When coach Mike Ebert told the eight members of his inaugural Verizon Cycling Team that their season would revolve around a gaggle of Motorola Droids, portable MiFi hot spots, netbooks and Twitter handles, it wasn't a hard sell.

"The great thing about a young team is that tech and social media are in their DNA," Ebert told Wired.com. "They're around gadgets all the time, so it's a really fertile testing ground to do all these things."

With the help of its team sponsors, the Verizon Cycling crew worked all through last winter planning the tech setup for the upcoming season. When March rolled around, it was all systems go for Ebert's band of bicycling brothers, who range in age from 19 to 25. Leading the team to its six race victories has been 23-year-old Mike Sherer, a University of Indiana grad who recently got his first individual win of the season (see below) and will most likely turn professional next year.

Every bike has a Quarq carbon-fiber crankset with embedded power meter, along with ANT+ low-power data transmission, that makes the rider's output visible in watts through the handlebar-mounted display, which also reads their on-board heart-rate monitors. Each rider also has his own Motorola Droid monitoring their individual GPS routes. When their training ride is over, all Ebert and the coaches need to do is fire up a netbook, turn on the MiFi, and all the riders' data is accessible and crunchable from wherever they are in the field.

"Being a development team, it just makes it so much easier, as their coach, to be able to say, 'OK, these are the types of skills that you need to pinpoint,'" said Ebert, "or from a psychological, tactical standpoint, 'This is where you could've conserved some energy.'"

And when team staff travels to Canada later this month for the 2010 ANT+ Alliance Symposium, they'll be looking to broaden some of those industry connections, including allowing Ebert to drill down on all his riders' data during a race in real-time, akin to a pit crew chief in NASCAR.

With that ability in his hands, Ebert and others will have more than enough spare cycles to bring the team to the next level.

Photo: Verizon Cycling

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