University of Oregon

About the University of Oregon

The Oregon Ducks are the intercollegiate athletic teams that represent the University of Oregon, located in Eugene. The Ducks compete at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I level as a member of the Pac-12 Conference. With eighteen varsity teams, Oregon is best known for its American football team and track and field program, which has helped Eugene gain a reputation as Track Town, USA.

“Our goal is to understand each individual sport, profile its demands, and see what it takes for our athletes to be successful.... Then we quantify our athletes’ capacity. Creating robust and standard systems enables us to say how the team as a whole is doing, where an individual athlete is, and, given their sport and position, which benchmarks they have to meet to be successful. This is how we prioritize their needs and individualize elements of their training.”

Jordan Troester

Director of Performance & Sports Science, University of Oregon

Key Takeaways

The Opportunity

The Marcus Mariota Sports Performance Center is widely recognized as an innovation leader in college sports. As such, the University of Oregon performance staff recognized a chance to build something greater than themselves: an athlete-centric, datainformed model that enabled practitioners, sports scientists, and coaches to set athletes up for success on and off the field. To support this multidisciplinary approach, they needed a human performance optimization (HPO) platform that would collect athlete data in a standardized way from multiple inputs, centralize it for analysis, and present it in a way that was usable for all stakeholders.

The Challenge

With 20 sports and over 500 student-athletes, Oregon’s performance team is tasked with overseeing a wide variety of needs, goals, and intended outcomes for each team throughout their seasons. Finding a system that could effectively serve all the competitors, coaches, and staff involved in each program while also uniting disparate data sources and workflows would be difficult. Another obstacle was the frequent staff turnover in college athletics, which necessitated building robust processes around a unified platform to provide continuity.

The Solution

Smartabase supports the three stages of Oregon’s player development lifecycle: profiling, loading, and monitoring. Databacked solutions also extend to availability, hydration tracking, wellness questionnaires, data visualization and reporting, and more. Establishing benchmarks and norms for each individual by sport and position enables staff to develop all qualities objectively over time, while also solving problems for coaches and increasing athlete buy-in. They continue to customize and expand the use of the system to support their evolving needs.

The Impact

As an all-in-one data management and reporting solution, Smartabase reduces effort and makes information actionable faster. Collaborating with coaches to create tailored dashboards gives them relevant insights when they need it to make timely decisions. Individualized athlete profiling informs more precise load planning, skill development, and strength and conditioning programming, while sharing more information with athletes improves their engagement in Oregon’s human performance program.