Toronto FC monitoring athletes remotely during COVID-19 (part one)
For many teams, athlete monitoring has become dramatically difficult during this uncertain time. Players, coaches, and other performance staff are having to find new ways of training as access to facilities and even outdoor space in many parts of the world is becoming increasingly limited during COVID-19 restrictions.
Catapult continues to support its over 3000 teams as best as it possibly can. This is no easy task but the company is continuing to ensure teams are best prepared for the highly anticipated return of sports worldwide.
One team currently being helped by Catapult is Toronto FC. Based in Ontario, Canada, and competing in the Eastern Conference of Major League Soccer (MLS) is currently using our pro performance and health product, Catapult Vector, to help monitor players and their workloads during cardiovascular based exercises, like running.
Responsible for ensuring the players’ conditioning levels are high enough to allow the team to effectively compete in the MLS is the club’s Head of Strength and Conditioning, Tom Williams. He is an experienced practitioner having spent many years at Sheffield United and Leicester City before his tenure in Toronto. His work directly involves using Catapult Vector to quantify the players’ workloads during their current isolated status since the MLS has been postponed until further notice.
Planning for the worst-case scenario
With the help of The Reds’ Director of Sports Science, Jim Liston, Tom set out to see what was happening around the world in relation to COVID-19 before taking the best course of action for Toronto FC.
“Myself and Jim had a couple of days to figure out the potential worst-case scenario. When looking at what was happening in Europe, in particular, Italy, Spain, and the UK, we anticipated the outbreak as best as we could, planning for the worst-case scenario, which is that the players are in lockdown, stuck in their condos.”
Tom, with the help of Jim, chose to plan for the worst-case scenario because he says that “if you’re able to plan for the worst-case scenario, then you can take the best possible action. There is no playbook for this situation, so rather than being reactive, we tried to be proactive in approaching the situation. By ensuring players are as equipped and as comfortable as they possibly can be.”
Establishing performance groups
Under typical training conditions, the players would follow a similar plan with some individually specific differences. However, given the players isolated status, the lack of face-to-face contact and differences in-home workout competence amongst the players, Tom first set out to split each member of the playing squad and academy into three groups.
“The first being a bigger group full of players who have a strong understanding of training and our academy players since they have grown up training alongside playing having come through our system.
“Group two is full of international players or those who are non-English speaking. Often, these players have a limited training background or sporadic training background because they have come from countries where different training methodologies are applied.
“Then the final group is full of our veteran players and those carrying slight injuries, we wanted to protect them a little bit and give them more freedom with some of the training plans we have put together.”