April 25, 2024 | SPORTS | By Elijah Ruderman
Ed Robson Arena opened in Sept. 2021, finally allowing students easy access to home games. However, that wasn’t the only change within the Colorado College Hockey Program.
Colorado College’s Hockey Team ended the 2023-2024 season ranked No. 15 in the nation with a 21-13-3 record. Yet, just three years ago, the Tigers finished with an abysmal 4-17-2 record.
The Tigers dismantled their coaching staff in 2021, including letting go of former coach Mike Haviland, who oversaw the team through seven losing seasons. Colorado College named Kris Mayotte the new head coach of the hockey team, and Cam Davidson the new strength and conditioning coach for their program.
The two men had something in common: their trust in data.
Mayotte previously served as the assistant coach at the University of Michigan before arriving at Colorado College. Meanwhile, Cam Davidson most recently was the Assistant Director of Performance Enhancement at Penn State.
Senior defenseman Andrew Nicklas was a freshman during the COVID-shortened 2020-21 season for Colorado College Hockey. Nicklas recalls that the team did not track any stats and that a one-mile bike test was the only form of conditioning testing conducted.
“So my freshman year, most of the seniors didn’t have aspirations to play pro hockey after [college],” Nicklas said. “Those seniors, I don’t feel like they were trying to get better.”
In the fall of 2021, Colorado College’s hockey program started using a Catapult system.
“Every player wears a tracking system called Catapult,” 2nd-year assistant coach and former Colgate University hockey player John Lidgett said. “There’s a GPS tracker inside them. And all those numbers get put into a software that Cam Davidson, our strength coach, has.”
“You don’t even feel it,” Zach Wisdom, freshman forward and 2023 Seattle Kraken draft pick, said. “It’s an Under Armour kind of material—kind of like a sports bra—you strap it on, and at the back, there’s a little pocket [where the Catapult stays].”
The Catapult system allows the team to track ‘stats’ such as player load, intensity, heart rate and acceleration.
“We track it (the stats) per drill per practice, and that gives us an idea of monitoring where our players are as far as what they’re expending,” said Emily West, the CC director of hockey operations and former Ohio State women’s hockey assistant coach.
“There’s internal load and external load. Internal load is heart rate,” Davidson said. “External load is everything that happens externally to the body, and Catapult has their algorithm of combining those two pieces.”
Davidson explained that player load is how much work is being done, and player load over time is equivalent to intensity. Because intensity is a function of time, usually, the longer a player is on the ice, the less intensity they’ll have.
“If he’s a really defensive defenseman, he might not be moving his feet as much as your center because the centerman is going to be all over the ice.”
Catapult can also tell when something is going wrong within the body. Wisdom experienced this firsthand. He was going through a typical Wednesday practice in late November, and he felt a little off but wasn’t sure if he was sick. After practice, Wisdom went up to Cody Ahlgrimm, the team’s athletic trainer, and told him he didn’t feel well.
“Actually, I was coming to find you,” Cody said to Wisdom. “Your heart rate was up here, but your workload was down here.”
Wisdom went to get tested, and it turned out he had strep throat. He would miss the next week-and-a-half of play, including three games.
“I would’ve played. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it,” Wisdom said. “[The Catapult] helps in letting the coaches know what’s happening behind the scenes with the body because the body’s important, right? You only got one of them.”
Another important analytical system that Colorado College uses is its force plates. The action of force plate testing is essentially a box jump where you keep your hands at your hips. During the summer, when players are supposedly less fatigued, they test their max force plate. That becomes their baseline, which their force plate data are compared to throughout the season.
The force plate tracks an array of stats. Davidson said the five stats he keeps track of from the force plates are jump height, peak power, eccentric braking, time for take off and modified RSI (mRSI).
“The jump heights are more of a competitive metric; the mRSI is a fatigue metric, the eccentric braking and peak power are for strength, and the time for take-off is for speed,” Davidson said. “If you suck at eccentric breaking, but you’re great at takeoff velocity, you’re fast, but you’re kind of weak.”
Based on the results of the force plates, Davidson can construct a workout plan to improve a player’s physical weaknesses.
Colorado College also uses Hudl and InStat, which give advanced in-game video analysis.
“Hudl tracks time on ice, but [also] shots on goal, where they shoot their opportunities, where their opportunities are outside the box versus inside the box, high accuracy, chances for, chances against,” West said. InStat does much of the same.
The advanced analytics at Colorado College’s disposal are also used in the recruitment process. Lidgett said that the coaches spend a lot of time talking to recruits about stats to show that there is a plan for their development and that Colorado College is a place they can develop on their way to a professional career.
“To know they care about your body and care about how you feel—it definitely is a big, big factor when you’re committing to a college, and that was one of the things that kind of sold me on the school,” Wisdom said.
“I have to give all props to Mayotte and the coaches because if they didn’t care about it [the stats], it would be a complete waste of my time,” said Davidson, who understands that he wouldn’t be able to properly do his job without the support of the coaching staff.
The Colorado College Tigers hockey team has come a long way from their four-win season three years ago. And, in Colorado College’s hockey program, no major decision is made without some level of data driving it.