May the Force be with BU: Terriers Take Advantage of Sports Performance Technology
February 28, 2020 | Men's Ice Hockey
New Sports Performance Technology May Give Terriers A Competitive Edge in Hockey East Race
By Scott Weighart, Staff Writer, GoTerriers.Com
BOSTON – The Terriers are in the thick of what could prove to be the most competitive year in the history of Hockey East play.
With just two weekends left in the regular season, only five points separate second-place Massachusetts from Northeastern and Providence, which are tied for seventh place. Boston University finds itself smack in the middle of this scrum in the standings with a 9-7-5 record and 23 points.
Underscoring the slim margin separating the various teams, 10 of the Terriers' 21 Hockey East games thus far were either ties or decided by one goal.
With so much parity between teams, a win, loss, or tie can come down to any number of small moments on the ice—winning a puck battle along the boards, outskating an opponent to prevent or earn an icing call, jumping off the bench on a line change and exploding onto the ice to produce an odd-man rush, and so on.
While myriad factors lead a team to one outcome or another, the Terriers do have one edge on every team in Hockey East. Just over a year ago, the program began using a wearable GPS sports performance tracking device called Catapult. Although the technology is now common in the National Hockey League, BU strength and conditioning coach Kyle Czech believes that, aside from the Terriers, only Denver, Colorado College and Dartmouth are using it on a collegiate level.
"We now have it for a three-year deal," Czech told GoTerriers.com. "We use it in every practice and game, and we see a lot of different metrics that can help us in communicating with the coaching staff and the players as well as for myself in the weight room."
Every Terrier except the goaltenders now strap up before each game and practice. "The guys wear kind of a harness—almost like a sports bra," Czech said. "There's a little chip that goes in between the shoulder blades of the harness and collects a lot of different data. It can quantify a player's workload and a skating load, which is slightly different than the workload."
Now the program has valuable metrics that can be collected, studied, and tapped to make critical adjustments in how the team and individual players practice and train in the weight room.
"Workload is a way for us to quantify basically everything a player is doing on the ice: When a guy is shooting pucks, taking hits, or making hard strides, we can quantify all of that. We have some guys who are fast, hard, explosive skaters… guys who hit a lot… and then more of our finesse guys who spend more time floating around and then turning on the jets when they need to. It's a way for us to use data to clarify what your eyes see. It puts things in a different perspective."
Czech has been fascinated to see how the metrics vary dramatically based on each player's style of play. As a result, though, he mentions that you have to be cautious in making head-to-head comparisons between athletes. "Patrick Curry is a guy who when he hops on the ice, it's just go time," Czech said. "[Gabe] Chabot always shows up as high workload. He's a third or fourth-line player, but on the ice he's productive with stride force and in the explosive effort category. Matthew Quercia is one of those guys as well.
"And then you've got your smooth skaters like your Patrick Harper or Trevor Zegras—and I know Charlie McAvoy was like that when he was here. They don't show up as having a high number of explosive efforts but still very productive and a different style of player, so you have to take that into consideration. So it's not always comparing those players to each other but to themselves over a number of games and multiple practices."
We talked to some of the players who Czech praised as some of the hardest-working Terriers to hear their insights on the new technology.
"It's something we more looked at after last year," junior defenseman Kasper Kotkansalo said. "It shows the workload better than heart rates; it will show how explosive you are. Basically, Kyle just simplified it for me. What I noticed from the data was that I wasn't that explosive: I was more of a diesel engine. I'm strong, and I have strong legs, but I needed to work on getting going in more of an explosive way—squatting more, working on my vertical more. I worked on that and improved a lot, and now the numbers show I'm in better shape in that way."
"Something I always look at is my workload after games," Terrier captain Curry said. "Say I played a lot of minutes; that'll tell me, and I'll know I need to get some extra recovery in or go a little lighter in practice. That's the main thing I've taken from the technology so far."
Senior Gabe Chabot scored a couple of huge goals in road games at UMass Lowell and Vermont last month. The strides that he's made in strength and conditioning over his four years at BU have made a visible impact in his ability to stay in the lineup and really contribute. The technology gives him a yardstick to appreciate what the numbers say versus his own perceptions.
