Sports-specific Wearables Will “change The Game”
Sports-specific wearables such as Catapult will change the game, says The Fields Of Green’s Casey Levy-Tulloch…
Millennials have been exposed to the technology of wearables through advertisements and their peers, and often see more issues than solutions for the casual athlete. Sure it sounds fun to compete with your friends tracking steps or calories burned via iOS apps, but as a serious competitor wearable bands aren’t a substitute for on-field competition. When I talk with friends that have a Fitbit, Jawbone or Nike FuelBand, the common theme is that they use it to track their performance in order to maintain an active lifestyle and possibly work their way toward a fitness goal. For now, wearables are mostly used as stylish high-tech pedometers, falling short of establishing the “fitness networks” that athletic companies have tried to achieve.
Enter Catapult, a company that gets it. Instead of marketing to the masses, Catapult works with professional and college teams to monitor the workload of athletes. For example, leading up to football season, an article came out about USC utilizing Catapult to monitor two-way threat Adoree’ Jackson as he takes more snaps on the offensive side of the ball. Although it won’t tell coaches how much a player can hold up, Catapult keeps track of a player’s dashboard (mileage and RPMs) so that coaches can measure performance relative to the amount of work they’re putting in. Catapult hits the mark as a supplemental tool for competitive amateur, collegiate and professional athletes invested in sustaining long-term performance.
Whether sensors are in football helmets to track concussive hits, mounted on baseball bat knobs or golf gloves to analyze swing path, or inside Wilson’s newly released X Connected Basketball to keep track of perimeter-shooting performance, more applications of analytics are coming. “Moneyball” introduced sports franchises to data analytics to measure player attributes in building rosters. We’re now entering an age where data will be mined to identify training and performance benchmarks to build the player. Not only will teams benefit from increased knowledge to improve practice and game strategy, but players will also see the value of technology: They’ll be able to stay on the field longer due to avoiding soft-tissue and lingering injuries.
As cool as it was to see LeBron James dunking in a Nike Plus commercial when the FuelBand was released in 2012, it’s evident that the marketing tactic of comparing data among friends as a competition didn’t work out. If you keep a religious workout and diet schedule or are a weekend warrior participating in triathlons, the current wearable market keeps track of the data you need: distance and calories. However, for the competitive athlete that wants to increase performance level, the sports-specific technology emerging today presents an exciting opportunity. Athletic training capabilities will not only increase, but athletes may actually decide to compete based on bat speed or number of 3’s made in a shooting session. We should expect companies solely focused on sports technology such as Catapult to continue changing the game.
This article first appeared here.
