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Lacrosse is a fast-paced, physically demanding game that includes intermittent high-intensity sprints, rapid changes of direction, contact and heightened hand-eye coordination.

To handle these demands, players need to be optimally prepared.

Enter Sports Performance Tracking (SPT).

The SPT2 athlete tracking system is designed to improve the performance of athletes and teams by tracking physical output with data metrics such as top speed, total distance, intensity and player workload. Without this information, a coach relies purely on guesswork to design a training program and risks overworking or underworking players.

Pushing players too hard during training sessions can result in a coach sending an exhausted, underperforming team out onto the field on game day. On the other hand, unprepared bodies won’t be able to maintain the physical demands put on them in competition. 

The result? A player’s chance of suffering an injury is significantly higher, and without a healthy group of players at the coach’s disposal, it’s incredibly difficult to attain and sustain success. 

With the information recorded by the SPT2 GPS device, coaches can create a smarter practice schedule by gaining a precise understanding of the physiological demands of the game — including position-and player-specific benchmarks, which can then be used for performance analysis, training and conditioning.

For Michael Gordon, athletic trainer at St. Xavier High School in Ohio, SPT has been a vital piece to his team’s health and wellness puzzle. Tracking movement patterns in games and practices allows him to achieve the ultimate goal of delivering the freshest, healthiest roster possible on game day. 

Gordon used the data to advise the coaching staff on how to ramp up or pull back activity in practices based on the opponent. “If we had three tough games in a seven-day stretch, making sure we decreased the volumes and intensities was key to keeping guys fresh and aiding in injury prevention,” he said.

With the real-time information and feedback that GPS tracking provides, a team’s performance culture evolves. Players become more self-aware, and this helps them focus on improving their performance every day. 

Team USA recently added SPT GPS technology to its toolkit to help train the nation’s premier lacrosse players and optimize performance.

“The U.S. National Teams Program decided upon the SPT technology for two simple reasons,” said Skip Lichtfuss, director of national teams and high performance at US Lacrosse. “One, it provides basic, essential data to track the training load on the athletes. Two, the data will be analyzed over time and will enable our strength and training staffs to evaluate and update our training sessions to provide maximum results.”