New Zealand elite wearable technology company VX Sport is making its way over to NCAA Soccer. Similar tracking technology has been denied access in the past by college teams due to high costs. But now VX Sport has entered the US market at a third of the cost of previous systems.
Access to this high-end pro-sport wearable technology has helped many of this season’s top college soccer teams like 2015 College Cup winners, Stanford Cardinal, and semi-finalist Akron Zips.
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“We’ve been surprised at how quickly colleges have embraced the wearable high performance technology for athletes, with more than 30 colleges having come on board in just over a year,” says VX Sport’s managing director Richard Snow, whose company previously only worked with professional sports teams such as the current world champion New Zealand Rugby Team.
The wearable technology uses a small electronic box that is attached to the athlete’s body or clothing using a special harness. With a GPS, heart rate monitor, accelerometers, magnetometers and digital radio in the box, coaches and players can use real-time data to analyze and assist with decision-making. Over 1 million data points are collected in a typical 90-minute training session for a single athlete.
Athletes can also self-report their daily sleep, nutrition, soreness, RPE, and stress levels into the VX mobile app. The goal of this is to deliver a comprehensive view of the athlete’s workload with considerations of factors outside of training.
Eric Verso channeled Brandi Chastain as Stanford celebrated an NCAA title: https://t.co/ZzjbD2lyys pic.twitter.com/x4sjKLZ9mR
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Coaches can monitor maximal and average speed, total distance, sprint details, body force, and heart rate and intensity during games and practices.
Ultimately the technology will help athletes optimize their performance with the VX Sport software that is adaptable to the specific needs of individual teams.
“Coaches can determine if the athlete has trained to capacity, or if he or she is pushing too hard. Are they achieving speed and heart rate reasonable to the task? If an athlete is training at too high of an intensity, or they are fatigued, their ability to learn, perform or recover is significantly hampered – while the risk of soft tissue injuries is increased – so having the right insights allows coaching teams to build performance profiles and training plans that optimize athlete performance,” said Snow.
VX Sport comes to the college level as more and more pro level teams are utilizing similar technology. So time will tell if VX Sport can capitalize on the potentially large player tracking market for college athletes.