"It's been super-interesting," Chabot said. "We get a pretty good look at individual shifts and periods in terms of output and how hard each period was. It's pretty interesting to look at after a game or after a week of practice to see how tired you really are versus the effort you're putting out. It's a good measure of work ethic and what kind of player you are. It's good to have the hard facts that Catapult gives us to reflect what's actually going on."
"When you don't have that information, you don't have the details of what you can work on," Curry said. "The technology is way ahead of its time, and it's something we can use to iron out some details and figure out where guys specifically need to work because each guy is different, so it's good to have.
"It really goes in-depth," Curry added. "When you're wearing it, it keeps track of your strides, and it keeps track of the power you provide off of each leg. So if a guy favors his left leg, it shows that, and it's something you can work on in the gym by yourself to become a better skater."
This information is also invaluable when it comes to evaluating whether a player is truly ready to return to game action after an injury. A player may be eager to get back on the ice and tell the coaches that he's good to go, but the technology could tell a different story. Czech has found this data really helpful.
"So if you have something going on with a player's hip, before we put them back on the ice for a game, we can look at the number of strides they're taking on each leg in practice," Czech said.
"So a guy just coming back from injury might show up as taking 600 strides on his right leg and 400 on his left leg. And we can see that he's favoring it. Or we can say that he doesn't have his normal stride force, and he may not be all the way back yet. It's been great for that."
Beyond the individual benefits, the team data can be instructive as well. Coach Albie O'Connell appreciates the input, even if sometimes it simply corroborates what he suspects to be true. "It's important to see how guys physically are—to see how hard the practices and workouts are—because we don't want to over-train guys," O'Connell said. "That's the biggest thing that I get out of it. You don't want to put guys in a sport where they're tired. You want to make sure we're ramping up to the practices at the beginning of the week are a little bit harder than at the end of the week so we're at our peak with our most energy on Friday and Saturday. I think Kyle does a good job of managing that and giving us the feedback on where the guys are at."
A few months ago, the Catapult data helped the team identify an energy trough that was showing up on the scoreboard. "Sometimes it's hard to tell without the data," Chabot said. "There was one game that had a high-paced first and third period and then a lower-paced second period. Looking back over a few games, we saw a trend where our second period was getting a little slower, so we focused on upping our pace in the second period, and it made a difference."
Over the course of a season, the data can ensure that the coaching staff is fine-tuning workouts and practices to get optimal physical results. With helpful guidance from Kathryn Yates, BU's first-ever director of analytics for the men's ice hockey program, Czech can turn the data into real insights. "If the coaches ask us 'How hard was that practice?' we can give them much more than you'd get by just looking at how hard a guy is sweating," Czech said. "We can say, 'Well, that second drill of practice was hard for the defensemen, based on their workload.' Maybe it's the amount of skating they did, or it was a battle drill with a lot of hitting going in, or not a lot of rest in a short time period. But we can quantify practice for the forwards, defensemen, or each player individually. For a given player, is it an issue of effort, or is it stride force? We can look at that."
Ultimately, the goal is to create practices that simulate what will lead to success in game action. "They always say to 'practice how you play,' and the Catapult allows us to organize our practice and making sure we're hitting game-like speeds and forces and workloads during our practices individually and as a team," Czech said. "And if the practice didn't have the intensity level we wanted, we can look at it and say, 'What were we missing?'"
Deliberately tracking specific metrics and then tailoring workouts and practices to improve them can yield small but significant improvements that eventually add up in results. One particularly critical metric in hockey is "stride force."
"Stride force is huge because in hockey we talk a lot about those first two or three strides—that acceleration component," Czech explained. "If you can increase that, it might result in winning puck battles or being faster than your opponent in a short space, and that may not show up on the stat sheet, but it will help you win games."
In the end, that's what this is all about—finding ways to win.
As Curry put it, "Ultimately, it's up to the guys on the ice to compete and be ready to go, but the Catapult technology does give you a bit of an advantage because you know the details more. The margin to win games is so small. When you know that stuff, it might just be the extra thing you need to get a point or two."
This season, even one or two more points could make the difference between home ice or a road trip for the quarterfinals or the dreaded No. 9 spot that misses the tournament all together.
To make that happen, BU will need to continue to make powerful strides against every opponent. The difference is that now the team can count each of those strides and measure how powerful and explosive they are.
In the Star Wars movies, the Force is an unseen, mythical power. With the new technology, force is something the BU coaches and players can measure and understand in ways that are not yet available to its Hockey East opponents.
