Case Study – University of Manitoba

The University of Manitoba (UM) is a public research university in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Founded in 1877, it was the first university in Western Canada. The school’s athletic teams, known as the Bisons, compete in the Canada West conference. UM consistently ranks among the country’s top 10 universities for producing Academic All-Canadian athletes.

Extending the Capabilities of a Small S&C Staff

In the early 2010s, UM received significant funding to invest in facilities, staff, and other resources for its sports teams. This included a new football stadium, a high-performance training center, and a dedicated strength and conditioning coaching group. After evaluating several athlete management systems to support their programming, these coaches selected AthleteMonitoring.

“We have around 400 varsity athletes, and the former head strength coach saw the need to synthesize information, parse through large amounts of data, and manage relationships with them,” said Cole Scheller, lead strength and conditioning coach at UM. “The aim was to bring data together in a central hub so we had greater context and could make information actionable. That led to selecting AthleteMonitoring.”
The athletes Cole mentioned are spread across eight women’s and eight men’s varsity squads. Back when the strength and conditioning staff used paper on clipboards and spreadsheets, managing practice and training data for all of them was extremely time-consuming and the data was limited to whoever recorded it.

“We only have two full-time staff and there’s no way we could collect objective, subjective, and injury data for 400 athletes,” Cole said. “We’d need at least 15 people to do it, and we don’t have the resources for that. AthleteMonitoring replaces an army of grad assistants with a platform that’s accessible at any given time.”

Since AthleteMonitoring was implemented, it’s much faster to capture information for all of UM’s athletes and it’s instantly available to every authorized user on the performance and medical teams. This makes it easier to know what’s going on with each sport throughout the day.

“Our men’s hockey program skates at 8:00 AM and our track and field program starts practice at 6:00 PM, so the breadth of the timing makes it difficult to establish set contact points,” Cole said. “AthleteMonitoring allows each sport to push information to us, so we see what’s going on, which makes it a very useful tool.”

Joining the Dots in the Offseason

One of the challenges that Cole and his fellow staff members faced was understanding what their athletes did during the offseason. Over half of them are not from Winnipeg, and when they went home for the summer, they could be given training programs, but there was no way to know if they followed them or not. The AthleteMonitoring system provides greater visibility and accountability.

“Because we’re involved in high-performance sport, we don’t deal with six- or eight-week training blocks – it’s 52 weeks of the year,” Cole said. “There are chunks of time when we’re not with our athletes – like over summer break – and we needed a way to maintain those relationships and see what they were doing with their workouts. With AthleteMonitoring, we can look at in-season loads, create yearly training plans, and build up athletes’ volume in the weeks before training camps start.

Coming in, we can see the level that every player was at during the previous month, and tailor practices and strength sessions accordingly. Our football team had its best season in 23 years and part of that was matching their training camp and on-field demands with their summer training.”
Many college strength and conditioning programs store athlete data in separate systems, applications, and databases, which makes it difficult to share and act upon information. Others have blind spots where there’s no context at all. Using AthleteMonitoring has solved these issues for Cole and his fellow coaches.

“Software doesn’t make decisions – the professionals using it do,” Cole said. “But you can’t make informed choices without information. We log data in AthleteMonitoring like assessment results, training loads, and session RPEs. It allows us to see each player’s progress over time. Data is accessible in one place and gives us a shared language, which improves our organizational agility. It cuts down the need for seeking information because you can easily pull it.”

For an athlete management system to be practical, it needs to be user-friendly. While AthleteMonitoring includes advanced functionality – such as injury and illness monitoring based on IOC standards – it’s also simple to operate and administer.
“I only need to look at AthleteMonitoring for five or 10 minutes in the morning and periodically throughout the day because all the information I need is right there,” Cole said. “I can also provide each coach with a simple snapshot of their team’s physical state and readiness. It’s easy to get it to show exactly what you want because it’s so customizable. If you have a program that is well-informed and holistic, almost every day is going to be fine. Then you can just identify one-off outliers to start conversations about.”

Proactively Managing Injury and Return to Play

In addition to cataloging objective performance data and subjective wellness responses in AthleteMonitoring, Cole is also utilizing the system to collect and report on injury statistics. This doesn’t just improve hindsight but enables training programs to be tweaked proactively to reduce the incidence of injury going forward.

“Driving performance with our athletes isn’t that difficult – it’s reducing the likelihood of injury that’s hard,” Cole said. “Three years ago, I noticed that we were getting too many hamstring injuries in the skill position groups on our football team, so I started having them sprint year-round. Now the hamstring injury rate went way down. AthleteMonitoring allows you to target things like this and do something about them. When we’re able to make micro changes for consecutive seasons, it produces macro results.”

