Collegiate and professional basketball seasons often come down to tired athletes falling a few inches short, and coaches wishing they rotated their players at the right time.
(Bloomberg) — Collegiate and professional basketball seasons often come down to tired athletes falling a few inches short, and coaches wishing they rotated their players at the right time.
“That’s the little edge we’re trying to get,” said Nick Potter, Duke University men’s basketball director of high performance and sports science. “You’re trying to get the dunk where you finish over somebody versus it just gets blocked.”
Sports teams are increasingly sucking up data to find out how their athletes are performing. Last year, the total market for sports tech was over $21.1 billion, according to a recent report from Citigroup Inc. Firms like Boston-based analytics company Catapult Sports, which launched its latest athlete tracking product on Monday, are sending real-time data to coaches on how much energy a player is exerting during practice or a game.
Catapult’s Vector T7 is part of an established trend of top teams’ reliance on data to improve performance while avoiding injuries. National Football League teams began using wearable radio-frequency identification transmitters in 2014, while players have their data relayed to analysts via their cleats.
Catapult has been developing performance-tracking systems and video software since 2011. Its latest product is half the size of previous iterations. Tailored to basketball players’ needs, data collection is more accurate and can be viewed in real-time on any connected device.
The Vector T7 has been tested for the last several months by Duke and the women’s squad of Ohio State University.
A number of teams have used Catapult’s earlier Vector models. National Basketball Association teams like the Boston Celtics, the Houston Rockets and the Milwaukee Bucks have given the Vector a go, as have National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s teams like University of California in Los Angeles and University of Connecticut.
The tech has prevented injuries on Duke’s men’s basketball team, Potter said. Coaches will use load metrics from previous practices to structure training for the rest of the week and the remainder of the season. Catapult’s product fits within an ecosystem of data the team relies on, he said.
“It helps us with communication and if someone does get injured, we have objective information again to progress someone back to playing.” Potter said. “It’s helpful for the coaches to know that we’re hitting the benchmarks we need to win the game.”
Here’s how it works: the Vector T7 is pinned to the back of a player’s jersey or worn around the waist. Using local positioning systems as well as inertial and heart rate sensors, the device tracks data like how long someone ran or how high they jumped. This is then used to estimate a load metric, or how hard the player worked.
Catapult, which currently serves over 3,600 teams globally, runs on a subscription-based model. Annual subscriptions range from $40,000-$100,000, depending on hardware, data tracking and access to additional services.
Catapult is traded on the Australian Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol CAT after going public in 2014. The company brings in around $80 million in revenue a year.
The technology is designed specifically to meet the needs of basketball players, said Catapult CEO Will Lopes. “Basketball has been an area that has been fairly under-penetrated” compared to other sports the company tracks data for, he added, likely because of the specific movements unique to basketball.
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