In the summer of 2024, during the WNBAâs Olympic break, several Atlanta Dream players who werenât competing in Paris had gathered for a midseason training camp of sorts. Anyone watching would have seen what looked like a typical 3-on-3 scrimmage. In reality, it was anything but. The Dream werenât playing in any ordinary gym, but rather in what might be the worldâs most advanced basketball laboratory. Dream players ran across 87 subterranean force plates underneath the court, precisely tracking the force each player generated with their movements. Forty cameras, 20 on each side of the court, captured their movements; multiple optical tracking engines processed skeletal profile data based on the inputs. Ball and basket tracking technology monitored every shotâs arc, depth, and orientation in inch-perfect detail. Sensors sat in playersâ waistbands and tracked granular movements like accelerations and decelerations. The setting was the Joe Gibbs Human Performance Institute in Charlotte, N.C., originally designed as a biomechanics-heavy recruitment and training hub for pit crew members for the Joe Gibbs NASCAR racing team. But the team quickly realized their facility had potential uses across sports, basketball chief among them. They purchased a wooden floor from the same company that makes the NBAâs, then outfitted the setup with tech typically reserved for actual laboratories.
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