DURHAM, N.C. — As Duke’s players come streaming off the practice court inside the Michael W. Krzyzewski Center, you barely notice it: the bump on their backs.
You’re there to watch all the captivating things these guys do on the court, not some wallet-sized bulge between their shoulder blades. In fact, it’s designed specifically so you, and the players themselves, don’t notice it’s there.
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But don’t let the device’s size confuse its impact. That device — a wearable anchor for the Catapult technology Duke uses — is critical to the program’s overall sports science operation, which has steadily grown over the last five or so years. Catapult is a central component of that, but it isn’t alone; the Blue Devils also utilize force plates, track body weights, and study biomechanics to ensure players perform at their peaks. That’s especially paramount given the program’s roster-building philosophy the last decade, which depends on getting handfuls of highly-rated freshmen up to speed as quickly as possible.
From a basketball standpoint, that’s on Jon Scheyer and his coaching staff. But from a physical development standpoint? Well, Nick Potter — Duke’s director of high performance and sport science — plays an integral role.
And this summer, with seven new freshmen in the fold, he’s been busy.
“The whole point of doing all this stuff, ultimately, is to win the game — but to win the game, we want the players to have the best development and strength and wellness,” Potter says. “We want them to be in the best place to where they can succeed.”
Before you can understand how Duke utilizes sports science, you have to (sort of) understand how the science works.
So what, exactly, is Catapult?
In layman’s terms, it’s “an athlete-monitoring system,” as Catapult CEO Will Lopes calls it, something designed to “help teams make better decisions about the performance of their athletes.” Translation: technology that tracks a players movements and exertion, and over time, builds patterns for their activity.
It’s obviously more complicated than that. Typically, Catapult tech works by pinging a player’s data — obtained from the “anchor” worn between their shoulder blades — to satellites, and then to a central computer that processes it all. The satellite network allows for player locations, and movements, to be tracked in real time. Now, that’s perfect for soccer or football, but for basketball — an indoor sport — it potentially could be logistically challenging. (For that very reason, Kentucky recently switched its wearable tech from Catapult to Kinexon.) But in Duke’s case, there’s a convenient workaround: Catapult Clearsky, which instead depends on dozens of sensors within a given arena — Duke has 25 to 30 installed in both Cameron Indoor and the K Center — to create an indoor GPS tracking system. “So we can get,” Potter says, “super accurate GPS data.”
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And about that data… phew, is there a lot of it. As Potter explains, Catapult essentially has three key components, each of which measures something different: the gyroscope, which tells directional movement; the accelerometer, which tells quick movement (like explosion, bursts, and cuts); and the GPS, which tells velocity and distance. Within the accelerometer alone, Catapult tracks five different high-speed movement categories: left and right, forward and deceleration, and jumps. Potter and his team can break that down and look at one specific element — how many high jumps Duke’s big men accrue over the course of a finishing drill, for instance — but it can also take the entire picture together and measure what the system deems “workload,” or “load” for short.
As for the practical application of all this? Potter offers one example of how the staff assesses symmetry — right movements vs. left movements — as an indicator for injury or potential injury: “For example, if they hurt their right foot, they’ll commonly have less high-speed movement going to the left,” Potter says, “because they’re not pushing off that foot, or they’re avoiding going to that side because of that foot.”
That’s just one application, though, and a relatively granular one. There’s a reason Catapult is used by the Virginia Cavaliers, as well, not to mention the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, Boston Celtics, Golden State Warriors and Oklahoma City Thunder. Used to its full capability — and with the frequency Duke uses it — Catapult can do much more than just check for abnormalities.
“Our guys are wearing the devices during games, practices, and other workouts, and from that we can adjust conditioning, tailor individual workouts, and closely monitor rehab,” Scheyer told The Athletic. “The daily data we have access to, whether it be on players’ workloads or movement intensity, is so valuable.”
Early last season, during Duke’s neutral-court wins over Kentucky and Gonzaga, superstar freshman Paolo Banchero had to miss significant time because of cramping issues. What went awry?
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Well, ask Catapult.
