How a new small electronic tracker has helped Duke basketball this season

One of the reasons Duke’s sports performance staff believes the team is thriving heading into this week’s ACC tournament – winners of six consecutive games – is a small device that players wear on their shirts between their shoulder blades.

Catapult’s athlete-monitoring system is one of the pillars of Duke’s sports science investments. It enables the staff to assess a smorgasbord of exertion and workload metrics to help them precisely calibrate the best intensity for upcoming practices. For teams looking to peak during March Madness, finding that sweet spot between training hard and over-training is critical. And in its seventh season using Catapult’s wearable technology, Duke has spent this season beta testing the company’s latest product: the Vector T7, which will be officially offered to clients April 1. 

Among the benefits that Duke touts is that the device, which can be worn between players’ shoulder blades or on their shorts, is 73 percent smaller than its predecessor. It’s small, about the size of a piece of gum. And it tracks a multitude of analytics, including explosive bursts, cuts, jumps and overall workload. 

The vast wearables industry continues to expand significantly each year. The demand for teams to maximize performance and minimize injury risk parallels the proliferation of technologies that offer data on everything from workload and inertia to sleep and hydration. Catapult, which works with 3,625 teams in 137 countries, counts 31 teams from last season’s NCAA tournament as clients, including Arkansas, Alabama, Texas, Michigan State and UCLA. The Boston Celtics, Golden State Warriors, Oklahoma City Thunder and San Antonio Spurs are among the NBA teams that use Catapult’s services.

Will Lopes, CEO of Catapult, believes the wearables industry is just scratching the surface with potential benefits. And while he said basketball in the wearables space has probably been the least-penetrated sport, wearables are now starting to move fairly quickly into that marketplace.

“The challenge for wearable technology in basketball has really been around, how can you help the practitioners make real-time decisions,” Lopes told On3. “That has been an evolution in wearables of data becoming live now and being accessible across video. As those things start to become more and more sophisticated, you’ll see a pretty fast growth in the basketball space.”

The price point for Catapult’s offerings vary depending on the extent of the services, which also can include video analysis. High schools can spend several thousand dollars, while pro teams and universities can budget six figures for multiple Catapult solutions across a number of athletes and coaches.

One of the other benefits of the Vector T7 is Catapult’s proprietary basketball movement profile, which quantifies and categorizes every type of basketball movement to help coaches make better decisions for their athletes and identify causes of strain with more accuracy. The analytics are position-specific and focus on change-of-direction movements, acceleration, jumping, steady jogging and more.

Duke certainly thrived before it began working with Catapult; it won five national titles between 1991 and 2015. But Nick Potter, Duke men’s basketball’s director of high performance and sports science, said the technology the past seven seasons has been invaluable.

“It’s huge in so many ways,” Potter told On3, adding that decades ago “you never had a cell phone and it wasn’t a problem. You didn’t think of it. Now if you go to the store and forget your phone, it’s like you are lost, you detach from the world. It’s almost like that.”

Before they started working with Catapult, Potter said, players were suffering an increasing number of foot injuries. But since then, Duke has seen basically no foot injuries because of training. Relying on Catapult’s ClearSky Local Positioning System, which provides accurate positional data indoors, Potter and coaches have real-time access to data from practices and games. That enables the staff to best tailor practices, offseason conditioning and rehab work.

When a team dives into using wearables, it’s easy to feel like you’re drowning in data or wind-up implementing technology just for the sake of new technology. The difference with Catapult, Potter said, is that the data produces insights that are actionable. 

During the team’s Canadian tour in 2018, for instance, pregame warmups for heralded freshman Zion Williamson turned into a one-man dunk fest. The problem: Catapult data showed Williamson was exerting far too much power and, thus, amassing far too much of a workload before the game even began. By the third game, Duke’s staff managed to tailor a pregame warmup that enabled Williamson to save his best for the game.

Early last season, Paolo Banchero confronted a similar issue at Madison Square Garden. He got to MSG hours before the game so he could shoot extra shots on the famed court. By the time he had participated in warmups, he already had sweated so much that dehydration became a concern. Tapping into the Catapult data, Duke’s staff knew exactly how much of a workload Banchero had amassed before tip-off. In turn, they managed to re-calibrate his pre-game routine with precision.

When potential clients explore adding Catapult, Lopes said, one of the most common questions the company gets concerns how easy it is to sift through and interpret the data. In short, “Do I need a Ph.D. sitting next to me to understand?” he said. To that point, Potter said it’s critical to communicate the relevant insights from the data to the coaching staff in a way that they prefer. For instance, Potter said that Mike Krzyzewski preferred to read it on a piece of paper. But first-year coach Jon Scheyer prefers to receive text messages, after which he will follow up with a phone call. 

The Blue Devils haven’t lost since February 11. Potter believes an ability to tailor late-season practices in a way to maximize readiness for games is one of the reasons. And the ability to lean on data – as well as gut instinct – helps inform the staff’s decisions.

“By the end of the year, people can be worn down and fatigued,” Potter said. But this year, “it is the opposite. We are peaking. We’re doing our best toward the end of the year.”

Duke uses the Catapult system – specifically, the Vector T7 – to maximize performance and minimize injury risk. 

The Vector T7 can be worn between players’ shoulder blades or on their shorts, and it tracks a multitude of analytics, including explosive bursts, cuts, jumps and overall workload. (Courtesy of Catapult)