After North Carolina’s 7-3 defeat of Duke on Friday evening, coach Karen Shelton was happy with the box score. Her team had outshot the Blue Devils 22-6 and dominated the game’s tempo from start to finish.
But as soon as she gets back to her laptop, Shelton won’t have to rely on the box score to figure out how hard her players worked.
For this game, each player on the field was outfitted with a GPS chip on the back of her uniform. The chips will provide researchers (and coaches) with charts of each player’s maximum velocity and total volume of running. The data will also show how long the athlete was walking, jogging, sprinting or standing.
Shelton said she was sure the data would reflect UNC’s relatively superior depth. Tonight, Duke’s bench consisted of one person. It’s 19-person roster was short seven players — six are at the Junior Pan-American Games, and another is injured.
“We had more people, and we could keep fresh legs in there,” she said. “I hope the GPS will show that we had more percentage of the higher end band — sprinting. But I think if you were watching the game, you might agree with that.”
Shelton said that UNC had also recently acquired 10 GPS units that it had been using in practice to plan training regimens.
UNC will head home and crunch the numbers as it prepares to play No. 11 Stanford in Chapel Hill on Sunday.
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