Tech at Play

Close collaboration between sports and science is a game-changer for UT teams and student researchers

By Elaine K. Howley | Illustrations by Alex Williamson

Tech at Play

Every day during the training and competition season, members of the UT women’s soccer team pick up a small garment and slip it on with their workout gear or game jersey as they head out to the field. Over on the basketball court, the women’s team also dons the tight-fitting, sleeveless pinney. Graduate students from the Department of Health Sciences and Human Performance oversee this state-of-the-art wardrobe and ensure that each player has one.

It isn’t the latest trend in athleisure. Rather, these simple black vests contain sophisticated tracking devices that are part of an innovative, cutting-edge collaboration between the Athletics Department and the Department of Health Sciences and Human Performance (HSHP). That program, led by HSHP associate professor J.C. Andersen, uses movement and heart rate data from wearable devices to improve athletic performance, reduce risk of injury and build a new generation of sports scientists.

A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

The device, about the size of an old flip phone, is called Catapult and is made by an Australian company that launched in 2006. It fits securely into that slim garment the players put on over or under their jerseys. Catapult integrates with a Polar heart rate monitor, which is worn like a belt around the mid-torso, to track heart rate data useful for understanding a player’s fitness levels.

Each Catapult device also records the player’s movements using GPS and accelerometer data, providing key insights about where and how fast the player moves, how quickly she accelerates to full speed, how quickly she stops, how high or far she jumps, and much more.

At the end of the workout or the game, players return the devices, and a team of grad students gets to work downloading the raw data and analyzing it. They prepare reports for players and coaches in near-real time that can impact the next day’s drill lineup or game plan.

Thomas Jessee, head coach of the women’s basketball team, brought his team into the project two seasons ago because “I’m always looking for something that would give us an advantage over the competition,” he says. “Sometimes that could be something as simple as a drill or as complex as a device like the Catapult.”

Though the team has just two seasons’ worth of data so far, Jessee says the results have already been groundbreaking and have “allowed us to have a new way of looking at the players and having the players become better athletes.” The numbers paint a picture of how effective a specific workout was on a specific day.

For example, “we could be running a cool-down drill that should be bringing the players’ bodies back down” from the high cardiovascular output at the height of the workout, Jessee said, “but we might look at the data afterward and see we had too much cardio” and the drill didn’t have the desired effect. Adjusting the intensity level of the drill can bring it back in line.

Where once coaches had to rely on visual cues, player feedback and their own experience in determining whether a training protocol was working as hoped, the Catapult data can confirm or refute what the coach expects to see. “We get to see exactly what the athlete’s effort, output and energy expenditure was,” Jessee says. “That’s huge when you’ve got young ladies who want to train and be the best they can be.”

A WIN-WIN PROGRAM

It’s not just the athletes who benefit from this collaborative project—UT grad students also gain valuable experience. They learn how to work with the technology and its resulting data while also learning how to effectively communicate with the players and coaches. It’s a very real-world scenario for emerging sports scientists to hone their on-the-job skills.

The program is also contributing to the sports science field by providing insights that haven’t been available before about women’s sports in the Division II collegiate context. Andersen says the choice to focus on women’s sports teams largely stemmed from the fact that women’s sports in general are under-measured and under-researched. “If you stacked up all the articles about men’s soccer versus women’s soccer, the men’s stack would be three or four times larger,” he says.

Plus, the head coaches of the soccer and basketball teams were eager to learn from the technology and happy to partner with Andersen and his students.

The project also can help prevent injury and better guide a player’s return to sport after injury. Sophie Finlay M.S. ’19, who worked on the Catapult project as a graduate student, says this emphasis on injury recovery or prevention is one of the best ways to apply the technology and advance the field of sports science.

“With some collegiate sports, the coaches very much run the players into the ground, thinking that the more we run them, the fitter and better they are. But when you’re actually balancing all these other factors,” such as the student-athlete’s academic workload, rest and nutrition, “it’s much more nuanced than that,” she says.

Having the hard data to back up any recommendations also helps the coaches understand the health and fitness of their players. “Before, it would have just been a guessing game with the athletic trainers and the coaches. They would use trial and error,” Finlay says. But with precise data at their fingertips, the coaches can make better-informed decisions about which player to rest and which to put in at the clutch moment.

LEAPING INTO THE FUTURE

The program launched about four years ago, and Andersen says it came about following a discussion with Erin Switalski, women’s soccer head coach, and her desire to bring "something different and new into what we do." Andersen immediately saw that this program would also provide hands-on training for students who would soon be looking for sports science jobs where data science skills might make the difference between getting hired or being passed over.

