can be used to support our awareness and build the best approaches to supporting elite level student-athletes as possible.

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