OH Leuven expands its partnership with Catapult Sports for 3 years.

After the first team since 2017, the new January 2022 deal includes the use of the Vector wearables for the OH Leuven Women team as well as the academy teams (U23 – U18 – U16) to support the data-informed decision making and to stimulate the communication between staff – players and other stakeholders within our daily work.

This deal is a breakthrough to implement our data-informed health & Performance philosophy in the entire club, including Women and our Elite Academy says Steven Probst (Head of Health – Performance & Analytics)

The Women’s game is ever evolving in terms of physical demands and the intensity of play. Tracking systems are not as widely used as in the men’s game. Therefore, we believe we are gaining a competitive advantage using the catapult technology. We analyse and interpret the position-specific physical demands of our players and benchmark against the top-tier players. This information is used to optimize our game-based periodization and individualization of training load. During the live monitoring, in training and games, we provide the coach real-time feedback about the players which is used to adjust training prescriptions or for decision making in games.

Within the academy the tracking system is used to individualize the player pathways towards the first team. By using the GPS tracking system over the age-groups, we map the gap in terms of volume and intensity during training and games. Based on the historical first team data and scientific research we identified the player profiles per position. These profiles are now used to set the targets per age-group for the periodization on macro-meso- and session level. The age-specific targets are monitored to analyse progression per player overtime and as a kind of quality control of our training process.