Potter heard a common refrain with Banchero that Duke’s players had mentioned before past road games. “Because it’s a new arena, new environment, they want to get extra shots up,” Potter says. “Our (team) warm-up was like an hour before the game starts, but we got there early, so guys went out there an hour before that.”
What that meant was Banchero was sweating for an hour before Duke’s official warmup, then also for the planned hour with the team. He’d sweated, essentially, as much before the game as he actually would later that night against Kentucky. By using Catapult, Potter could see how long Banchero was warming up, but also what specific movements he was doing to exert himself. “He’s sweating and dehydrating himself the whole time, so not only is there a physical load that occurs, but there’s a physiological load where now he’s dehydrated himself,” Potter says. “We can see the types of movements and how much he’s working — and we know how much he sweats per hour — (so) we can actually know how much he’s sweated before the game starts.” The solution, then, was simple: just cut out that whole unplanned hour, save for spot shooting and stretching. Boom, no more dehydration.
Before Duke played its first exhibition game during a preseason Canadian tour in 2018, Potter noticed that freshman phenom Zion Williamson was registering an abnormally high number of high jumps — something that, traditionally over time with big men, can contribute to knee tendonitis, among other injuries. Potter wondered why Williamson had so many, but quickly realized: “Because everyone is cheering for him and the crowd gets him going, so all he wanted to do was dunk,” Potter says, smiling. “That was fine playing those teams, but we don’t normally want 40 high jumps before the game even starts when we’re playing an ACC team.” So Potter and the coaching staff spoke to Williamson and advised him to save some of those acrobatics for in-game.
But before Duke’s second exhibition, Potter noticed Williamson’s levels were high again — even though he hadn’t been dunking. That’s where application of the Catapult information comes into play. Duke traditionally splits its warmups between bigs and guards, but because it was so early in the season, Williamson wasn’t sure which group to go with; by default, he stayed in the shooting lines for the entire warmup. “Because he wanted to do both kinds of finishing,” Potter says, “so you ended up with more high jumps (from shooting and finishing) again.” After the second game, the Blue Devils’ staff told Williamson to stay with the bigs next time — and unsurprisingly, before the third game, he got exactly the balanced warmup he needed.
“We just don’t want to wear your legs out before the game starts,” Potter says.
There are countless other examples of how Potter reads and then interprets the Catapult data, but clearly, it’s as much about application as the tech itself. And that’s why, as Duke enters the Scheyer era, it’s interesting to track how that technological integration may, or may not, change.
Some of those shifts might be subtle. For example, when Potter first started giving Mike Krzyzewski and his staff Catapult reports during the 2016-17 season, he admits he didn’t get much feedback. “I was like, how much is he even looking at it? And then our strength coach, Will (Stephens), he actually told me that Coach K liked to read the newspaper. He likes to read things,” Potter says, smiling. “The day I gave Coach K the written-out version — basically the same information in a different format — it was like the greatest thing on the planet.” Thus far in Scheyer’s tenure as head coach, Potter says he’s maintained that same format to minimize change around the first-time head coach. But as Scheyer becomes more established and comfortable in his role, Potter’s reports could shift in format or focus.
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Scheyer’s new assistant coaches are another change. Just as Catapult tracks player trends for movement and workload, it also tracks the movements and workload generated by specific assistant coaches. What Amile Jefferson does with the big men, for instance, necessitates different movements and workloads than what Jai Lucas does with Duke’s guards. That also applies to when assistants work with players one-on-one before or after practice, or when they’re helping individuals rehab from injury. Potter can simultaneously track what the majority of the team does, versus what a rehabbing player on the side might do, and compare not just the workloads for both, but also how those practice workloads compare to a real game.
“If three-quarters of (his one-on-one work with an assistant) are this one type of movement, we’re not getting this other stuff which is needed for his rehab,” Potter says. “We start talking about it, and the player didn’t do any defense. Well, half the game is on defense.”
The trick for Potter and his team is that, at the end of the day, Scheyer and his staff make the final decisions. He presents the information as objectively as possible — “which is stuff that maybe we on the medical side or performance side wanted to say in the past, but it was opinion,” he says — and then the staff make tweaks accordingly. Sometimes, that means simple practice alterations; if player workloads aren’t what they normally are after a grueling week of games and travel, maybe a particular day’s scrimmage is adjusted down to three games from five. Sometimes, it’s as simple as making the players aware of something.
