McLloyd is proud to announce a brand-new partnership with Life University Men’s Rugby. We caught up with the team’s headcoach, Colton Cariaga. Life University, a private University in Georgia, USA, is famous for its excellent rugby program both in Union and Sevens.
“I have been head coach since 2017. After working for over 14 years with age grade and collegiate teams, my goals are to break into the high-performance pathway in professional rugby. Collegiate rugby holds a special place for me, having played in it myself. I think what these athletes accomplish on top of playing rugby at a high level is very inspiring and I love being part of that environment”.
Colton Cariaga, headcoach
“We use it as often as possible. The main thing is helping us achieve our conditioning outcomes for preseason and defining what those outcomes are. There is also the objective feedback in terms of managing the workload in order to keep our players healthy throughout the season. Another layer to our use of the system is how we leverage the data for our players who are returning from injury and things like that. It also helps players and coaches gain awareness in terms of what they are producing, and how they are evolving as athletes.
“We had a gap in our use of wearable GPS, we had another system before, but it didn’t work out so well. We would lose a lot of data and it was frustrating. What’s brilliant about McLloyd is the Live option that allows us to see where we are in terms of the targets for any particular sessions, to know when we have reached them or inversely when we need to top up. Live really comes in handy. And in games you can see when players are slowing down and it helps make decisions about personnel and substitutions in real time. We are going to start using it for benchmark testing as it’s really useful to see top speeds and such.”
“We are going to start using it for benchmark testing as it’s really useful to see top speeds and such.”
Laurent Debrousse, McLloyd’s US Manager, was heavily involved in this new partnership.
“Laurent did such a good job managing the relationship with our organisation, his knowledge of the system and his background really helped us make our decision to the point where we even made intros with coaches from other sports connected to the school.”
While Colton isn’t personally in charge of the daily handling of the GPS, his experience of McLloyd GPS system has been seamless:
“The user interface is super simple to use. There are a few tricks to learn but thanks to the guidance of Laurent we were quickly able to use the system efficiently.”
The plan is also to use the GPS for talent identification during our summer camps.
