BLACKSBURG, Va. — When Kody Cooke first began pursuing a career as a strength and conditioning coach earlier this decade, he never envisioned that a good portion of his time would be spent hunched over a computer analyzing reams of data.
Football weight rooms and workouts always have been about pushing plates and limits, after all. But that’s changing, and with Virginia Tech’s expanded use of a GPS tracking system provided by STATSports this offseason, the job is becoming much more data-intensive.
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That’s where Cooke comes in. Hired for Ben Hilgart’s strength and conditioning staff a year and a half ago from Arizona State, he’s been tasked with collecting and analyzing all that information.
First, he downloads data off individual GPS trackers the players wear during workouts (the Hokies are tracking 96 players this summer). Then he pores over it, paring down the important stuff to a CliffsNotes version he passes along in digestible bites to the coaches, his fellow strength staffers and sports medicine personnel. From there, they use the data to best serve the players.
“We’re getting the players to buy into it and getting them to understand that this is a part of their normal everyday life now,” Cooke said. “It’s like putting on their cleats. And they’ve done a fantastic job of that.
“I think Coach Hilgart has sold it the right way and Coach (Justin) Fuente has sold it. And if it’s all bought in, this holistic approach, it’s part of who we are and what we do. And if they know it’s going to help us win games, that’s what we want. That’s what everybody wants at the end of the day.”
The goal is for everyone to be on the same page regarding workouts with as much objective data as possible. Hilgart, who was Fuente’s hand-picked strength and conditioning coach upon his arrival in Blacksburg after the 2015 season, stresses that the GPS trackers are no substitute for an experienced coach with an attentive eye; it’s just another tool for the staff to use in its overall assessment of players.
The Hokies aren’t the first program to use STATSports’ GPS trackers, though it seems fitting for a technical school such as Virginia Tech to get up to speed with it.
“There is a perception of what we think we see out there, that somebody is running fast or trying hard,” said Mike Goforth, the Hokies’ director of sports medicine. “And that might be a perception of my staff, strength staff or the coaching staff, and also the athletes perceiving that they’re working hard. The GPS takes all that out of it. It tells you exactly what they’re doing. It takes that subjectivity out of it and makes it more objective.”
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It works like this: Virginia Tech has a number of GPS devices, which aren’t much bigger than most phones. They fit between the shoulder blades in a compression shirt tank top that can go under a player’s pads. It tracks all sorts of stuff during a workout — speed, acceleration, distance, high-intensity workload — with more than 50 categories of data.
The GPS tracker itself fits into this tank top, which is worn underneath the jersey. (Courtesy of Virginia Tech Athletics)
Each player is assigned a GPS number for the day, so coaches can track them in real time if they want, either on an iPad or via watches that the strength and sports medicine staffs have. The real data analysis comes afterward, though. Players simply put their tank top with the GPS tracker in a bin when they come off the field, Cooke downloads the information and away he goes.
“The information it provides could be useless, interesting or useful,” Hilgart said. “Obviously, if it’s useless, we’re not going to use it. If it’s just interesting — man, that’s pretty neat that somebody ran 24.16 mph but is it actually useful? Can we actually apply that somehow? And as we go through this process, Kody’s done a tremendous job and my staff has done a tremendous job fine-tuning and figuring out the ways that we can make this applicable in our setting.”
What can you glean from it? Plenty, though for players, there’s one category in particular: speed. Everyone wants to know how fast he ran. Hilgart leans into it, making it a bit of a competition, something that gets the players to buy in. He’ll post the top speeds recorded each week, just like he would the top bench press or squat numbers, and hopes to track them with personal bests during the season.
Last fall, when the Hokies began using the trackers on a limited basis with some skill players in the two-deep, cornerback Caleb Farley had the fastest recorded time (24.16 mph) in full pads against Notre Dame, giving him current bragging rights as the fastest player on the team. (Running back Cole Beck, who was on the scout team last fall and ran track this spring, finishing fourth in the ACC outdoor meet with a time of 10.22 seconds, certainly will be a challenger once he’s outfitted with a GPS tracker.)
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To put that in perspective, Usain Bolt is the fastest human ever recorded at 27.8 mph.
“I can watch Caleb Farley and know that he’s fast, but I can tell exactly how fast he is,” Hilgart said. “And as we continue to train and progress, we can see are those things improving? As his body changes, does that affect it?”
There’s a deeper reservoir of data to mine: Coaches can see how much their players are running at practice, noting how much that changes from week to week and how much of it is high-intensity work or just jogging back to the huddle. They can see levels of fatigue, getting a better sense of when to pull back a bit.
“What I’m looking at is making sure our guys are prepared for practice,” Hilgart said. “We know now what the demands of practice look like. We already knew what the demands of a game look like. And now what can we do to prepare them for that in the offseason?”
That is particularly helpful with “return-to-play” guys — players coming back from an injury. Instead of estimating at what 70 percent speed is, the coaches actually can calibrate that based on their baseline numbers.
There certainly is nothing fancy about the bin to collect the GPS trackers after practice. But the info transmitted by the trackers is highly technical. (Courtesy of Virginia Tech Athletics)
Goforth’s rule is not to go above a 30 percent increase in workload over a couple days’ time. (“You’re asking for reinjury,” he said.) This helps the medical staff and coaches in plotting out a schedule, and it gets them communicating and paying attention to whether a player is trying to do too much.
The GPS won’t tell you if a player is going to pull a hamstring, but it can get into something as specific as step balance, which is whether a player is favoring a particular side or overcompensating for a past injury. The Hokies thus hope it prevents small injuries from developing into bigger ones.
“Let’s say you’ve got your hamstring in the second week of camp,” Goforth said. “OK, we know if we put you out there too soon, that two-week hamstring turns into a six-week hamstring. If I can prevent that from happening and get you to the first game, that’s huge. …
“So if you look at what a cornerback’s ‘workload,’ for lack of a better term, is over a two-day practice segment, you know you can’t get above 30 percent of that or you’ll be risking injury. So now we’ve got a baseline of all these guys of exactly what a cornerback does. You can’t sit there and predict over the course of two periods of practice how many deep balls as opposed to out routes — and that changes how much a corner runs. And with the GPS, we have all of that. It can make a little bit better prediction.”
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Cooke calls it “trying to do things in a controlled setting before we release them into an uncontrolled setting.”
The trackers also can tell when a player’s not going all out. It’s not necessarily to catch loafers but rather to point out to players that they have more to give.
“We’re just trying to maximize what these kids are doing and help educate them on what maximizing is,” Goforth said. “You working hard and me working hard are two different things. If I tell three kids to go get on a bike, one of them’s going to hop on there like it’s the Tour de France — that’s Sam Rogers or Dax Hollifield, until the pedals come off. Another one’s going to go over and go to sleep. Another’s going to go cruise. This gives us some objective data to what you’re doing.”
It’s one thing to hear general feedback from a coach; every player has been told he can do more. It’s another thing when there’s data to back it up.
“I can go out here and say, ‘Hey, I think you can go harder. I think you’ve got more in the tank,’ ” Hilgart said. “Now I can show you physically that, yeah, in black and white on this graph, this satellite that’s shooting down has no idea what your name is, you’re just a number to it; it’s telling me that you can do this and we know you can run this.
“At the end of the day, there’s no substitute for hard work. Hard work is still the primary thing we do, but if we can find technology to help us get our kids to work harder and do so in an intelligent matter, where we’re being able to program for them exactly as they need to be programmed, it’s great.”
