Kankakee Times

A Florida State national championship was the inspiration for Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School to ramp up its sports technology.

The school has added sensors to the outfits and equipment of its sports teams in order to track the sports' effects on its athletes, according to a recent article on Popular Science's website. The school began using the sensors in April, making it the first high school in the nation to use this technology, and is now one of 15 schools in the country using them, according to Adam Vogel, athletic performance training coordinator at the high school, in an interview with the Kankakee Times.

Vogel said he first heard about the sensors, which are made by Catapult, when Florida State used them while winning the national title in football three years ago. European soccer teams also use the devices, as do other professional teams. The system uses GPS to monitor what athletes do in games and practices, Vogel said.

Coaches at the high school wondered what could be done to improve its teams' performances – keeping the players' health in mind while also making them better. Then, Vogel said, the school found out it was moving to a tougher conference in football this season, as would the other sports.

An interesting aspect to Australia-based Catapult was that it eventually emerged from the failures of that country's national team at the Olympic Games in a drive to better train athletes.

“In 1976, they didn't win a single gold medal, so what they decided to do was put a bunch of money into sports science and research ..., and that's where all this stuff came out of,” Vogel said.

The school talked to a professor at Notre Dame who handles sports science about the technology, Vogel said. After meeting with him, the school was sold on the technology.

All the sports teams at the school used their own funds to pay for the sensors, which are put in pouches in the athletes' undershirts or sports bras. They measure a multitude of aspects on an athlete, Vogel said. They can tell how fast an athlete can accelerate and decelerate, determine if they're favoring one leg over the other, record the number of impacts an athlete absorbs, and measure heart rates and workloads.

“We know how hard they worked or how hard they didn't work,” he said.

Sometimes, an athlete not seeming to work hard can indicate other things, Vogel said. It could be based on fatigue, lack of sleep, poor nutrition or stress going on at home.

“It almost asks more questions,” he said. “It'll give us a chance to ask those kids to see what's going on with their lives that might not have (been) seen... . (It) could be a crucial thing to help them out.”

Vogel said they're finding out so much more about how to train athletes better, making sure they're doing things safely and maximizing their abilities, and getting practices to align with energy performances used during a game.

“It's unbelievable,” he said. “I guess our next question is, how we can get more?”