By Ethan Wilcox
Jasmine Johnson isn’t playing games on her iPad. Instead, she’s looking at the traffic light colors flashing across her screen during the Georgia women’s soccer team’s early morning practice drills.
Her iPad is tracking what is known as a “relative threshold.” Each player wears a device under their shirt to track data and player-related statistics with a database called STATSports to monitor this threshold. Johnson combs through weeks of data to determine this level, which helps her gauge the amount of work a player should be putting in at practice.
Johnson tracks real-time feedback on her iPad relayed from those devices the players are wearing. The threshold is visualized in the form of familiar traffic light colors: green is the sweet spot, and the player is good to keep going; orange means a player’s threshold is pushing a bit high, so they should lighten their exertion; red means the player should stop the drill.
Johnson is the associate director for athletic performance for the soccer team, so she attends multiple training sessions each week and helps the coaching staff decide how much to push players in practice. One of the metrics she looks at is called a dynamic index, which shows when a player is having heavier foot contacts. The heavier the contacts, the more tired the player is.
“I’ll walk around, and during the drill sometimes I’ll tell [head coach Keidane McAlpine], ‘Hey, maybe you should shorten this drill a little bit,’” Johnson said. “He’s really awesome about letting me interrupt them in practice.”
Georgia is no stranger to the straining fall schedule. The Bulldogs sometimes have to play twice a week, traveling to different states in a 10-game SEC gauntlet. Injuries often arise in such a compact schedule, but Georgia has only sustained two major injuries in 18 games after entering the season with five, according to the team.
The limited injuries and the ability for the team to manage fatigue are a result of the communication between Johnson and the coaching staff.
Johnson writes a detailed PDF report about what she observes in practice and sends it to the staff to review after sessions are over. McAlpine and his staff use the metrics to understand how training sessions are impacting the team. But McAlpine believes that numbers are not always everything, and that coaches also need to listen to the players.
“They’re the ones doing [the drills], and all the feedback and information they can give us is important,” McAlpine said.
Defender Virginia Odom said she appreciates how the trainers listen to the players.
“They’re very communicative… It’s pretty easy to communicate with them if you’re not feeling good.”
Odom takes extra precautions before getting on the field after suffering an ACL injury a few years ago. The risk of injury always exists, but Odom doesn’t let that bother her.
“I just really make sure to stretch really well before I get on the field,” Odom said. “I think it’s just more mental than anything else, like just reminding yourself that it’s not gonna happen again. If it does, nothing you can do to control that.”
ACL injuries are among the most common serious injuries in women’s soccer players. Johnson had the team do preventative exercises in the preseason to limit these.
“We worked really hard on having extra lifts for them,” Johnson said. “Besides them having lifts three times a week, they would come in for an extra fourth day, they would do their extra knee preventative work and strengthening exercises.”
Defender Laila Booker previously injured her hamstring. She understands that players also have expectations beyond training to remain healthy during the peak of the season.
Players are expected to get good sleep and keep track of their nutrition. Georgia offers an opportunity called The BITE, a place where athletes can grab food and avoid the crowds of dining halls. The players are also expected to see their trainers at some point during the day for treatment.
“How you manage your course load and things like that, making sure you’re not staying up too late, meeting with your teachers, making sure that that isn’t an additional stress there… that way you can be locked in with soccer,” Booker said.
Other than entering the season with five injuries, McAlpine said this season has been OK injury-wise.
“We’ve had different players out for small periods. That’s impacted our lineups pretty significantly. But overall… we’re in a pretty decent space going into the [SEC Tournament].”
The NCAA will change the women’s soccer schedule next season so there are only two double- game weeks. The change is meant to allow students to get more rest and reduce missed class time.
“It’ll allow us to prepare all week to actually have good periodization in and out of every game, which I’m very, very excited about,” McAlpine said.