In the chart below, for example, Potter will track the team’s movement levels by segments of a game: from the start to the first media timeout, or the last eight minutes of a half, or the first four out of halftime. (Media timeouts every four minutes are helpful milestones.) Several seasons ago, Potter noticed that Duke’s overall team intensity in the first eight minutes of a game would spike … but then it would trail off thereafter, including in the first few minutes after halftime. “Basically, it quantifies for the coaches if we’re playing hard,” Potter says. “It’s one of those things you hear: We’re not playing hard. Well, that’s a subjective opinion based on what you’re seeing, but now we can quantify playing hard — and playing hard as a team.”
Using 125 as a threshold, Krzyzewski then showed his team how their numbers got as high as 154 early in games … and as low as 110 out of the break. “Before he put up film of the game the next day,” Potter says, “he put up (the report) I gave him and said, (have a) sense of urgency.”
The program’s sports science takes on arguably its most importance during this time of year. For the team’s freshmen, establishing baselines for their movement patterns and workloads was key when they first arrived over the summer.
“The data is useful on day one — and part of that, I think, is because you have so many benchmarks,” Lopes says. “Some of that is stuff that we offer, some of that is stuff that a team like Duke has from its previous classes, and they know what to look for. When guys come in, they know what the anticipated workload is based on the following X events, and they want to know how you’re doing in those.”
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Potter says that he, with direction from Scheyer and the coaching staff, goes into the summer with a plan for what the freshmen’s first-week “workload” should look like; that then evolves, after he sees how they responded to conditioning and basketball-specific workouts. Usually, he says, any surprises that crop up are pleasant.
Case in point: Earlier this summer, during a July scrimmage, one of the team’s freshman bigs registered the highest sprinting score on the team. “That’s what you want, because you want the rim runs,” Potter says. “That’s one of the things I share with the coaches. He’s supposed to be one of our best players, he’s a big guy, and he can run. Like, we knew he could run, but look at how much more he ran during scrimmage compared to everybody else.” That also ties into how Scheyer wants to play, by pushing the pace perhaps more than his predecessor. But it takes having players with that capability, plus training that specific skill set, to actually ensure Duke plays how its coach wants.
But in that situation, when a player does what they’re supposed to — and the quantifiable metrics from Catapult back them up? That’s the best-case scenario, and what Scheyer and Potter strive for. The positive reinforcement of showing a guy quantitatively what he did well, Potter says, is something that historically has tracked with more productive performances.
Lopes adds that in the case of a place like Duke, which constantly recruits at such a high level, Catapult technology has certainly eased the transition for freshmen to college basketball.
“If you go back 15, 20 years ago, you’d recruit somebody who looked absolutely incredible. If you were an amazing recruiter, you probably got it right,” Lopes says. “But there were also moments when you recruited somebody and it didn’t turn out to be what you anticipated — and it wasn’t because they were a bad recruit; you just maybe didn’t know how to take that raw talent from high school and turn them into a real talent for a program like Duke.”
Now, Duke’s sports science staff knows just how to do that — even down to individual workouts. And in the case of players who stay multiple years, like Mark Williams or Wendell Moore Jr. — or now Jeremy Roach — Catapult tech can help gradually transition weaknesses into strengths. For Moore, that meant adjusting his gait to unlock more of his athleticism; some of that was biomechanical running form, and some of it was also tracking his improved acceleration with said form improvements. In Williams’ case, moving better laterally was the goal; while it took time for Williams to develop the strength and flexibility needed to slide his feet, Potter could track Williams’ progress by measuring his burst and velocity over a longer distance.
Behind the full brunt of Duke’s sports science program, the Blue Devils are training and rehabbing as efficiently as ever. And with a new head coach in tow — one who has already shown a willingness to embrace modernity — there’s no telling how much more prominent Duke’s sports science might become in the future.
(Photos: Courtesy Duke Athletics)
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