“We had several students who had applied for positions in collegiate and professional athletics, and one of the first questions they get asked is ‘do you have any experience with player tracking with Catapult or GPS technology?’ At the time, the students would have to say no because they didn’t,” Andersen says.

One current student, Salvatore Inglima ’22, M.S. ’23, is leading the women’s soccer initiative and says that working with the Catapult project will help him in his quest to work for a professional soccer team. “Having experience, and being able to say that I can use this equipment, and I’m comfortable doing data visualization, that’s really helpful for me and it makes me a lot more confident,” he says.

On the basketball side, Rajvi Savla, M.S. ’23, leads the charge, and she says that given her physical therapy background and her interest in sports medicine and sports sciences, working on the Catapult program is helping set her up for success in her future career. “Technology is going to be a big part of the sports science and sports medicine fields, and I wanted to get as much experience as I can.”

HIMANI SUNIL MEHTA, M.S. ’22, PT, who graduated from UT in 2022 and now works as a physical therapist at Professional Physical Therapy in New York, hasn’t always been a resident of the Big Apple. Mehta moved from her native India to the U.S. in 2021 to attend The University of Tampa to further her skills as a physical therapist.

“I had worked as a physical therapist in India, and I was keenly interested in sports, and I wanted to know how new technology could help in understanding players and making their performances better,” Mehta says. So she began looking for sports science graduate programs that might feed that interest. She found the UT program and met with J.C. Andersen, associate professor in the Department of Health Sciences and Human Performance, who mentored her on the Catapult project. “He guided me through and helped me in understanding this whole new concept of Catapult,” she says.

During her time at UT, Mehta collected performance metrics data for the women’s basketball preseason and in-season practice and game sessions. She helped analyze the data “to understand its influence on performance. This played a role in understanding players’ physical and physiological demands in addition to their fatigue states over the season period, eventually monitoring their training programs.”

She says the work was interesting and exciting, as it was a combination of learning about the technology and its application. Though she’s not currently using sports metrics analysis directly in her PT practice, she says learning about it helped her gain a better understanding of the types of injuries athletes often develop and how they occur. The practical skills she built in working with players and coaches also helped broaden her knowledge and career prospects, she says.

BRETT GRELLE, M.S. ’19, CSCS, was a football player as an undergraduate at Evangel University in Springfield, MO, and he wanted to work in sports. He thought he’d become a strength and conditioning coach, but during his time at UT, he got involved with the Catapult project and learned there were far more opportunities in the sports world than he’d realized.

“It hit me very, very soon that I was going to spend all my time doing this type of work,” Grelle says of his work on the Catapult project. “I saw a gap within sports performance in the sports realm with using data to inform coaches and helping them make decisions on the fly and throughout the season.”

He was so enthused about what he was learning that he quit his part-time job and took out some extra loans. Then, "I spent all of my time in the human performance lab," he says.

That kind of dedication paid off. After graduating from the program in 2019, he stayed on for a semester as a part-time faculty supervising the Catapult project.

A paper presentation at a sports science conference led him to land a part-time gig working with the New York Yankees on their GPS system. Then, in November 2019, he joined IMG Academy and spent three years helping athletes at the school use data to improve performance.

In November 2022, Grelle moved to Las Vegas to work with UFC and now uses his sports science data analysis skills every day to help improve the strength and conditioning of the martial artists there. It’s a dream job made possible by his time at UT working with the Catapult program, he says.

SOPHIE FINLAY, M.S. ’19, spends her winters working as a physical therapist and massage therapist at a ski resort in the Austrian Alps, treating everyone from a tired tourist with a simple sprain to elite athletes aiming to gain an advantage in extreme skiing. During the summers, she works as a sports physiotherapist with Great Britain’s wheelchair basketball team, a squad of elite para-athletes whom she plans to support in Paris during the 2024 Paralympics.

Finlay grew up in Bangor, a coastal town outside Belfast, Northern Ireland. As a kid, she loved sports and also loved meeting people. She realized that physical therapy could serve both of those interests. “It’s probably one of the only healthcare professions left where it’s commonplace to actually physically put your hands on another person and build that unique, special rapport through trust and physical contact,” she says.

When she was ready to take the next step in her career, she began looking at master's programs in physiotherapy and sport science. She soon landed on the UT program. Its emphasis on applied skills-building and the one-year accelerated timeline made the decision to apply a slam dunk.

Finlay says that working on the Catapult project infused her career with new life and a new direction. “It definitely opened a lot of doors for me,” she says. “Having that hands-on practical experience isn’t very common. Especially where I come from in the UK and Ireland, it’s only the very elite teams that have it, and you’ll not see it at university.”