How Duke, Marquette And Other NCAA Tournament Teams Use Catapult To Track Work Load, Improve Performance

As Marquette point guard Tyler Kolek sat on a chair in a Madison Square Garden locker room after a Big East tournament game last Friday night, he took off his uniform top, revealing a thin black compression vest underneath. Kolek was asked whether the vest was protecting some sort of upper body injury.

No, he replied. He explained there was a small wearable device tucked into the vest that helped track his movements during that night’s game against Connecticut. All of the Marquette players wore the device, which is manufactured by Catapult, a sports technology company that was founded in Australia nearly 20 years ago.

Since then, Catapult has built an impressive list of more than 3,600 sports team clients in more than 40 sports and 100 countries.

Marquette is one of several schools participating in the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments that use Catapult’s products, which primarily track players’ movements while they’re practicing or playing in games.

Other schools that qualified for the NCAA tournament and are Catapult customers include UConn, Notre Dame, UCLA and Louisville on the women’s side and Duke, Iowa State, Virginia and Northwestern on the men’s side.

Most use Catapult’s athlete monitoring system that captures data on players’ performance. Players have a small device/chip with an accelerometer in it that is inserted into the vest between their shoulder blades or sometimes stitched into their undershirts or waistbands, depending on the school.

The system allows athletic trainers and sports science employees to analyze how every player moves, whether they sprint or jog or walk, and track it over time to recognize patterns. The system measures a player’s work load (or what Catapult calls player load) and how much effort he or she exerts in different situations and helps teams determine how that impacts their performance.

“It helps me understand basketball a lot,” said Todd Smith, Marquette’s assistant athletics director for applied sports science and performance. “The main goal is for us to have the highest work capacity that we can….Our goal is to get the highest player load we can and prepare for that the right way so we stay healthy.”

Smith added that the measurements and data extracted from the Catapult system helps inform Marquette’s coaches how to structure practices and how hard to push players. He said coach Shaka Smart, who led the Golden Eagles to the Big East regular season and tournament titles and the No. 2 seed in the East Region, has embraced Catapult and asks about the data on a regular basis.

Marquette’s other coaches are on board, too, according to Smith. The school has been using Catapult’s products since 2015, and currently the men’s and women’s basketball, soccer and lacrosse teams are utilizing Catapult in various capacities.

“I think the whole load management thing gets a bad rap in the NBA because it’s always about pulling things back or resting,” Smith said. “Our goal is not to rest kids. Our goal is to get to the highest work capacity possible safely. If you do that the right way and you’re smart about it, you can do that without having to rest people. You just have to be smart about how much you work.”

He added: “We’re to the point where Coach Smart has a really good understanding of (Catapult), my staff has a really good understanding of it and we work together to give us the best, most finely tuned engine we can moving forward, especially now in March.”

While sports science and data/analytics in sports has exploded in recent years Catapult was one of the first technology companies that targeted athletics. The company was formed in the early 2000s as a partnership between the Australian Institute of Sport, a sports training institute, and Cooperative Research Centres, a government research program. The Australian government’s goal was to use technology to improve the country’s performance in the Olympics.

Starting 2009, Catapult expanded outside of Australia and into several sports. Catapult strikes deals primarily with teams instead of leagues. The company’s clients include teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL and European soccer leagues.

Today, the company generates about 95% of the company’s revenue and 95% of its clients are outside of Australia, according to Will Lopes, Catapult’s chief executive. The company’s shares have traded on the Australian Securities Exchange since 2014, although Lopes and the most of the senior management team works out of Boston.

For the first half of fiscal year 2023, Catapult generated $41.6 million, up 16% from the same time period a year ago and the first time the company has exceeded $40 million in revenue for a half year. The company lost $13.4 million on a free cash flow basis during the period, but it expects to generate positive free cash flow next year.

Besides the athlete monitoring system, Catapult recently began selling an enhanced video analysis solution that can integrate with the wearable devices. The company entered the video technology sector in 2016 through its $60 million acquisition of XOS Digital Inc., which specialized in digital video for coaches and teams in the NFL, NHL and college sports.

In July 2021, Catapult expanded deeper into video with the acquisition of SBG Sports Software Limited, a London-based company that worked with Formula 1, soccer and rugby. The company plans on releasing the new video solution during the men’s Final Four, which takes place on April 1 and 3 in Houston.

“We realized the combination of video analysis and wearables is really integral to the company and it’s really integral to the teams we work with,” Lopes said. “We needed to either make the (video) solution more scalable or we needed to go find something else in the market to bring in…..The video solution we’re now bringing to market now allows our clients to combine the wearables data and improves the workflow so that it makes it easier for them to share it with the athletes, the other coaches on the team and in some cases the front office for recruiting purposes.”

Lopes said some schools such as Duke have been helping Catapult test some products that the company plans on rolling out. Nick Potter, Duke’s director of high performance and sports science, said the men’s basketball team has integrated Catapult’s technology into its program since 2016.

After each practice, Potter puts together a detailed report on the players and their health that includes work load using the Catapult data and sends it to coach Jon Scheyer and his assistants as well as the team doctor and others.

“(The data from Catapult on work load) is one piece, but it’s a huge piece into this whole sports science and athlete monitoring system,” Potter said. “It’s not my opinion. It’s objective numbers. If we’re trying to load a certain amount and we’re already really high, from a scientific standpoint, we can have one more hard day and one more light day versus it being my opinion of, ‘I think we’ve done a lot.’ It’s more of a scientific approach.”

As Potter spoke on Tuesday afternoon, he was preparing to board a flight in a few hours to Orlando, Fla., where No. 5 seed Duke plays No. 12 Oral Roberts on Thursday night. The next afternoon, No. 2 seed Marquette faces No. 15 Vermont in Columbus, Ohio.

If Duke and Marquette win three games apiece, they will meet in the East Region’s Elite 8 on March 25 at Madison Square Garden. That would be a matchup of two schools that have embraced Catapult and sports science in general.

“We’re not trying to tell the coaches what to do,” Smith said. “That’s not it at all. We’re just here to help justify what their eyeballs are seeing because they’ve been doing this a long time. We’re just here to aid and advise what we think is going to keep the kids on the courts or the fields the best and working at the highest level possible.”