Data has transformed the personnel side of coaching in football, with GPS tracking and machine learning being used to anticipate player success from college through to the NFL, but there are still significant gains left to be had. Elite coach Pete Bommarito and sports scientist Dr. Monique Mokha are taking football analytics to a new level using motion capture.
“The game today isn’t just ‘I’m injured, I had surgery, I go to physical therapy, now I’m returning to train and I’m returning to play’,” explains Pete Bommarito. “No, sports itself is stress, and quantifying the magnitude of what sports does to the body helps the overall game.”
Bommarito has a background in sports and clinical biomechanics, but has built his career as a practitioner offering elite-level coaching to athletes through his company, Bommarito Performance Systems. He’s discussing a study of would-be NFL players that he and Dr. Mokha, a Professor of Health and Human Performance at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, USA, are undertaking.
The pair met at a conference in 2017 and got talking. “We were just sketching ideas, like two battery sparks popping back and forth. And then as our lab at Nova started developing, we started asking, ‘What’s possible?’” says Dr. Mokha.
Bommarito and Dr. Mokha have established an annual project that uses motion capture and other technologies to quantify the performance of NFL hopefuls ahead of the Scouting Combine and Pro Day, which gives talent assessors an opportunity to see players undergo a battery of physical and mental tests.
They worked out a system that involves Bommarito’s athletes being tested in Dr. Mokha’s lab ahead of his pre-Combine training camp, with data on each player being fed to Bommarito before training starts. Following the six to eight week camp, players return to the lab, which has 10 Vicon T-Series cameras and a Bertec treadmill, to be tested again so that the research team can analyze changes in the athletes’ performance.
Quantifying acceleration
“It’s not just draft prep and having people run fast,” explains Bommarito. “It’s a blueprint for motion, period. Anytime you’re moving in sport, you are accelerating. People talk about multidirectional sports, and how you’ve got to be able to change direction. Well, that’s great, but the challenge of changing direction is accelerating out of the change of direction. That is a stride that needs to be quantified.”
Bommarito says that the study is proving his theory that speed and injury prevention are related. “If you’re striving towards symmetry, you will not only be more efficient in terms of your speed, you’re going to be more efficient in terms of injury prevention,” he says.
“That’s a theory I’ve had for years, but we’ve had to look at symmetry using all the medical disciplines: look at that holy grail of maximizing the splits, maximizing your time, and finding that when the medical team says we’re symmetrical, and we’re running better. But it’s got to be quantified. And now we’re actually proving my theory to be accurate, that symmetry equals not only injury prevention, but performance.”
Because the study is focused on training for the speed- and strength-focused Combine and Pro Days, rather than football-specific skills, its applications aren’t limited to football. “We’re able to document the movement strategies that change when you’re trying to get someone faster,” says Dr. Mokha.
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