The WHS boys’ varsity soccer team looks to maximize their performance with the purchase of real-time Titan GPS tracking vests. The coaching staff made this purchase in the early parts of this fall season, and it has opened up a whole new world for the players with new statistics and visuals.

“[The stats] are a lot of fun to track,” assistant coach George Argyrou said. “We’re getting some really good data and we’re really getting their surveys, so we’re getting a good gauge on how the players are feeling before we get out [on the field].”

The GPS Athlete Performance Tracking Device tracks many different things that go on during a game or a practice. In fact, it tracks over 130 different metrics, such as total distance run, sprint distance, top speed, conditioning score, fatigue score, acceleration, average sprint speed and more.

“It gives you a heat map of where you were on the field at certain times so you can track positioning and where you were during practice,” senior captain Gage Fuller said. “It also does top sprint speed, acceleration and the number of times you were over a certain speed. It doesn’t do heart rate, but it can take quantitative measurements that correlate to just running or walking.”

With new and improving technology constantly on the rise, it didn’t take WHS long to catch on to this phenomenon to improve their game.

“The assistant coaches, spearheaded by Coach Argyrou, Coach [Charles] Goodhue and Coach [Colin] Meiselman, had been looking at a way for us to identify with our athletes ways in which we could improve their training,” head coach David Gavron said. “The coaches really felt that this would be really advantageous and a good opportunity for us to make some real headway in how we train our athletes.”

The trackers are helping the boys to improve as a team and are allowing them to see the game from a whole different perspective.

“What’s helpful for the players is that they could also see that ‘Oh my gosh, we spent 70% of the time on the right side of the field, we didn’t switch fields,'” Gavron said. “Coaches can say that and we can tell you, ‘You’re not switching fields,’ but seeing it in video and seeing it now with trackers has been helpful.”

Despite some discomfort in wearing the trackers, the boys are getting accustomed to wearing them.

“Some of the guys felt that they were a little bit uncomfortable to wear, but that just takes some getting used to,” Gavron said.

The varsity soccer team hopes that in the near future they won’t be the only team using these trackers. Their goal is to have the whole soccer program use them and would love if every sport could have something like the Titans.

“I would love for the entire soccer program to have them and I think that it would be great if every athlete in the school had it so that coaches could use those,” Gavron said.