For the last few weeks, John Calipari has teased fans and reporters with references to an innovative new system Kentucky basketball is using to monitor the performance of his players in practice and games. On Thursday, he gave the Big Blue Nation an inside look at what he’s been talking about.Each Wildcat now wears a device that monitors exertion rate, sport zones, caloric expenditure and heart rate. Here’s Coach Cal talking about how he and his staff have been using the data:
The device gives us the ability to monitor and check how much effort players are giving in real time. Because we are able to read their heart rates, now we know who is maxing out in practice and who is hiding, who thinks they’re going hard and who isn’t, who is able to push themselves through pain, and who has mental toughness to be special.Everybody perceives his exertion level differently. Some feel they are working extremely hard and they’re not, and others perceive that they’re not working very hard when they really are. My hope is to get everybody in that second category. I want them to realize what their exertion level is in games compared to what it is in practice, and this device helps us do that.I always say the film doesn’t lie, that you can have every excuse you want but the truth will show up on film. Guess what? The monitoring system doesn’t lie either.For the last few weeks, Rock Oliver has been sitting in front of the computer for every practice and workout so he can monitor our players’ heart rates and exertion levels in real time. At any point in practice I can look over to him and ask him what the rates are and he can give me the percentages. He can tell me if they’re going at 80 percent or 90 percent or whatever it is. If I think the rates are too low – if we are in the 70s or 80s – we get on the baseline and we run to get them back in the 90s.To give you some perspective, our players’ heart rates work at about a 90-percent level in an actual game. If they are only in that 80-percent level in practice, which was happening to a few of our players, they are so far behind when the game requires them to give 90-95 percent exertion that it looks like they can’t play.
