So I’m 6 months on my new position with the Whitecaps and while I’d love to say we’re using one of the fancy player monitoring systems like Smartabase, TopSportsLab or Kinetic Athlete to monitor our players physical readiness, the reality is that, for a variety of reasons we don’t yet have any of those options in place. At about my 2nd month here, I realized that it might be a while to have something to monitor training load and player fatigue longitudinally so I decided to just make my own ‘system.’ As they say, if you want something done, sometimes it’s best to do it yourself. What started as just a spreadsheet to manage the various data streams I was moniroting evolved next in to a thought exercise and then in to something a little more advanced that actually returns shockingly acceptable and reliable information on the player’s physical readiness. Over the next couple posts, I’ll detail what I was trying to accomplish and how I’ve gone about doing it to come up with a system (admittedly imperfect)?that at the very least has forced me to put in to action and test the thought processes I would use with with a more expensive and flashy system.

Starting off, I had a couple goals:

1. Manage multiple data streams
2. Somehow make a composite of those data streams
3. Translate that composite data in to meaningful information with day-to-day reliability on the reflection of a player’s physical readiness
4. Visualize data to better see trends

Each one of these points has several sub-points. In my next post I’ll address the data streams that I’m looking at (or want to look at).

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Mike Young

Director of Performance at Athletic Lab

Mike is the Head Fitness Coach for the North Carolina Courage and North Carolina FC. He is also the owner and Director of Performance at Athletic Lab sports performance training center. He previously served as the fitness coach for the Vancouver Whitecaps and Carolina Railhawks. He has a PhD in Biomechanics, an MS in Coaching Science, and a BSS in Exercise Physiology and has coached Olympic and professional athletes in Skeleton, Track & Field, MLS and NASL Soccer, PGA Golf, NFL Football, MLB Baseball and Olympic Weightlifting. He has lectured around the world and authored 2 books and dozens of research and coaching articles.

Latest posts by Mike Young (see all)

• Brilliant Hamstring Injury Observations from Dave Joyce - September 26, 2018
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