Next week, the United States Women’s National Team will kick off the finals CONCACAF Championship, aiming for an eighth title in that tournament, and qualification for defense of its World Cup crown in 2019. In preparation for those upcoming challenges, the team has been expanding its high performance department over the last year, integrating experts in medical and scientific fields, as well as those in performance analysis. The department’s overall goal is to create the best possible environment for player development and performance.
The High Performance department is separate from the team’s coaching staff, but players and coaches are now able to meet with its staff daily to discuss ideas, learn about new technologies, and benchmark progress. To ensure the new hires were a cultural fit and had the right level of expertise needed, USWNT head coach Jill Ellis played a role in their recruitment process.
“Jill has been fully involved in the formation of this team on a high level,” said James Bunce, director of the high performance department, in a press release on U.S. Soccer’s website. “She’s tremendously open and wanting to know more about performance, about pushing the boundaries, about finding more data and finding more information to integrate into her decision-making process.”
The department has been under development since February 2017, when Bunce was appointed. He was hired to help integrate its previously disparate efforts to optimize both player development and performance. “One of the High Performance department’s objectives is to link the multi-disciplinary teams together more cohesively, so there is more integration of knowledge, of data and of operation,” Bunce said in the recent announcement.
This summer’s men’s World Cup in Russia was the first to allow teams to transmit technical and tactical data to benches during games. Bunce highlighted the importance of that change for his department. “We’re able now to use this data to help the coaches, providing them with information that could potentially have an in-game solution,” he said in the release. “Not only do we have a full-time staff member who is a dedicated and trained performance analyst, but we now have a lot more integrated data both within the Federation and partners externally who are working with us to make sure we are optimizing our data collection and integrating it into the decision-making process.”
SportTechie Takeaway
The USWNT has been a dominant force in women’s soccer. Since the women’s World Cup first kicked off in 1991, the U.S. has won three of seven tournaments. And since women’s soccer debuted at Atlanta 1996, the USWNT has won four of the six gold medals on offer. The team’s investment in its high performance department is not only in line with the data-driven approach seen across the professional sports landscape—in the last year, U.S. Soccer itself has struck major wearables and data deals with STATSports and Opta—but also seeks to further exert its hold on the game.