Miami's Always Had Speed - Now There's Proof
By David Villavicencio
HurricaneSports.com
CORAL GABLES, Fla. – “FEELEY! GIVE ME 10 MORE!”
Assistant strength and conditioning coach Kevin Kroboth can frequently be heard shouting those exact words for all of the Greentree Practice Fields to hear.
Kroboth, who is in his first year on the strength staff at Miami, instructs director of strength and conditioning David Feeley to drop and give him 10 push-ups every time a Miami Hurricane runs 20 miles-per-hour or faster. The Canes have kept Feeley pretty busy over the first six days of fall camp, assigning him over 200 push-ups.
“The 20 miles-per-hour mark is going to be where your skill guys are pretty close to top end speed,” Feeley said. “We thought it would be a really fun carrot to dangle in front of them to put me to work a little bit, especially since we have put them to work all over. There is a lot of fun in some guy screaming, ‘Hey, Feeley! Get down and give me ten!’ They’re enjoying it thoroughly.”
The push-ups may be the most visible part of this story, but how the Hurricanes are capturing the speed and other performance data is what is most important. The Catapult wearable GPS system tracks the performance of each individual student-athlete and that is something that Miami’s Senior Associate Athletic Director for Performance, Health and Wellness, Luis Feigenbaum, believes will be a game changer for the Canes.
“Catapult is a revolutionary measurement system where we can track how fast our student-athletes are performing, how much work they’re doing, how much load and the directions that they’re moving in,” Feigenbaum said. “It should help with the overall incorporation of maintaining our student-athletes healthy and also it plays a role in understanding where people are when they’re coming back from injuries.”
Adding the Catapult system was an investment in student-athlete wellness. Head coach Manny Diaz and Miami’s administration have made a commitment to giving the football student-athletes a first-class experience athletically, academically and with their well-being.
“Part of the conversation with coach Diaz and Blake James and Jenn Strawley was that this device will help us compete and will keep our athletes safe,” Feeley said. “We now have tangible ‘red zones,’ and that’s what we are trying to prevent every day. You want every student-athlete who leaves here to say, ‘Wow, I had the most positive experience at the University of Miami.’ Winning comes with that and how they’re treated goes along with that. There is an obvious huge workload that these guys have to endure, but if they know that you’re looking out for their best interests and making sure that they’re safe then it’s a win for everybody. That how I’d want my kids to be treated.”
The investment was a big one in the eyes of Feeley and the rest of Miami’s coaching staff. They came forward with the idea to add Catapult to their program and Miami’s donor base quickly made their dream a reality.
“We are so grateful for our donors who helped make this happen. It’s not happening without them and I hope they realize how important this is to making our program better. Their efforts are appreciated greatly. That tool makes us better. It’s not a waterfall or a slide or anything like that. The things that we are asking for are things that make us 100 percent better and they knocked it out of the park by helping to make this happen.”
The Catapult system has been fully integrated into Miami’s practices, with every single student-athlete wearing their GPS unit underneath their uniform and feeding data into the computer for analysis.
“It’s an incredible tool that we use and one of the most valuable tools in all of sports performance,” Feeley said. “It is a tangible way to track and show effort and show distance traveled and how intense those distances are traveled throughout the entire workout. Before this system, you really couldn’t do that. It gives you such a tangible way to make people better out on the field. It’s just about irreplaceable.”
There are five main data categories the Hurricanes are analyzing with the Catapult system: Player Load, Player Load per Minute, Max Velocity, Inertial Movement Analysis and Total Distance. Each data category is different and they all come together to help Miami’s coaching staff create a system for optimal performance.
“Player load is basically your effort throughout the day, how hard you’re working,” Feeley explained. “Player load per minute, that shows how hard are you going per minute. How much bang for your buck are you getting? You want to go high, high, high. The higher the number, the better, but there is a point where if you go too high, you run the risk of hurting somebody. That’s why I love this. It’s like a giant check system as long as you can understand the data and what it’s telling you.”
The Inertial Movement Analysis (IMA) is quickly becoming a major asset in injury rehab and recovery. Miami’s staff took the baseline measurements of each player while fully healthy in the offseason and is using the baseline IMA to gauge how an injured player’s rehab is progressing.
“It’s extremely valuable in that it also helps you track somebody coming back from an injury,” Feeley said. “It helps you see where the asymmetries appear as to how they’re breaking right and breaking left. To the coach’s eyes, you might be fooled a little bit on how somebody is bracing or the athlete may need to see the data to understand it and then they have a tangible goal to reach.”
With total distance, Catapult tracks the total amount of yards traveled in a given session. Each position group has different parameters they should meet because linemen will run differently than skill position players like wide receivers and defensive backs.
“You have your max velocities and that is where the guys get super competitive,” Feeley said. “That’s where the push-ups come in and my chest is really sore right now.”
Miami has consistently been one of the fastest programs in the country for the last four decades, but did not actually know just how fast they were until the addition of the Catapult system while running on the track this summer.
“These guys want to know how fast they are,” Feeley said. “They are fighting tooth and nail to do it. They want to beat that number. You want to have guys running over 20 miles-per-hour. We’ve got guys running 22 and 23 miles-per-hour on the track and once you crack that 23, you’re talking real-deal speed. Once they start hitting 22 miles per hour in pads, now we are talking. They will compete for that number just like when it’s max squat day and they compete for that higher weight. Now they have tangible data on how that goes. When you look at how many hard accelerations they have they want to know where they’re at because when they burst in a short area, they know that is football. That one step will get you beat in football, so they know if they can get faster with that first step then we are cooking with fire.”
With Catapult, the Canes can compare how a player is running from practice to practice and even from period to period within practices. That goes a long way towards helping Miami’s staff coach its players.
“If you want to be fast, you have to run fast,” Feeley said. “You can’t just tell someone they looked great today. That doesn’t mean anything. We now have tangible information. You can tell a guy, ‘Hey, you’re running really hard. Keep it up.’ Or you can say ‘despite how you feel today, you’re still hitting a good number. Just because you don’t feel well today doesn’t mean you’re not performing well.’ Catapult allows us to use this data to better coach our athletes.”
Kroboth is the man analyzing the data in real time during each and every Hurricanes practice and it would be hard to find someone better to monitor everything that Catapult is tracking. A former assistant strength coach at Baylor, Kroboth worked for two years under the direction of one of the foremost experts in the field of sport performance in Baylor Assistant AD for Sport Performance Andy Althoff.
“I had a bunch of players at Temple that love Kevin Kroboth and they credit him with a lot of their speed improvements,” Feeley said. “We were going to hire him at Temple and I brought him here right away. The fact that Kevin had all that speed experience and he was at the Raiders for a little bit and is quite talented at teaching the events of pro day and the combine made him very attractive to add to our strength staff. Then with him being around Andy and going over Catapult data and the way Kevin can watch people run and help them improve their running mechanics, it was a no brainer to bring him down here.”
Kroboth can routinely be found sitting under a tent analyzing the data within the Catapult interface. He extrapolates the data and jots notes, while tagging the practice in real time to make post-practice analysis instantaneous. The only time you really see him get up is when a player cracks the 20 miles-per-hour mark. Feeley hopes to see Kroboth continue to sprint out of the tent to assign him more push-ups throughout the rest of the 2019 season.
“After the way they worked this summer, I think the players have earned quite a few months of telling me to get down and do some work,” Feeley said.
