From Baseline to Game Day
How Hudy & Jui, the performance team for an NCAA Div 1 women’s basketball team, built a season-long movement intelligence system
SETTING
NCAA Div. 1 Women’s Basketball
PRACTITIONERS
Dr. Andrea Hudy & Jui Shah
DURATION
Full competitive season
APPROACH
Continuous, athlete-driven monitoring
DR ANDREA HUDY
Director of Performance
30+ years in NCAA Division I. Built programs where practice demands match the chaos of competition, not the control of a lab
JUI SHAH
Sports Performance Assistant
Background in coaching, strength training, and machine learning. Integrates data across platforms to surface patterns before they become problems.
The problem with a snapshot
Dr. Andrea Hudy knows what a force plate test can tell you — and, more importantly, what it can't. She and Jui Shah were after not just a better snapshot, but a continuous read on how each athlete actually moves, day after day, across an entire season.
“Practice must match competition. The capacity we build has to handle the demands of the sport. Not the demands of a lab.”
That distinction — between controlled testing and ecologically valid sport performance — is what drove them to Plantiga.
Laying the foundation
Before preseason camp, athletes were introduced to a daily protocol that would define how the team used data all year. Each athlete ran their own standardized walk test and jump test — independently, before every session, with no staff supervision required.
The goal was a personal movement baseline for every player on the roster. One that would become the reference point against which all in-season fluctuations would be compared. But Hudy didn't want testing to feel like testing.
“Everyone has their own movement signature. Like music — everyone has different pitch, tone, and melody. Plantiga helps us find each athlete’s perfect pitch.”
WHAT THE DAILY BASELINE CAPTURED
Physical load — training intensity and accumulated fatigue across sessions
Academic and emotional stress — fluctuations not visible in traditional load metrics
Travel and sleep effects — how recovery actually manifests in movement patterns
Individual signatures — after 5 sessions, each athlete's typical range was established across core metrics
The protocol was woven so thoroughly into the daily routine that it stopped being a "test" and simply became what you did when you arrived. As Hudy puts it: "Fatigue can be an emotional response." The walk test became, in effect, a daily mood ring with biomechanical precision.
The signal amid the noise
As competitive play began, athletes wore Plantiga pods throughout practices and games. Jui's role was to surface biomechanical responses from training quickly — integrating Plantiga's output with data from other platforms to identify athletes trending outside their personal norms before those trends became problems.
DATA FLOWING INTO THE PIPELINE
Impact and push-off asymmetries — side-to-side load distribution across every session
Athlete g-Load — total mechanical load across training and competition
Acceleration and deceleration profiles — propulsion and absorption as they actually occur on court
Typical range flags — individual thresholds that triggered review when exceeded
One of the most immediate applications was tracking the acute effects of manual therapy and activation sessions. Walk tests before and after interventions showed real-time changes in asymmetry — and allowed staff to track how long those effects held.
“The question we started asking was whether we were turning acute effects into chronic ones. Are we actually changing the pattern, or just temporarily correcting it?”
The case that defined the season
At approximately 10 months post-ACL reconstruction, one athlete had cleared every standard return-to-sport criterion. Force plate testing looked good. Clinical assessments passed. By conventional measures, she was ready.
But her on-court data told a different story.
CLEARED (10 months post-op)
Standard return-to-sport criteria passed. Force plate: normal.
20% asymmetryON-COURT DATA REVEALS DEFICIT
Loading 20% more through non-surgical leg. Undetected in controlled testing.
Targeted interventionWEEKS OF REAL-TIME MONITORING
Activation, mobility, and strength adjusted. Progress tracked on court, session by session.
Asymmetry narrowingCOMPETITION SUSTAINABLE
Asymmetry down from 20% to under 4%. Cleared in the environment that matters.
<4% asymmetry“Cleared, competition ready, and competition sustainability are not all the same thing. Rehab starts in the weight room and the clinic. But it has to hold up on the court.”
The athlete could see her own trajectory — not as an abstract clinical metric, but as a number to watch move in the right direction as a direct response to her own effort and consistency.
Athlete-led, by design
The single most important cultural outcome across the season wasn't a specific data insight. It was the shift in how athletes related to their own data. From day one, the protocol was athlete-driven — players grabbed their own pods, ran their own tests, docked their pods afterward, and reviewed results with Hudy and Jui.
That repeated exposure — daily, across an entire season — built something that performance staff rarely talk about explicitly: health literacy. Athletes started asking questions. What does my asymmetry mean? Why is my G-Load higher this week? What changed after my treatment session?
“The data is ultimately for the athlete. To understand who they are.”
Those questions signal genuine investment — and genuine investment changes behaviour. Athletes who understand their data make better decisions about recovery, sleep, and self-management.
What a season of continuous data changed
| Before | After | Value added |
|---|---|---|
| Day-to-day fluctuations driven by social, emotional, academic, and physiological stressors went undetected. | Daily shifts in typical movement patterns can be easily pinpointed and used to support interventions. | Context |
| Load measures were estimates or only considered centre of mass. | Side-to-side and step-by-step limb asymmetries allow immediate, individualised adjustments. | Precision |
| Data was available to athletes, but not all were invested in understanding it. | Athletes take charge of their own data collection and are invested in what it means. | Health literacy |
A continuum, not a destination
Hudy's framing of performance is worth sitting with: "Everybody's on a return to performance continuum." Whether an athlete is eight months post-ACL or preparing for a conference tournament, the question is always the same — are we having a positive impact on consistency and performance?
A season of Plantiga data doesn't answer that question once. It keeps answering it, every day, in the environment that actually matters.
That's the shift. Not from bad data to good data. From a snapshot to a story — one that begins with a baseline, runs through every practice and game, and ends with athletes who know themselves better than they did before.
Data collection, analysis, and athlete monitoring conducted by Dr. Andrea Hudy and Jui Shah.
