TKA Cross-Country Team Using High-Tech Sports Science Gear

The King’s Academy cross-country team is benefiting from the school’s strategic partnership with United Data Technologies to evaluate performance using technology typically only available to professional and college athletes.

The school is using the most advanced wearable health and fitness trackers available in the market, which track heart rate, steps taken, calorie burn, skin temperature, perspiration rate and sleep quality. The devices are wrist-worn and waterproof and capture all of the metrics listed above every 60 seconds.

“Through our partnership with UDT, we are able to capture more than 100,000 data points for our athletes every day,” TKA cross country coach Bill Mitchell said. “This type of sports analytics is pervasive at the professional level, sometimes used at the collegiate level, and rarely, if ever, used at the high school varsity level.”

UDT continues to improve on its technology offerings.

“We continue to extend different data types to further correlate what could impact an athlete during training so we can one day predictively understand how they might perform on game day,” UDT Chief Technology Officer Daniel Rodriguez said. “One example of this includes organizing weather data from NOAA every five minutes to correlate the effects of outside temperature, wind speed, relative humidity and barometric pressure on athletes. We built team-based views so TKA’s coaches can compare athletes to each other and set benchmarks and targets for each.”

TKA is a nationally recognized private Christian school serving approximately 1,300 students from preschool through 12th grade. For more info., visit www.tka.net.

ABOVE: The TKA cross-country team shows off its high-tech sports watches provided by United Data Technologies.