Oregon State Uses Insights to Help Improve Training and Performance

An E&I 2-Minute Article

At many universities, the idea that the IT professionals on staff could have a dramatic impact on the school’s athletics program is novel, to say the least. Install a new printer for the athletics department or troubleshoot the network? That’s where IT makes a difference — not in fine-tuning athletes’ development or helping coaches perfect training regimens.

But Oregon State athletics hired a new IT director on the Data and Media Infrastructure Team. It originally was a very traditional IT support role and did not include analytics. But the new IT director started asking coaches how he could help? He would ask questions like “what kind of data would help you enhance your program?”

Their responses were as varied as the teams themselves. The baseball team’s pitching staff wanted data that could help determine which pitcher to start and when. Rowing coaches were curious about the power their athletes generated with each stroke and how that fluctuated based on water currents. And many coaches wanted a way to view the data they already had — on nutrition plans or workout results, for example — in ways that made the information more usable.

The new IT director reached out to CDW, since CDW had helped him in prior roles. With a very low budget, the team was pulling data and gaining athletics department support. One major challenge was finding a way to pull data from disparate environments, whether the baseball field, the football team’s weight room or student dining halls and dormitories. In addition, any data collection solution would need to work seamlessly with the software products of various third-party vendors — the radar gun that records athletes’ pitch speed, for example, and the GPS units that soccer players wear in training. 

The project needed an analytics component to get coaches the insights they needed. With CDW, the OSU team solved its hosting dilemma by adding a Dell EMC Unity 300 hybrid flash storage system to its infrastructure. And on the data aggregation and analytics front, the team chose two solutions from Microsoft. It used the SharePOint collaborative platform which helped with data collection, and a cloud-based analytics tool that filtered and processed data. All along the way, CDW facilitated conversations and solutions that helped OSU move its innovative project forward.

Data-driven insights helped athletes achieve peak performance. The insights empower coaches and players to take a holistic view of performance, understanding which factors are likely to help athletes hit their peak and which may make them more prone to injury. OSU baseball coaches, for example, can harvest data from multiple sources to determine how a batter might improve his swing or predict when a pitcher is likely to throw his best. 

What OSU is doing with CDW and data analytics is revolutionary in intercollegiate athletics. Coaches are using data-driven insights to make strategic decisions on the field, and their athletes are doing the same to optimize how they compete and train. 

This is just a summary of a case study, by CDW. Here is the Full Article.