Sideline use of tablets and technology is a familiar sight on NBA benches, but has been slow to make the transition to the college game. Significant change for college coaches is likely a couple of years away.getty images
In the college basketball game of the future, coaches will design plays on computer tablets, make substitutions based on analytics delivered in real time to the bench, and show players a video of what they did wrong rather than tell them.
Some of this is happening already in professional basketball around the globe, but the college game has been slow to introduce these new advancements to its sidelines.
“Certainly, at the higher levels of the game, technology has been more embraced with the resources that are available in the NBA and FIBA,” said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president for basketball. “Even at the lower levels of the game in high school and grassroots, you’ve got a lot more technology that’s employed than we are permitting in our games. We’ll see how it works out, but I do think that there’s a lot of opportunity there for the game, and we need to be more progressive in that way. … The time has come.”
Conferences have been allowed to experiment with live stats being delivered to the bench, but more significant change is probably two years away.
The most obvious way technology might affect the college game is by allowing the coaches to use software to better understand the trends in a live game. For example, if a team is outscoring its opponent with a certain combination of players on the floor, the software would flag that. It could also tell the coach that a majority of points are coming from the left side or right side of the court, or what percentage of the time a team scores when the ball is passed from one side of the court to the other. That type of information also could be an enhancement for the television broadcast.
Much of this is available to coaches now after the game, but not during.
“There’s some different technology with wearable sensors in the ball and in the uniform,” said Dan Leibovitz, the SEC’s associate commissioner for men’s basketball. “That would allow for data in terms of player movement, ball movement, and just some new and different data points.”
With any kind of equipment change among the 350 schools in Division I comes questions about maintaining a level playing court.
“There are some complexities around it in terms of the financial investment, and the fairness, and making sure that it’s accessible to both teams,” Gavitt said. “Those are all hurdles we just have to jump over. We need to modernize the game because that’s the way kids are growing up in the game now. It’s part of their experience of learning the game.”