May the force be with BU.
By Scott Weighart, Staff Writer, GoTerriers.Com
BOSTON – The Terriers are in the thick of what could prove to be the most competitive year in the history of Hockey East play.
With just two weekends left in the regular season, only five points separate second-place Massachusetts from Northeastern and Providence, which are tied for seventh place. Boston University finds itself smack in the middle of this scrum in the standings with a 9-7-5 record and 23 points.
Underscoring the slim margin separating the various teams, 10 of the Terriers' 21 Hockey East games thus far were either ties or decided by one goal.
With so much parity between teams, a win, loss, or tie can come down to any number of small moments on the ice—winning a puck battle along the boards, outskating an opponent to prevent or earn an icing call, jumping off the bench on a line change and exploding onto the ice to produce an odd-man rush, and so on.
While myriad factors lead a team to one outcome or another, the Terriers do have one edge on every team in Hockey East. Just over a year ago, the program began using a wearable GPS sports performance tracking device called Catapult. Although the technology is now common in the National Hockey League, BU strength and conditioning coach Kyle Czech believes that, aside from the Terriers, only Denver, Colorado College and Dartmouth are using it on a collegiate level.
"We now have it for a three-year deal," Czech told GoTerriers.com. "We use it in every practice and game, and we see a lot of different metrics that can help us in communicating with the coaching staff and the players as well as for myself in the weight room."
Every Terrier except the goaltenders now strap up before each game and practice. "The guys wear kind of a harness—almost like a sports bra," Czech said. "There's a little chip that goes in between the shoulder blades of the harness and collects a lot of different data. It can quantify a player's workload and a skating load, which is slightly different than the workload."
Now the program has valuable metrics that can be collected, studied, and tapped to make critical adjustments in how the team and individual players practice and train in the weight room.
"Workload is a way for us to quantify basically everything a player is doing on the ice: When a guy is shooting pucks, taking hits, or making hard strides, we can quantify all of that. We have some guys who are fast, hard, explosive skaters… guys who hit a lot… and then more of our finesse guys who spend more time floating around and then turning on the jets when they need to. It's a way for us to use data to clarify what your eyes see. It puts things in a different perspective."
Czech has been fascinated to see how the metrics vary dramatically based on each player's style of play. As a result, though, he mentions that you have to be cautious in making head-to-head comparisons between athletes. "Patrick Curry is a guy who when he hops on the ice, it's just go time," Czech said. "[Gabe] Chabot always shows up as high workload. He's a third or fourth-line player, but on the ice he's productive with stride force and in the explosive effort category. Matthew Quercia is one of those guys as well.
"And then you've got your smooth skaters like your Patrick Harper or Trevor Zegras—and I know Charlie McAvoy was like that when he was here. They don't show up as having a high number of explosive efforts but still very productive and a different style of player, so you have to take that into consideration. So it's not always comparing those players to each other but to themselves over a number of games and multiple practices."
We talked to some of the players who Czech praised as some of the hardest-working Terriers to hear their insights on the new technology.
"It's something we more looked at after last year," junior defenseman Kasper Kotkansalo said. "It shows the workload better than heart rates; it will show how explosive you are. Basically, Kyle just simplified it for me. What I noticed from the data was that I wasn't that explosive: I was more of a diesel engine. I'm strong, and I have strong legs, but I needed to work on getting going in more of an explosive way—squatting more, working on my vertical more. I worked on that and improved a lot, and now the numbers show I'm in better shape in that way."
"Something I always look at is my workload after games," Terrier captain Curry said. "Say I played a lot of minutes; that'll tell me, and I'll know I need to get some extra recovery in or go a little lighter in practice. That's the main thing I've taken from the technology so far."
Senior Gabe Chabot scored a couple of huge goals in road games at UMass Lowell and Vermont last month. The strides that he's made in strength and conditioning over his four years at BU have made a visible impact in his ability to stay in the lineup and really contribute. The technology gives him a yardstick to appreciate what the numbers say versus his own perceptions.
"It's been super-interesting," Chabot said. "We get a pretty good look at individual shifts and periods in terms of output and how hard each period was. It's pretty interesting to look at after a game or after a week of practice to see how tired you really are versus the effort you're putting out. It's a good measure of work ethic and what kind of player you are. It's good to have the hard facts that Catapult gives us to reflect what's actually going on."
