VX Sport is working to professionally track college players’ abilities

VX Sport is a company every wearable enthusiast would have heard of. A New Zealand based elite wearable manufacturing company is paving its way towards NCAA Soccer. The company has come up with a new tracking technology.

The wearable in question is a small electronic box that can be fitted to the body of players or their clothing. The electronic box has built-in heart rate monitor, GPS, accelerometer, digital radio and magnetometers. These techs are a perfect recipe of providing players and coaches with real-time data. Thus, the players can get to know their stats and the coaches and the guides can assist them with the decision making. During a 90 minute training session, an individual athlete can collect around 1 million data points.

Explaining the significance and usage of the wearable by VX Sports managing director Richard Snow claimed that;

“Coaches can determine if the athlete has trained to capacity, or if he or she is pushing too hard. Are they achieving speed and heart rate reasonable to the task? If an athlete is training at too high of an intensity, or they are fatigued, their ability to learn, perform or recover is significantly hampered – while the risk of soft tissue injuries is increased – so having the right insights allows coaching teams to build performance profiles and training plans that optimize athlete performance.”

In order to get more accurate analysis, the athletes can self-report their soreness, nutrition value, RPE, daily sleep timings, and stress levels into a connected VX mobile app. Coaches can also monitor total distance covered, maximum and average speed, body force, heart rate, sprint information and intensity of play during practices and games. The wearable box will, hence, improve the performance of the athletes and the VX software will tell them about their requirements.

VX Sports has made its debut to the college level athletic when more and more teams are becoming active towards the importance and use of wearable technology. It is to see whether this technology is capable of changing the tracking market for the college athletes or not. It is important to note that, previously, many similar wearables tried to make their way into the college athletics. But, such technologies were denied access back then.

The alleged reason for the ban was considered to be the high price of the wearables. VX Sports is the first company which has announced the same technology at a third of the cost of previous wearables. Hence, the price tag is considered to attract a large number of student player bases.

Richard Snow declared that;

“We’ve been surprised at how quickly colleges have embraced the wearable high performance technology for athletes, with more than 30 colleges having come on board in just over a year.”

The claim by Snow is quite true because the wearable box has already helped a number of soccer teams like 2015 College Cup winners, Stanford Cardinal, and semi-finalist Akron Zips.