At the University of Oklahoma, Sooners coaches are revolutionizing the 40-yard dash, one of football’s most fundamental tests of speed.
Enlisting the help of Zybek Sports, which has developed performance measurement tech used at the NFL Combine, the Sooners created a 70-yard turf field within their brand new performance center. Under that stretch of gridiron lies 2,000 pounds of force plates that, with total precision, measure not just the speed (above-ground laser sensors take care of that), but also the dynamics of a player during the 40-yard dash and other skill tests.
“When you’re running the 40-yard dash, the time is an effect of what you’ve done, it’s not the cause,” Zybek Sports founder Mike Weinstein told SportTechie. “The cause of an athlete running fast is the ground base forces that the athlete’s able to generate.”
The force plates are located under the starting line for the dash — extending six feet behind and 20 feet in front – where the athlete’s first steps are the most important. It’s the horizontal movement that is crucial, Weinstein said.
The technology that for the past seven years has been used to test at the NFL Combine is now being applied at prominent Division I athletic programs.
Weinstein has been working with Sooners coaches for quite some time — 2 1/2 years before construction on the new facility began more than two years ago. The result of almost five years of talks between Zybek Sports and Oklahoma is a system that can provide athletes and coaches with the exact information that can help them improve and develop over the course of four years playing college football.
“Now we’re able to quantify the forces the athlete is generating and then overlay those on the video to show exactly what’s working and what’s not working — in real-time feedback,” Weinstein said.
Zybek Sports also has two wall-mounted cameras that focus on the 40-yard dash markers to collect video of a player doing a run. Combined with the data from the force plates, the videos allow Sooners personnel to match specific data to a particular frame.
“The data’s really important, but the video kind of brings it all home,” Weinstein said.
But the focus on complete athlete development at Oklahoma doesn’t stop with force plates and 40-yard dashes. Zybek Sports also installed a 3D scanner that takes full-body images of athletes and renders them virtually, as if for a video game, Weinstein explained. Unlike a normal photo, the 3D image allows the coaching staff to follow a player’s body measurements throughout his college career.
“The immediate use of this right here is one, just to really document that, more than a picture, but to really show the athlete’s body and volume and dimensions in a 3D fashion, but also create this really cool athlete’s profiles and video clips based on the athlete’s 3D image,” Weinstein said.
Though Zybek has access to a trove of player data in an IBM database, only the client — Oklahoma, in this case — can receive the results of analytics performed on that data.
And while all of this new technology inside the strength and conditioning center is useful for current Oklahoma athletes, coaches’ eyes are constantly on another prize: top high-school recruits. Oklahoma can attract a modern class of aspiring professional athletes who are increasingly interested in evaluating and improving their performance.
“What we’ve done at Oklahoma — this is the first time we’ve done this; we’re pioneers in this area at OU — we’ve built all the systems into their new facility that they’ve put together,” Weinstein said, “and this way, they’re always there and they can show that this is literally built into their program for really helping develop athletes for what might be their next steps at the NFL.”
