Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM OCT. 28, 2023 19 device, and it gives Wagle and his staff several data points about each player. The numbers include how much and how fast players run, how often they're changing directions and how frequently they're engaging in collisions. "Practice doesn't look the same for everybody, and that's really what GPS is doing," Wagle said. "It's describing practice. And based on that information, we will know, maybe, a few individual players that need additional recovery support that our team then wraps their arms around in between sessions." Wagle and his team meet with Free- man every Monday to go over the game data, and their job is to package the data into one place and present it to Freeman. The second-year coach then makes de- cisions based on their input. "By the time it gets to me, I say, 'Lis- ten, I just need to know who's high, who's low, where these lows are at? How do I need to adjust, who's gonna be fa- tigued, who had an extremely high-low game?'" Freeman said. "I look at it on an individual and a position basis, and then make the adjustments accordingly." That usage of sports science started even before the season, when Freeman and Wagle spent time together to evaluate how the Irish ran practices in fall camp. Freeman wanted to tweak practice, shortening it by a couple periods but getting exactly as much done. Some sessions stayed the same length they were last year, but many got shorter and more efficient. "It's not as many periods but you still get the great work," senior cornerback Clarence Lewis said at the time. "It may shorten the practice but you get great work mentally and physically." Around the same time, junior running back Audric Estimé shouted out the use of contrast — using the hot tub and the cold tub in the same sessions — to help him recover. Camp is dense, Wagle said, and he wanted to make sure players had all the options for recovery on the table. "Recovery is complex, right?" Wagle said, explaining how using both tem- peratures helps. "Sometimes there's muscular recovery, sometimes it's neu- romuscular, sometimes you're dealing with trauma from the impacts. "Each modality targets something spe- cific, which is again, the importance of bringing different disciplines together." The emphasis on sports science is largely a credit to deputy athletics direc- tor for competitive excellence Jody Sadler, who has been at Notre Dame for 23 years. She helped create Wagle's position, hiring him from the Kansas City Royals, where he was the director of performance sci- ence and player development. "We have a very talented group of folks internally, and we have wonderful cam- pus partners and constituent groups that really saw the value in having a sports science-specific position," Sadler said. The position, Sadler explained, would help serve as a bridge between the data itself and using it in practice — the hu- man element. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sadler had time, as unfortunate as the circumstances were, to do real research to determine what sports science at Notre Dame could look like. The athletic department employed scientific advi- sors that "helped inform what [the Irish were] trying to do," Sadler said. On the other side, Notre Dame had a young alumni group including Olympi- ans, injured athletes and former profes- sional athletes. The Irish also had an in- ternal group of practitioners, and those three groups together helped inform the department. "That young alumni group really gave us a lot of insight into that from their different experiences," Sadler said. "What recovery looks like, what perse- verance looks like, what did they need to perform at the optimal level — not only in their sport, but as humans." "We believe that to be a competitive advantage," Wagle said. "We haven't sep- arated the person from the performer." That insight, combined with Wagle's use of data and Freeman fully embracing it, is why the Irish believe they have an edge over their competitors in the use of sports science. For each individual player, Notre Dame uses the tracking numbers and what it knows about the person to plan out their week. Wagle knows many college and pro- fessional teams employ some sort of sports science strategy. Connecting it with the human side, he said, is what distinguishes Notre Dame. ✦ "Practice doesn't look the same for everybody, and that's really what GPS is doing. It's describing practice. And based on that information, we will know, maybe, a few individual players that need additional recovery support that our team then wraps their arms around in between sessions." NOTRE DAME SENIOR ATHLETICS DIRECTOR FOR SPORTS PERFORMANCE JOHN WAGLE