Making such informed changes enables UM to keep its overall injury rates low. Yet there will always be some athletes who get hurt. Logging these incidents quickly in AthleteMonitoring, enabling the performance and medical teams to coordinate their efforts, and uploading clinical notes, treatment plans, and more help provide timely care and accelerate return-to-play protocols.

“I know what happens to an athlete before they tell me about it because the medical staff did their thing in AthleteMonitoring and I was notified,” Cole said. “We have a weekly meeting with them where we go through athlete updates. I can upload an exercise program for an injured player so that when they go to physical therapy, they don’t need to do those exercises again. Clinical notes are available in the summertime to make sure that if someone got an ankle injury right before the season ended, they resolve it while they’re away.”

Load management is one of the biggest challenges for any injured athlete. Some are so eager to return to full fitness that they often overdo their training, while others don’t get sufficient load exposure. Real-time tracking in AthleteMonitoring helps Cole and the medical staff manage acute-to-chronic workload and progress each player at the right rate, so they come back strong and ready.

“Data visualization has allowed us to avoid the mistake of someone quadrupling their training volume over three or four days,” Cole said. “We can spread out the load instead so that they safely ramp up on their way back to full performance.”

Informing Player Relationships and Development

As important as it is to collect, collate, and visualize objective data in AthleteMonitoring, this only tells half of each athletes’ story. Cole believes that it’s also crucial to obtain subjective data about how every player is feeling, what their recovery looks like, and if there are any issues they’re dealing with outside of sports. This is why the school created a wellness questionnaire that they send out weekly. If someone’s scores are outside their normal ranges, it flags in the system so that Cole or another staff member can follow up and dig deeper into the issue. This way, the school is helping safeguard its athletes’ physical and mental wellbeing.

“You could have the best practice plan and best training program in the world, but if someone’s not eating or not sleeping or they ended a relationship, it doesn’t matter,” Cole said. “Our athletes have lives outside of college sports, and AthleteMonitoring surveys help provide greater context of what they’re dealing with, so we have a more complete picture. It’s the things that are unseen that AthleteMonitoring does a great job of illuminating. This enables us to target people who might need help, so we can check in and let them know about the resources that are available to them.”

As well as referring students to experts like counselors and nutritionists, Cole also takes it upon himself to check in with athletes if their survey responses indicate that they might be struggling. If enough fields are color-coded red, he can see with a quick glance at an AthleteMonitoring dashboard who he needs to talk to.

“The hardest part of my job is relationship management with the athletes,” Cole said. “It makes them feel valued if I know what’s going on in their lives. If someone’s wellness score has been really poor for the past few days, it allows me to ask, ‘How are you doing?’ Without having that information pushed to me through AthleteMonitoring, it would be a lot more difficult to have those conversations.”

Another way that UM has enhanced its athlete data collection is by augmenting hard numbers with rate of perceived exertion (RPE) scores. Doing so provides greater insight into how difficult players find each training session so that coaches can better balance more and less intense sessions during each practice week.

“The thing that causes friction is differences between reality and expectation,” Cole said. “If you’re designing a sport practice or a training session, you might think something is easy, but some of your athletes could think it’s super challenging. AthleteMonitoring helps to better inform what coaches’ expectations should be. Our hockey coach went through every drill his team was going to use for the entire year and gave it an RPE scale based off of how hard his players thought each practice was.”

While Cole has to write programs with lines of best fit for entire teams, being able to see how each athlete’s metrics change and comparing this to their normal ranges presents a greater chance for personalization.

“AthleteMonitoring tells us if someone is different from their normal self, which is useful for fitting into each person’s own context,” he said. “It gives you an opportunity to make everybody feel like an individual in a team setting.”
The ability to track players’ progress across their entire college sports careers allows Cole to take a long-range view of athlete development that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

“With the longitudinal data AthleteMonitoring provides, we’ve started to work on the nuances of player development instead of just objective outputs in the weight room,” he said. “If you’re a women’s hockey player who’s in year four and you’re back squatting 140 kilos and running 17.5 on the yo-yo test, what do you want to work on next?”

It’s essential for UM’s athletic department to have a full-featured, stable AMS that offers continual uptime. What is also key to the ongoing success of the athlete performance and wellness initiative is that Cole is working with a trusted long-term partner.

“AthleteMonitoring’s customer service is awesome,” he said. “Anytime I have an issue, I have a direct line to a familiar point of contact, who always gets back to me right away. That has helped ensure we’re able to use the system exactly how we need to. They really value our customer experience.”

Quick Facts

Focus: College sports
Location: Winnipeg, Canada
Number of teams: 16
Sports: Basketball, golf, football, track and field, soccer, cross country, volleyball, hockey, swimming