The Story
The Penticton Pinnacles are a youth soccer club in Penticton, BC – the effective governing body for the sport in the area. The group has coaching, strength and conditioning staff, and has more than 200 playing members ranging in age from 11 to 18.
Need for Speed
The Pinnacles approached XCO to add a speed/agility component to their regular player development regime. With a select group of high-achieving players from the Pinnacles' under-13 and under-18 "Excelsior" teams, XCO designed an 8-week program to assess and improve players ' on-field speed.
Sessions were divided into one-hour blocks per team, each Wednesday evening, using both indoor artificial-turf and outdoor fields.
Method
The BioAnalyticsTM system was the cornerstone technology in these sessions, improving athlete and coach experiences with:
- continuous tracking
- precise position, velocity and acceleration measurements
- automated athlete profiling
- personalized performance insights
- engaging real-time team leaderboards
Phase 1: assessment
Players' sprint mechanics, reaction times, top-end speed were rigorously evaluated using the Sport BioAnalyticsTM system, handheld video capture. A set of benchmark activities were established to monitor progress through the entire program:
- 10m sprint from standing start
- 10m flying-start sprint
- 40y dash
- 5m/5m cut left/right
Phase 2: Training
Using the Sport BioAnalyticsTM athlete profiling capabilities – specifically comparing any one athlete with others – the coach guided athletes through corrective and developmental drills, giving personalized advice.
The coach was able to leverage on-field activity data from the XPSTM system to show athletes aspects of their performance that deserved mention – slow or fast start, high top-end speed, poor mechanics causing sub-optimal lateral movement, etc. This imbued the instructional content with extra empirical weight; continuously updating personal and team leaderboards helped to make the individual activities more compelling for the athletes.
While periodically revisiting the principal benchmark activities, along with other specially designed exercises, athletes were given custom, 1:1 coaching in the following areas:
- core sprint mechanics
- agility and explosiveness
- developing intuition for optimal ground-contact
- top-end speed
Phase 3: Refinement and Final Assessment
Players' sprint mechanics and measurable performances were assessed in a combine-like environment on the final day of the program.
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