Yale’s lacrosse coaches wanted to provide their goalies with additional training a couple of years ago, but they faced several obstacles. One was a good problem to have: their defensemen were so skilled that few shots reached their own net. The other was unavoidable. Lacrosse balls are hard, and Division I players can often shoot them at 80 to 90 miles per hour.
“You have this paradox where it’s definitely a volume-based activity and repetition because it’s technique but, at the same time, that same technique beats you up,” said Thomas Newman, Yale’s director of sports performance and innovation.
In the fall of 2017, Newman brought these problems to the university’s Center for Engineering Innovation & Design, where deputy dean Vincent Wilczynski and senior research scientist Lawrence Wilen co-teach ENAS 118, an introduction to innovation and design. In the second half of that course, students form teams and take on clients.
First-year students Cece Gao, Mary Clare McMahon, and Jacob Asher worked to solve the lacrosse team’s dilemma. Their answer was the Lightboard, a fast-flashing series of lights requiring users to slap buttons as quickly as possible. The product resembles a homemade Dynavision board but with a series of new reaction tests and an open back end to the software that enables additional customization.
The Lightboard has 15 buttons capable of flashing multiple colors. In some drills, a player just hits a button as soon as it lights up. In others, a player should only press buttons of a certain color. Scores were recorded, and the “gamification” of the exercise became appealing, Newman said, with lacrosse players coming to the engineering lab to test the first prototype.
“Even in that test configuration, you saw the competitive nature of the athlete pop out,” Wilczynski said. “‘We’re just here to test the device—but I’m better than you.’”
In spring 2018, after the end of that year’s CEID course, Newman installed the Lightboard in the fitness center. He reported heavy usage by all athletes, not just lacrosse goalies.
But the project’s target demographic may have been its biggest beneficiary: Yale won its first national championship in the sport that spring. Lacrosse coach Andy Shay told Yale’s internal news service that, anecdotally, he saw a “correlation to our goalie play and the pattern of games they were playing on the board.”
Shay added, “I understand that a number of studies need to be done to see a true correlation, but we did win a national championship with the help of some stellar goalie play … so I’ll take that as a positive.”
While no formal research has been conducted on the system yet, Newman said some trends have emerged. On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the fastest, nearly every user he has seen rates as a seven, eight, or nine on the most basic reaction test.
“Pretty much every college athlete is good at see-the-thing, hit-the-thing,” Newman said, adding: “As soon as you add color, like ‘only hit the blue color,’ it goes downhill.”
Offensive players tend to remain an eight or nine score for pure speed but aren’t able to discriminate well between the colors. Defensive players might slow to a seven or eight but be more accurate. In football, defensive lineman have quicker hands than offensive lineman. And regardless of sport, Newman said, “Our goalies are warp speed compared to normal people.”
While the Lightboard may be the biggest athletic success derived from the CEID course, students and faculty have built multiple products for Yale sports. A few years ago, the strength and conditioning coaches wanted a better way to measure isometric force—the work done by an athlete when holding a static position. The athletic department purchased a crane scale, and the engineers devised a way to plot the registered force over time.
“We developed an interface to this crane scale,” Wilen said. “Because we didn’t want to have wires coming off of it, it just transmitted the data 20, 30 feet away to a receiver. It’s [like] a homemade force plate. They’re happy with it because—and this is them being super creative—they come up with all these different ways of attaching it.”
In another instance, the engineering department created a squat box to help athletes lift weights with proper form. An athlete first does his or her first lift under the supervision of a coach, calibrating the machine. Then, anytime he or she returns to the proper position, the machine gives a soft ding as feedback.
Wilczynski and Wilen said they’re now interested in creating a new course focused entirely on sports technology—much like the University of California, Berkeley has—but that might be couple years off. In the meantime, Newman said he has three ideas for projects he’d like to introduce next fall.
“What we’ve done at the CEID is just really the beginning of something that I think is going to be great here,” Newman said.