
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:
- Manage multiple data streams
- Somehow make a composite of those data streams
- Translate that composite data in to meaningful information with day-to-day reliability on the reflection of a player’s physical readiness
- 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).
Mike Young
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Mike – do you post these articles somewhere as right now i only see them on Twitter and it is random when i do.
Hi Dave-
They’re posted here (which you can RSS subscribe to), on twitter (@mikeyoung and @fitforfutbol) and my facebook profile.
Looking for how you aggregate the data sets and what you do daily, weekly, and monthly with all of the tools available.
Very interested how you review medical data as well, since Dan P was a major player in sharing how track coaches understand sports medicine in ways that are rather enlightening.
Sounds good. Looking for some feedback. I’m doing what I can with the resources available. It’s by no means fancy but it is working despite the limitations on an aggregation software and man power (it’s just me…no interns or other staff to pull the data together).
Very interesting Mike! I am looking forward to the series. BTW, I am also looking to various pro solutions and I wonder which one is ‘better’. Smartabase looks very interesting, but I would love to compare it with Kinetic Athlete.
Can you share some of your experiences with them?
[…] the 2nd post in a series detailing my jimmy-rigged athlete monitoring system. As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I don’t have the luxury of a fancy monitoring system and was forced to do something myself. […]