"When you don't have that information, you don't have the details of what you can work on," Curry said. "The technology is way ahead of its time, and it's something we can use to iron out some details and figure out where guys specifically need to work because each guy is different, so it's good to have.
"It really goes in-depth," Curry added. "When you're wearing it, it keeps track of your strides, and it keeps track of the power you provide off of each leg. So if a guy favors his left leg, it shows that, and it's something you can work on in the gym by yourself to become a better skater."
This information is also invaluable when it comes to evaluating whether a player is truly ready to return to game action after an injury. A player may be eager to get back on the ice and tell the coaches that he's good to go, but the technology could tell a different story. Czech has found this data really helpful.
"So if you have something going on with a player's hip, before we put them back on the ice for a game, we can look at the number of strides they're taking on each leg in practice," Czech said.
"So a guy just coming back from injury might show up as taking 600 strides on his right leg and 400 on his left leg. And we can see that he's favoring it. Or we can say that he doesn't have his normal stride force, and he may not be all the way back yet. It's been great for that."
Beyond the individual benefits, the team data can be instructive as well. Coach Albie O'Connell appreciates the input, even if sometimes it simply corroborates what he suspects to be true. "It's important to see how guys physically are—to see how hard the practices and workouts are—because we don't want to over-train guys," O'Connell said. "That's the biggest thing that I get out of it. You don't want to put guys in a sport where they're tired. You want to make sure we're ramping up to the practices at the beginning of the week are a little bit harder than at the end of the week so we're at our peak with our most energy on Friday and Saturday. I think Kyle does a good job of managing that and giving us the feedback on where the guys are at."
A few months ago, the Catapult data helped the team identify an energy trough that was showing up on the scoreboard. "Sometimes it's hard to tell without the data," Chabot said. "There was one game that had a high-paced first and third period and then a lower-paced second period. Looking back over a few games, we saw a trend where our second period was getting a little slower, so we focused on upping our pace in the second period, and it made a difference."
Over the course of a season, the data can ensure that the coaching staff is fine-tuning workouts and practices to get optimal physical results. With helpful guidance from Kathryn Yates, BU's first-ever director of analytics for the men's ice hockey program, Czech can turn the data into real insights. "If the coaches ask us 'How hard was that practice?' we can give them much more than you'd get by just looking at how hard a guy is sweating," Czech said. "We can say, 'Well, that second drill of practice was hard for the defensemen, based on their workload.' Maybe it's the amount of skating they did, or it was a battle drill with a lot of hitting going in, or not a lot of rest in a short time period. But we can quantify practice for the forwards, defensemen, or each player individually. For a given player, is it an issue of effort, or is it stride force? We can look at that."
Ultimately, the goal is to create practices that simulate what will lead to success in game action. "They always say to 'practice how you play,' and the Catapult allows us to organize our practice and making sure we're hitting game-like speeds and forces and workloads during our practices individually and as a team," Czech said. "And if the practice didn't have the intensity level we wanted, we can look at it and say, 'What were we missing?'"
Deliberately tracking specific metrics and then tailoring workouts and practices to improve them can yield small but significant improvements that eventually add up in results. One particularly critical metric in hockey is "stride force."
"Stride force is huge because in hockey we talk a lot about those first two or three strides—that acceleration component," Czech explained. "If you can increase that, it might result in winning puck battles or being faster than your opponent in a short space, and that may not show up on the stat sheet, but it will help you win games."
In the end, that's what this is all about—finding ways to win.
As Curry put it, "Ultimately, it's up to the guys on the ice to compete and be ready to go, but the Catapult technology does give you a bit of an advantage because you know the details more. The margin to win games is so small. When you know that stuff, it might just be the extra thing you need to get a point or two."
This season, even one or two more points could make the difference between home ice or a road trip for the quarterfinals or the dreaded No. 9 spot that misses the tournament all together.
To make that happen, BU will need to continue to make powerful strides against every opponent. The difference is that now the team can count each of those strides and measure how powerful and explosive they are.
In the Star Wars movies, the Force is an unseen, mythical power. With the new technology, force is something the BU coaches and players can measure and understand in ways that are not yet available to its Hockey East opponents.
May the force be with BU.
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