Barring national championships, 2024 was a year of major improvement within Pitt athletics.
Pitt volleyball and men’s soccer spent weeks sitting at No. 1 in the country, while Pitt football had a major comeback from their 3-9 record, reaching No. 18 in October.
Supporting these talented athletes behind the scenes are Pitt’s sports science masters’ students who have the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with Pitt’s Division One athletics programs and function as the “team behind the team.”
Pitt provides students with the rare and competitive opportunity to earn a master’s degree in sports science, going beyond the classroom education of an undergraduate degree to have hands-on experience. The program places an emphasis on performance optimization and ensuring player safety in both practices and games.
In June 2024, Zach Witherspoon became the director of Pitt Sports Science and has helped implement new training methods for Pitt. A Tennessee native with a background in exercise science, Witherspoon previously held positions working with corporations and the NFL. But when the opportunity to work at Pitt presented itself, Witherspoon jumped on it.
“The brand of Pitt sports science is something that’s been largely growing over the past four years, and it’s really become a sought leader in the industry,” Witherspoon said. “That was something for me that was very important.”
As an internship requirement for graduation, students spend 450 hours with Pitt athletes throughout their graduate education, according to University spokesperson Jared Stonesifer.
Aaron Duvall, the strength and conditioning coach for Pitt lacrosse and swim and dive and the director of Olympic sports strength and conditioning at Pitt, describes the impact the interns have on the different teams they work with.
“The sports science side is kind of the straw that stirs the drink in terms of sports performance with all of our teams,” Duvall said.
The interns work with Pitt volleyball, football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, wrestling, lacrosse, swim and dive and women’s soccer.
The program also welcomed Tim Suchomel, an associate professor of sports medicine and nutrition, as director of the sports science master’s program in September 2024. He brings experience in weightlifting and baseball sports science, with a data-driven focus on the analytics.
“I work directly with the strength and conditioning staff, the sports scientists, to make sure that the students are placed in the best situation that will allow them to be successful,” Suchomel said.
Part of the internship involves integrating statistical software that monitors individual athletes’ performance throughout practices.
One of the more interesting things they can track is jump plate testing.
“Our student-athletes jump on a force plate [and it] can tell us all sorts of things,” Witherspoon said, “from jump height to how low they actually load it up to take off for the jump, which gives insights to readiness, injury potential, asymmetry, all of those things, and then that data also is getting aggregated and then put into digestible reports for our coaches.”
The No. 1 Pitt volleyball team used force plates throughout the offseason.
“Our women’s volleyball team used that pretty extensively over the course of the season to make sure that they were performing well when their best was required,” Witherspoon said. “Then progressing outside the weight room once you’re getting into the day to day … that tells us the basic things of how far did they run, how many times did they change direction? How fast did they go, how hard was this day relative to others? All that is, again, collected.”
The interns then use this data to inform the coaches of athletes’ performance throughout the season.
“You have the GPS unit [on the athletes], but the students run those throughout the entire practice and track real-time what’s happening during practice,” Suchomel said.
“High-intensity efforts impact those types of things, and they will then kind of go back to either the strength and conditioning coach and or the coaching staff and say, ‘this person has been at high intensity, most of practice. They may need to back off a little bit,’” Suchomel said. “But we ourselves are behind the team in the sense that we provide them with the tracking monitoring information so that they can make their decisions.”
The sports science program hopes to utilize all the data collected to standardize performance levels.
“We’re hoping to combine all of the data that we’ve collected over the number of years that we’ve gone through this process to benchmark performances so we can really understand what is a good performance, average performance, poor performance,” Suchomel said.
Another advantage of the internship is the doors opened after graduation. The experience gathered and job placement are crucial for the students.
“Over the last several years that I’ve been here, we’ve had a lot of really hungry students that want to do a good job and want to really insert themselves into the performance team,” Duvall said. “We’ve been lucky to have a good handful of really qualified, competent and valuable people … Our job placement out of the program is pretty good.”
With the success of the internship this year, Suchomel hopes to develop a doctoral program in the future.
“[The program] will also give us kind of more boots on the ground,” Suchomel said. “But also allow us to have a greater foundation for generating that sports science research.”
Witherspoon argues with the changing landscape of college sports, it is important to utilize data to help Pitt athletics consistently improve.
“College athletics is changing greatly,” Witherspoon said. “We’re looking to evolve and to grow with that, as far as helping our student-athletes be the most available and high-performing rosters in the ACC and in the country.”
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