For the 2017 NFL season, Zebra Sports will enter into the third consecutive year of deploying its RFID tracking Sports Solution into players’ shoulder pads but now it’ll include additional layers through a new relationship with Kinduct, a data and analytics software provider that helps sports teams make informed decisions.
Despite it being year three of Zebra Sports’ partnership with the NFL, Jill Stelfox — Vice President and General Manager of Location Solutions at Zebra Technologies — said this is the year franchises will glean more value from the data in years prior.
In part, that’s because at year’s end NFL teams will have three full seasons of data capture around players’ speed, distance traveled, acceleration and deceleration to compare against each other, look for patterns of information and create deeper insights for teams’ staffs, according to Stelfox.
At the same time, it’ll be the second straight year teams will be receive that information in-season as radio receivers installed at each NFL venue collects the data. Now, Kinduct’s data will be layered on top of Zebra’s information provided by the tracking chips. The Kinduct Athlete Management System will help NFL teams paint of 360-degree picture of athletes’ overall health and performance.
So, where does it begin and how does it all tie together?
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Stelfox said that the initial Zebra data acts “as the starting point of the information” followed by player-specific information such as sleep, nutrition and general fitness metrics like heart rate, too.
According to Dr. Travis McDonough, Kinduct Chief Executive Officer and Founder, all of the performance factors and health data points “can alter combined stress on a player during a workout or practice,” including practice duration and collisions. As he explained, a weighted impact score of a particular practice session will allow for future comparison between players over a period of time as Kinduct’s algorithmic technology further contextualizes the information.
Kinduct has also started to load standardized fitness and health information into its software that will eventually act as a barometer to compare and contrast practice sessions, McDonough said.
“Anything and everything around the athlete, we’ll have that data in our system,” McDonough said.
Through Kinduct’s cloud-based software, strength coaches, athletic trainers and players themselves can see developing patterns, trends and correlations through the combined data, with McDonough calling the Zebra practice data the “most important data.”
Stelfox provided the example that if an NFL running back is expected to play half of his team’s offensive players during a game but ends up having a much more strenuous game, should he then be expected to have a normal practice or should he have an altered session?
Based on the RFID tracking technology and Kinduct’s Athlete Management System, teams then will receive information on the best method for rest and recovery. Stelfox said with the Kinduct partnership, coaches will know how much effort players exerted on the field and the impact of practice on their bodies, effectively determining if there’s a need to operate at “half speed” for a given session. Trainers will now be able to answer, What does that really mean from a quantitative standpoint?
If a team wants to keep the running back’s total distance covered during practice under a few thousand yards, an alert will notify trainers when he is approaching that set number, giving them the option on how to proceed. Additional triggered alerts will warn the athlete or staffers around the athlete, as McDonough described, if an individual is exposing himself to a potential injury or over-use on the field.
“What we’re not here to do is replace any professional around the athlete — a strength coach, athletic trainer, a sports scientist — it’s really to augment their decision making,” he said. “The ultimate recommendation will be made by those professionals, but we will enhance their ability to make decisions.”
Along with all the 32 NFL teams, a few NCAA programs with lacrosse and soccer teams have started to leverage the Zebra-Kinduct relationship but for the most part, the two companies are just focused on one sport for now.
“Our intention is to have a long relationship but again we’re at the very beginning of the relationship for how we can change the game football,” Stelfox said.