Tracking athletes with a GPS

Opponents know that Kaelen Watson, U of T's most recent female athlete of the year, is a force to be reckoned with on the field hockey turf. What few would know is that Watson and her 2010 CIS championship-winning team are playing with an unprecedented, hidden edge: a tiny GPS tracking system tucked between their shoulder blades that's tracking their game to enhance the team's training strategy. Jason Vescovi, a former post-doctoral fellow in the Faculty of Phyiscal Education and Health and one-time research associate with Dean Ira Jacobs, recently chose the University of Toronto team to broaden his research using GPS technology. Currently an applied sport scientist at the Canadian Sport Centre Ontario (CSCO) and the physiologist for the women's national field hockey team, Vescovi is one of the only experts in North America to use a GPS system for studying female athletes. Monitoring Demands of the Game Much like the systems in many cars today, Vescovi's GPS units track where athletes go, how far they travel and at what speed. "Just as endurance athletes train in certain heart rate zones, we're able to track distances covered in different speed zones," said Vescovi. "So instead of monitoring heart rate ranges, we're looking at speed zones from zero to six kilometres an hour, being walking, all the way up to above 18 kilometres an hour, which is considered sprinting, and then everywhere in between." The technology sheds new light on the demands of the game, giving Vescovi more detailed information to make targeted recommendations for training and developing players from one level to the next.