Wearable Tracking of Player Workload

Participants were outfitted with wearable inertial measurement units (VERT; Mayfonk Inc., Ft. Lauderdale, FL, United States) embedded with a 3-axis accelerometer and 3-axis gyroscope in order to detect vertical displacements. Units and participants received a unique identifier to ensure the same device was worn each practice session and match across the season. Each session began with a team-led dynamic warm-up and ended following completion of the last drill in practice or once the final point was scored in match play. The raw signal was processed using proprietary algorithms then saved in cloud-based storage. Jump count was extracted as a surrogate measure of external workload. Active minutes were quantified using accelerometry from the device.