NEW YORK — The Seattle Reign Football Club has become one of the first teams to implement a new platform designed by digital agency POP and Microsoft Corp. that not only tracks player data and performance, but also measures subjective data such as how athletes feel.
The National Women’s Soccer League team recently started using the Sports Performance Platform to measure biometrics and overall well-being, performance and recovery of athletes, offering coaches additional insight into players by tackling not just quantifiable data, such as their heart rates and speed on the field, but also subjective data, such as how rested athletes feel and how sore their muscles are.
“We’re always looking for an edge on the pitch,” Seattle Reign owner and POP CEO Bill Predmore said Wednesday in an interview with SportTechie. “In most cases those judgements — how we’re going to get a player to perform — are subjective. Now we’ve got an opportunity to do something that is using data to drive coaching decisions.”
The platform calculates performance using a number of sensors and wearables on the athletes themselves, as well as surveys that athletes take before, during and after practice and matches.
Laura Harvey, head coach for the Seattle Reign FC, and Nick Leman, the team’s director of high performance, said they have used GPS data from Catapult wearables and the Fit For 90 software monitoring platform to track a player’s heart rate, speed, acceleration and deceleration.
Following practice and matches, they view data in one centralized place to make determinations based off a number of key points. For example, if data show a player sprinted more than normal, the coaches might be able to make the judgement that their muscles will be sore the next day and suggest more recovery time. If the temperature on game day was scorching hot, they might predict cardiovascular fatigue or dehydration.
The coaches are able to generate reports comparing data across a wide spectrum of timelines, from as micro as the first half of the game to the second half of the game to as macro as season-to-season. Over time, the platform would be able to keep track of trends, such as how the number of hours of sleep a player had before a game impacted their performance, so coaches can better understand athletes and tweak their training to optimize performance.
“A tool like this can help us measure how healthy a player is,” Predmore said. “If we need to dial back training a little bit, we’ve got the data to tell us to do that, rather than subjective judgements, which had tended to drive a lot of this in the past.”
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According to Microsoft, the platform can be customized to meet specific team needs. While Seattle Reign is the first team to roll it out in the U.S., Real Sociedad and Cricket Australia are among the few other teams that have implemented the system so far outside of the U.S.