Numbers crowd the whiteboard in Paul Longo’s office. Most of them change daily, laying out the weights and reps and cycles that the Notre Dame strength coach has planned for his football players. Amid that array, scrawled in red marker in the bottom left corner, is a set of numbers that stays the same.

Strength coach Paul Longo explains the EliteForce system Notre Dame installed in its weight room this January.

8-5—11—11-2. 12-1—13—8-5

Those are Notre Dame’s win-loss records for recent years and what those records could have been had close games gone in a different direction. The Irish finished 8-5 in 2011. With 11 more points scattered strategically in close losses, they could have been 11-2. The 2012 run to the BCS title game with a 12-1 record was 13 points away from being another mediocre 8-5 year. Longo keeps them there as a reminder of why all the other numbers around them matter.

The margin between winning and losing in college sports — between championships and no-name bowl games, between getting a raise and getting fired — is razor thin. Coaches and administrators are in a constant race to find ways to end up on the happy side of that blade. They raised salaries to attract better coaches. When everyone caught up in that department, they built opulent locker rooms to attract better players. Now, schools across the country are beginning to turn to technology and sports science in search of the next competitive edge.

From force plates that create movement signatures with dozens of data points for individual athletes when they stand and jump on top of them to drones filming unique angles as they hover high above practices, and every inch in between, colleges are transforming the way they train.

“It’s kind of a whole new world,” Longo said.

Notre Dame has set a goal to be a pioneer in this next phase of the college athletics arms race. Athletics director Jack Swarbrick formed the sports performance wing of the athletic department in 2011 and says becoming an industry leader in pushing technology’s boundaries is one his top priorities in the coming years.

Swarbrick’s introduction to the world of sports science came when he worked closely with the U.S. Olympic committee in Indianapolis before arriving at Notre Dame. In that world, the difference between failure and success can be a tenth of a second in reaction time. They have been quicker to experiment with and adopt new training methods than professional and collegiate sports teams.

“When I came here we were really good at team development, but in my judgment lagging pretty badly in the sports science side of what we do,” said Swarbrick, who was hired in 2008. “If we could get a bit better in the sports science thing I think it could have a big impact on performance.”

Notre Dame's decision to join forces with Under Armour in July was based heavily on the company's innovative reputation.

Notre Dame had fallen behind not only the Olympic movement, but its peers in college athletics as well when Swarbrick came to Notre Dame. He cracked the piggy bank for his strength and conditioning staff (The Irish have an endowed fund specifically earmarked for high-tech training equipment that was valued at $1.82 million in 2010) and has aggressively searched for new ways to catch up to schools like Stanford, Cal and Michigan in specific areas.

The decision to make Under Armour the school’s official apparel provider starting this July was based heavily on the company’s reputation as an innovator in its industry. Kevin Plank, Under Armour’s CEO, got his start because he didn’t like the way his T-shirt felt under his shoulder pads as a walk-on kicker at Maryland. The company pours millions into researching new products and holds an annual “Future Show” where would-be inventors pitch their ideas to Plank and his top executives in a reality show style interview.

“Their focus on performance was very important,” Swarbrick said. “I love the fact that so many really demanding professions and people rely on their product. Soldiers and policemen are very loyal to Under Armour. I find that fascinating because performance really matters to them.”

Swarbrick said he’d like the Under Armour folks to use Notre Dame as its extended “laboratory” for better uniforms and new types of wearable technology. Rob Woods, Under Armour’s director of strategy and operations for innovation (and also a Notre Dame graduate), said his company expects Notre Dame to be a partner in developing new ideas.

Swarbrick thinks one of their first joint endeavors could be practice gear with built-in GPS systems that track how far players run and how hard they are working. Notre Dame has used a similar system built by Australian company Catapult during the past two years for its soccer and lacrosse teams.

Catapult’s device, which slips into a bra-like holder under the jersey, measures heart rate along with distance and direction traveled. It spits back mountains of data, which strength coach Matt Howley — an Aussie native and Notre Dame’s resident Catapult expert — translates into graphs for his coaches.

It can tell them how far each player runs during a practice or game and how intense their workout was. It can also drill down into far more specific information, like how often a player goes right or left and if they have more success playing defense when they are using high intensity movements or low intensity movements (Howley was surprised to learn the Irish played better defense when intensity levels were lower).

