Coaching Insights, Applications, New Innovations
Coaching Insights
The Birth of Sports Science
At the highest levels of our sport coaches are constantly trying to improve 1-2%, find that tiny competitive advantage that gets you the points you need to make the difference in a game. As a coach, you’re always searching for answers to questions pertaining to your team’s performance. Tweaking practices, adapting schedules, introducing new training strategies. This never-ending search for answers is what birthed the sports science field. An area outside the typical coaching purview, but critically important to what happens on the court. It’s the objective support to the coaches experience and intuition. Many times they align, but sometimes they clash, which is often the best opportunity for growth, both for the coaches and sports science practitioners. Here’s what I mean: When viewing sports exclusively through an objective, data-driven lens, you can miss nuance and
individualization. Athlete personality doesn’t play into sports science. Just as tweaking coaching technique won’t impact whether an athlete has more type I (slow twitch) or type II (fast twitch) muscle fibers. Putting those two things together, understanding the athlete as an individual, both as a person and athletic machine is what arms coaches with the ability to develop their teams to the highest degree. The data; jump counts, jump height, landing impact, sleep, mood, nutritional intake, stress, etc, are all pieces to the puzzle. You don’t need all of them to see the picture, but the more you have the clearer it becomes. The challenge, when you have many of these pieces, is understanding how to put them together. Many coaches make the mistake of putting too much or too little emphasis on a certain metric. Is my team not jumping as high in week 5 of the season because our training load is too high, or is it midterms, perhaps something is going on socially that’s leading to a loss of sleep, or maybe just mental fatigue?
All these questions are why it is important to approach this data holistically and create a coaching culture of both strength and flexibility. No two teams are the same, but having objective data to look back on from previous years is how programs start to really answer these questions and make the changes that help their teams peak at the right time, year in and year out. I remember reviewing the practice booklet that coach John Dunning always had with him. He would flip back to the previous year’s work, always comparing what he was planning for week 7 of the current season with seasons past. What went right, what could he have done better. Always adapting and working to ensure the clearest view of the puzzle that is each team and each volleyball season.
Never stop learning.
Applications
Outsource Sports Science Staff
The previous section on the birth of sports science is also the cause of VERT’s evolution from a tool, to a service. When VERT was able to finally help coaches answer the question, “How many times have we jumped?” It led to more questions, namely, “Am I jumping too much, or too little?” It soon became clear that having the data and using the data are two very different things. For this, VERT Team System Advanced (VTS Advanced) was created.
VTS Advanced is led by VERT’s Performance Lab, a team of exercise scientists, former D1 coaches, and strength coaches, who work in tandem with programs to help answer, objectively, the questions that lead to coaching success.
Our clients meet monthly, bi-weekly or even weekly with our performance staff, reviewing weekly load undulations, individual player health and performance as well as review video with unique technologies that allow for overlaying vertical data (including landing impact) with game stats.
New Innovations
Perana Sports and VERT have teamed up to create a web application that seamlessly
combines DVW files, video and VERT stats to give coaches an incredibly powerful tool
for video analysis. Filter by kills, hard landings, or successful blocks. Each selection allows you to video videos based on the filtered choices as well as pull reports showing how many jumps were blocks (when a ball was touched), attacks and serves. Break down reports by sets, answer questions pertaining to what type of jumps lead to the hardest landings, and
how much being out of system impacts vertical performance.
This is the next level of player analysis and we’re excited to bring in for Fall 2024.
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