Sport science: How Sacramento Republic uses technology to get a competitive advantage
During soccer season, every Sacramento Republic player wears the same little black watch, 24 hours a day.
Everywhere they go, even when they’re sleeping, Republic players wear a Whoop fitness tracker, which checks their heart rate and keeps track of how much strain they put on their body. The Whoop tracker and live-action GPS trackers are part of a recent technological shift the team has made to get the most out of its players.
Republic players are full-time professional athletes and it’s part of their job to work with the team to get the most out of their bodies. But there was a little pushback from the players last year over privacy concerns. These guys are competitive, coach Mark Briggs said. Sacramento Republic is trying to win soccer games and the watches and GPS monitors players wear help the coaches and training staff make sure the players are in the best shape possible on game nights.
“You’re trying to get an advantage any way you possibly can, and you have to tell them, but we have to show them, this can be an advantage for you,” Briggs said. “If you use this the proper way, your performance will be higher.”
Athletes being athletes, they like performing better.
That competitive drive helped make the Whoop trackers part of the Quails’ daily routine last year, when the team introduced them. In addition to the watches, players wear GPS monitors in a black sling over the top of their chests during practices and games. The GPS monitors provide at-the-moment data to coaches on the sideline; an older GPS system only provided data after practices and games, when it was no longer as useful for halting a practice when players were run down.
The job of data decryption falls to head trainer Betty Olmedo and strength and conditioning coach Luke Rayfield. The night before a practice, Briggs gets a report about how much distance the players covered that day and how fast they ran, so he has some idea how worn-out they are. The morning before a practice, there’s a report about how well players slept and how well they recovered from yesterday’s work.
Then the coaches work with Briggs to build a training session. If a game is coming up soon, players might get a lighter day at practice. If they have a few days’ time, players will probably work harder.
Olmedo said it’s all about load management. The team has a better chance of winning a game if players have fresh legs. And the players seem to like the Whoop data.
“They’re pretty open to talking about it,” Olmedo said. “They’ll start bragging about it, check out my Whoop score. They’re competitive about it.”
Briggs said it wasn’t an easy sell when the watches were first introduced. Players were worried the team was going to get upset by what the players were up to in their time away from practice and games.
“There was a stigma that me and Betty want to know what they’re doing,” Briggs said. “If the heart rate goes up at 6:15, we can see when you got out of bed. But that’s not it. I don’t care what you’re doing. I want to make sure you’ve slept, I want to make sure you recovered, I want to make sure you’re hydrated so we don’t get injuries.”
“We’re not monitoring that the whole day,” Olmedo said. “We also have to be clear this is just for work purposes. We’re not stalking them.”
The watches aren’t Sacramento’s only high-tech solution to monitoring players. During games and practices, Rayfield keeps an eye on a different dataset. It’s his job to evaluate about 20 different data points from the GPS monitors. He keeps an eye on overall meters covered, sprint distance, work-to-rest ratio per minute and how much players are accelerating and decelerating. From that data, he can tell Briggs if a player looks like they are running out of steam or if they should stop practicing.
It’s often Rayfield and Olmedo’s job to be the bad guy in practice. Players love playing six-on-six games, and they’re quick to good-naturedly yell at their coaches if they get pulled off the field because they’ve run too far.
These players will play forever, if you let them. Naturally, there’s a data point the players particularly love, Rayfield said: top speed during a game. After a match, Rayfield posts a printout with the top speeds of each player in the locker room. More often than not, the player at the top of that list is 24-year-old defender Shannon Gomez.
“He’s around 10.2 meters per second. Everyone else is around high 9s,” Rayfield said. “Thing about him, he’s so fast, he often times doesn’t have to get to that gear. He can cruise at his 80 to 90% and still catch the guy who he’s running down. Sometimes he’s so fast the data doesn’t do him justice.”
Rayfield was quick to add the team has plenty of players who can keep up with Gomez, but their positions don’t involve covering as much of the field. He was quick to add that because coaches are a little wary of players turning games into a sprinting competition. That’s how competitive these guys are.
The coaches agree: The data is an important tool in their arsenal to get the most out of very competitive soccer players. But it’s not the only thing that matters. Some players don’t sleep well in hotels and get poor Whoop scores. Some players can run just as hard after running 14 kilometers as a guy who has run far less.
“It’s a tool, because you also have to see how players are doing on the field,” Olmedo said. “You don’t just base the training off the numbers, you have to match it to what you’re seeing on the field.”
The play on the field is all that really matters. If Republic beats the Oakland Roots on Wednesday night, players will be the first ones to talk about their Whoop scores. After they see who had the top speed in the game, of course.
This story was originally published August 11, 2021 at 5:00 AM.