“Once the coaches see the numbers it’s pretty easy for them to buy in,” he said. “They want to know if what they think they’re doing, is that actually what’s happening.”

The Irish plan to install a force plate (demonstrated above) to get in-depth "movement signatures" for individual athletes this year.
The results make buying in easy, too. The men’s soccer team won a national championship this year. The lacrosse team was the national runner-up. Florida’s State national championship football team also used the Catapult system, and head coach Jimbo Fisher called it his secret weapon in an interview with CBSSports.com.

The Seminoles reduced soft tissue injuries (usually the result of overworking a muscle) by 88 percent since using Catapult. Notre Dame’s women’s soccer team, the first Irish group to adopt the technology, has had only one such injury in the last two seasons.
Keeping track of and reducing recovery time are major drivers of the sports science movement. From heart rate monitors to wristbands that capture sleep patterns to bandages that change color based on how hydrated its wearer is, a high percentage of new technology in the field is aimed at measuring stress levels for athletes to get them healthy and keep them healthy.

Some members of the Irish training staff are looking to experts elsewhere on campus to help learn more in that area. Strength coach Elisa Angeles is working with university psychologist Dr. Jessica Payne to study how sleep, or a lack thereof, affects gains in training or performance in general.

Because the NCAA limits the amount of hours coaches and trainers can spend with their athletes, making the most out of the time they have becomes even more important. Quicker recovery time allows the players to do more in practice each day. Longo, who is in his 28th year running college weight rooms, said the days of simply working hard than the next team is no longer an option — every school is using every minute they can to get better.

“It’s about recovery,” he said. “It’s really hard to outwork people now. You’ve gotta be smarter than them. More isn’t always better. That’s where the science is really coming into play. Before you could just outwork people.”

Longo, who still believes strongly in the art behind motivating players, has made his approach equal parts Rocky and Ivan Drago. He has been filling his Notre Dame weight room with equipment to make his time with the players more efficient since he came to South Bend with head coach Brian Kelly five years ago. His newest toy, added in January, is EliteForm, a digital weight room system that less than a dozen colleges are currently using.

Players check in by tapping their name into a tablet mounted in the corner of each squat rack. The tablet tells the player the exercise, set and reps they have for the day and asks them to put in the weight they plan to lift. With each rep, radar measures the speed the barbell is moving and immediately reports it back to them.

When the set is done, players can swipe through graphs that show how their speed changed from rep to rep and how many watts of power they produced on each one. They can also watch a video replay of the set to check their form. All of that information gets saved in what look likes an old computer tower mounted on top of the rack and sent back to a mainframe for Longo and his assistants to review later in the day.

The instant feedback of speed — which Longo says is more important than the old school concern of “How much do you bench?” — gives the ultra-competitive population of athletes a new way to keep score. It’s instant motivation that Kelly and Longo say is already paying dividends.

“They’ve really taken to it,” Kelly said. “It gives our guy a real sense of the applicability of explosive movement other than the strength coach saying you have to be explosive. Now they can see the data.”

The challenge Notre Dame is discovering now is finding a way to make sense of the reams of numbers it can collect from all of the various new tools. How can they find the patterns in all that information and have it readily available for the long list of people who can benefit from it? Swarbrick and associate athletics director Mike Harrity, who took over as head of the sports performance department in August, are working on building a custom digital platform to solve those problems. Their idea is to have a profile for each student-athlete that contains all their relevant health, academic, recruiting and personal information in one spot.

The hope is that the new system, which would look like an app on a mobile device, could help different departments and teams learn from one another. It has to be secure enough to protect personal information and simple enough for anyone of the Irish athletic employees to use. It also has to be nimble enough to change with the inevitable new technology that is on its way.

“The conversation that we’re going to have in a year is much different than the one we’re having now,” Harrity said. “That’s the way we’re trying to enhance the culture of innovation.”

Swarbrick said Notre Dame is not yet halfway to where he wants to be in this field. In reality, measuring progress is hard while running a race with a moving finish line. He and his colleagues agree that the important thing is that the Irish are definitely running. They are willing to serve as guinea pigs while exploring the new mainstream landscape of college athletics. The new frontier of sports science has arrived and Notre Dame is doings its best to embrace it.

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