There is a point somewhere in your season where you hope your team is at its best. It might be the playoffs, a major tournament, or a game with a major rival.
That point might be in a week away, a month, three months or longer. Some teams and organizations develop and implement peaking calendars in an effort to hit that at its best on an important date.
In his role as Director of Sports Performance at Global Premier Soccer, Craig Von Wielligh has a different view of peaking, and he uses DRIVN to implement it.
“In my opinion, it is less about a peaking point, DRIVN helps make sure you are going into games and tournaments fresh,” he says. “If you have good intense training sessions and your players are still fresh enough to perform well on game day, that’s my version of peaking.”
Using DRIVN’s questionnaires and trackers, Von Wielligh is able to get valuable information from his players on how they feel, how difficult they felt the last training session was, and the level of stress and fatigue they are feeling.
“It’s visual information for you to check and see if you are over-training your players closer to games,” says Von Wielligh. “I might think the training sessions are easy but the players find them difficult. I think there’s a correlation between trying to keep intensity up as a team and actually knowing what your players are going through.
“And when you have players with injuries, can you find a way to slowly adapt to the training load again,” he adds. “One of the things we are doing is to report the injuries and communicate with the physical therapist and the doctor, and we have a system to look at how much they are doing. How sore are they, how hard do the sessions feel to them. It gives you a good way to monitor the progress of a player returning from injury.”
Global Premier Soccer is a youth soccer organization spread over 14 states. Von Wielligh helps GPS coaches across the country use DRIVN to monitor player loads to help enhance the performance of the team.
“I worked with our coaches to implement the app, telling them what it can do for them and explaining that the more information they have about their players the better prepared they were,” he says.
“Game evaluations, for example, helped the coaches a lot. By having the players write something down right after the game, the players were able to offer their thoughts about the game and their performance. Coaches could have that information without speaking individually with each player.”
Using DRIVN has helped GPS better understand the health and fitness of its players, but Von Wielligh has found that the app has also helped educate players.
If they are expected to put information into the app, it reminds them about how they actually are sleeping, how stressed they really are,” he says. “It’s a way of them being conscious of how those thing affect their performance and their health.”
Find out how you can use DRIVN to keep your team performing at its best throughout the season with a free demo.
{{cta(‘d171881a-4684-44f3-a194-7cea8dd4fe74’)}}