How Wichita State basketball is using new tracking technology to practice smarter
In order to extend its season next week, the Wichita State men’s basketball team will need to win four straight games in four days at the American Athletic Conference tournament.
Maximizing energy is paramount at this time of the season, given the steep challenge ahead. In the not-so-distant past, WSU head coach Paul Mills would have to rely on a gut feeling about how long and intense to make practices in an effort to retain his team’s legs entering the stretch run, which continues with a 7 p.m. Thursday road test at Rice (ESPN+ streaming).
“I remember when I was at Baylor, coach (Scott) Drew used to say, “Legs feed the wolf,’” Mills said. “So you better be fresh.”
Mills still trusts his instincts about how hard to push in practice, but he now has access to data that can put an exact number on workload with the new technology being used by the Shockers this season.
In fact, many WSU fans have spotted the tracking devices — sewn into the back of the players’ shorts — without knowing what they were. The tiny sensors, made by Kinexon, record movement information from workouts, practices and games and can instantly spit out precise statistics involving speed, distance, acceleration, heart rate and power.
“Sometimes a player can think that they’re going hard, but now you don’t have to guess,” Mills said. “You can just go straight to the data and say, ‘This was actually your work rate.’
“(A player) can say he’s going hard, but at the end of the day, you can tell if he’s not on the same level of motion and intensity that’s required in order to achieve what we’re trying to achieve.”
Almost every NBA team uses Kinexon tracking and WSU recently joined the growing trend of top-tier college basketball teams to sign up. Mills, always a fan of numbers, enjoys seeing the final product, but the actual program itself is operated by WSU director of sports performance Ashtin Meerpohl.
Before every workout or practice, Meerpohl makes sure every WSU player has their tracking device tucked away in a pocket in their shorts. At first, they were a bit uncomfortable for the players. Bijan Cortes tucked his away in his shoe during a summer practice, which led to his numbers spiking in the system and became a lesson to all players to always wear them in their shorts.
“You can definitely feel them, but they’re usually in their own little pouch,” WSU senior Xavier Bell said. “Once you get going, you don’t really feel it very much after that.”
Once the players are done on the court or in the weight room, Meerpohl collects the chips and then uploads the data to his computer. He has been collecting information since the summer, so Meerpohl is able to compare that day’s practice to the body of work and measure it against the past week, the past month or the entire season.
A typical WSU practice registers anywhere between a 7 and 8 on the “workload” scale, while an intense practice would score between 9 and 11. Meerpohl sends that to Mills in his daily report, which also includes the data for each player and the team as a whole from that day’s practice and where it ranked compared to other practices this season.
”I’ve been with coach for seven years now and I’ve always thought he’s done a good job of managing practice with how hard it was, how long it was,” Meerpohl said. “Now we can get real data on that. If our goal was a short, intense practice, we can look at the numbers and see if it hit the mark.
“It’s going to help us later in the season when we’re trying to figure out how hard to practice. Coach can go back and look and say, ‘Hey, this practice was an 8.3 with these drills and this practice was a 7.1 with those drills.’ He can use that data to plan his practices based on those previous numbers.”
While the data helps Mills prepare his practices, it’s not to the point where it is informing in-game decisions. The coaching staff won’t sit a player because they’ve reached their maximum workload or bench a player based on distance traveled or intensity in a game.
But the numbers do help in the rehabilitation process of injured players, like senior point guard Justin Hill and his ongoing toe injury. Coaches can see exactly how well Hill is moving in practice compared to before the injury and also monitor his workload.
The favorite part of the daily reports curated by Meerpohl for Mills is mining through the minutiae of the player data, looking for abnormalities and identifying them before they become a trend.
That’s his favorite part about the technology, he said, is using the data to start conversations with his players.
“I don’t know how much you study Gen Z, but I’ve studied Gen Z enough to know that one thing they really struggle with is asking for help,” Mills said. “The reason is because of social media. They want to put on this persona, so you have this Gen Z group burdened with anxiety. We’ve less stigmatized asking for mental health, but they usually don’t get to the help phase until they’re burdened with all of this stress and anxiety.
“And because they don’t want to ask for help, you rarely hear the words, ‘I’m sorry.’ Take it from someone who’s been married for 28 years, if you’re not doing this once a week, you’re doing it wrong: You need to acknowledge that you’re not perfect, and you need to be able to say you’re sorry and you need to own up to it. That’s what men do: They take responsibility. That data that we collect, that allows us to have those personal conversations, which I really, really enjoy.”
This story was originally published March 6, 2025 at 5:04 AM.
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