VERT is a partner of AVCA, American Volleyball Coaches Association, in the use of wearable technology since the last couple of years.
We managed to get one-on-one answers from the Executive Director of the AVCA, Kathy DeBoer regarding the effectiveness of VERT in volleyball for the players, coaches and organization.
AVCA started using VERT as soon as it was available. In fact, their first couple of devices were still beta-test models. They use it in the jump research for Volleyball Performance Index (avcaVPI™), so with their 900 college players and with the 1000 prospect-age players, they test per year.
VERT has changed volleyball and helped make coaches more efficient and effective
When asked regarding one valuable insight from VERT and its impact, Kathy told our team that there are just too many insights to name one. She went on to give just few things they are doing with VERT, like building a database of jump metrics on college and prospect-age players called avcaphenom.com that can be used to compare and contrast age-groups and assess college-readiness. Also, Volleyball coaches use VERT to track both the number and height of jumps in their volleyball players that provides invaluable data for conditioning and injury rehabilitation. VERT can easily be linked to video boards in arenas giving fans another stat to watch and adding a ‘WOW!’ factor to big points.
Kathy is confident that VERT has a major role to play in volleyball in the upcoming years. She believes that VERT is becoming a vital part of the training and assessment toolkit because it is affordable, reliable, and portable which are all the characteristics that coaches seek in training aids.
Read more: VERT Jump Monitor is the first wearable for jump rate
If AVCA was to do the coaching without VERT, she feels that it would be as if going back to the 20th century when everything was done manually. Many of the things would be impossible to track such as number of jumps in a match, height of jumps in practice, average jump of a high school outside hitter compared to a college outside hitter, and many more.
