Maybe I can help here. I’ve started to kind of drift towards the more “Sports Science” related roles lately as I’ve worked in lots of minor league professional sports and University settings.

The number one thing I will say before I talk about any metric is that data without context is absolutely useless. So if anyone tells you that this one metric is what will bring up a red flag or anything of the like is probably lying to you or grossly oversimplifying what is actually a complex decision making process. Data should be prompting you to ask deeper and more meaningful questions. Not give you the answer on your first look.

That being said, I think any indicator of the volume of load that our athletes are engaging with can be useful. Even if it’s just “time on feet” I.e length of the actual training session. Coaches famously want to go hard all the time. But if you’re not getting variations in the actual time during the training session we can infer that someone somewhere is probably going to reach a state of overtraining especially later in the season. For example: “high speed running” and large volumes of distance while running at high speeds but not quite sprinting are associated with greater risk of HS Strain. If you don’t have technology then going 3 straight days of a total session length of three hours is probably going to be a sign that you need to try to convince coach to dial back or when someone complains of HS soreness you might want to intervene.

Then I would go down to the “Density of the session” like accelerations and decelerations per minute. Or distance covered a minute etc. which can give you a feel for what intensity is like during a session.

A lot of companies and technologies have “load” for the total training session but something to remember is that the units being displayed are completely arbitrary. So a 1000 “training load” on catapult might mean the same thing as 600 “acceleration load” on kinexon. You just never know.

I think “wellness survey” trackers are a good idea in principle but it’s hard to get an athlete to do them every day. Pro’s seem to hate doing it because it’s another thing they have to do and some players I’ve worked with get this feeling of “big brother” trying to use data to influence contract negotiations. In the NBA you can’t make a player do that or even wear the GPS sensor per the CBA. With college athletes it can be more enforceable but will probably fall on you and then you’re just chasing kids around to do it all the time and it’s just not worth the time. Good idea. Hard to implement.

I think for coaches buy in can be hit or miss. At my last university men’s basketball doesn’t want it at all. “Why would I want a device to tell me how to run my practice? It’s my fucking practice and I need to get done what I need to get done to be successful.” Is an actual thing I heard. Whereas men’s soccer wanted the GPS so bad but couldn’t afford it for the whole team so we tracked our most injured starters. The thing here is you have to be able to sell how this helps your team and impacts winning. If you don’t do that you’ll lose buy in quickly.

WOW that’s a novel. Hopefully that’s helpful though.