London’s Rugby Union Premiership team Harlequins has broadened partnership with Catapult Sports (a sports technology firm) to improve its athlete performance by having tracking it more efficiently.
Harelquins are one of the oldest clubs in the world. It was founded in 1866 but it still looks to innovate.
Club has partnered for Catapult Sports for its technology for many seasons now to lower the players injury risk. But this pre-season campaign will witness the launch of latest technology that monitors this sport’s physical impact on athlete’s body and helps to evaluate their performance.
Moving on from injury prevention
To acquire this goal, the players are going to be given 52 devices of Catapault’s OptimEye 25 which fit on club’s playing jersey’s back and by developed analytical software, supposedly makes coaches and players able to study and analyze data while and after a training session or a match.
The device has censors which gather data about skill level and fitness, keeping in consideration the tactical performances and training techniques, which helps coaches to analyze injury risk and player’s rehabilitation progress. The club is hoping to perform better than last season with the help of these S5s while keeping athletes fresh.
Harlequins’ Sport science head Ton Batchelor spoke about this partnership’s benefits and said “Having used [Catapult’s] services for a number of years, we were keen to develop our relationship with them further. We use the data on a daily basis to review the workload of the players to guide our approach to their physical preparation. We value our relationship with Catapult and hope that it will continue to grow, with the way technology and our understanding of the data is developing I can only see this playing a larger and larger part in the way we go about our work.”
Serious Pedigree
This sports technology firm, Catapult Sports, has many noteworthy capabilities in this department. Their reach isn’t limited to Rugby only as over 1000 plus major sports teams around the world which include Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, Denver Broncos, Golden State Warriors and Argentina’s entire La Liga basketball league use Catapult’s technology.
Catapult’s head of UK sales, Curt Taylor stated that “Our purpose is to build better athletes” which is exactly what Harlequins are looking from the Partnership.
