Not everyone in the Portland Timbers organization lives and breathes data. Coach Giovanni Savarese, for one, still relies heavily on feel when making decisions for the pitch, but he admits there’s at least some value in analytics for elevating performance. And that’s a good thing, because the Timbers have been building out a robust sports science team in search of gaining a competitive advantage.

As MLS prepares to break for its July 31 All-Star Game, the Timbers are 8-8-4 through Tuesday night and rank ninth out of the 12 teams in the Western Conference—a drop-off after last season’s appearance in the MLS Finals against Atlanta United FC. The change of fortune isn’t surprising when you consider that the first three months of Portland’s schedule was dominated by away games while construction was being done back home at Providence Park. Data compiled via the team’s widespread use of wearables showed additional wear-and-tear on the players’ bodies due to the grueling travel.

Zarek Valentin, a 27-year-old defender in his sixth MLS season, enjoys digesting performance data and regularly uses the insights to tweak his output. He says his glutes grew tight by sitting so much on planes between games from March to June. Everyone on the Timbers’ roster is required to wear a Catapult GPS and heart-rate-monitoring system that hugs their chests like sports bras during practices (games are optional but highly recommended). Valentin additionally wears Athos-connected shorts that measure the electrical signals of his leg muscles, which helped to uncover travel-related issues.

“While sitting on the airplane I found that I was tighter in my glutes because I wasn’t using them enough,” he says. “I had to do a lot of glute-activation exercises so that my muscles could start working more functionally.”

Armed with one of the largest (and most animated) fan sections in MLS—and an $85 million renovation that added 4,000 seats—the energy at home games remains as high as ever despite Portland’s struggles on the pitch. This might not be their winningest season, but it will certainly be remembered as a pivotal transition year because of the upgraded stadium and the team’s expanded use of analytics.

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The Timbers are collecting so much data that they’re not even sure what to do with it all, says Nick Milonas, the team’s director of sports science and performance. Everyone at the highest levels of front office believe that data is important, but Milonas says there have been some growing pains with respect to supporting the coaching staff and not overloading people with a barrage of insights.

“There’s not a roadblock by any means, more just us trying to find the best way to communicate what’s important to discuss or flag,” says Milonas, an EXOS performance specialist who has a Master’s degree in human movement. “Utilizing technology to help us understand what each athlete is going through is important, but how it comes together is the most important. We’re in constant communication with coaches and rest of the management team to find the best way to help them make the best decisions for not only player health but, ultimately, performance.”

Milonas tells his staff to keep their reports to management as simple as possible to avoid overcomplication and confusion, which could threaten the process. Fifteen people—physical therapists, athletic therapists, performance coaches, performance analysts and nutritionists—work on the sports science staff and serve the Timbers’ first and second teams, the Thorns of the National Women’s Soccer League, and the Timbers’ youth academy teams. In conversations with management, they pad insights generated by wearables, video analytics, connected training equipment and mobile touchpoints with actionable recommendations for execution. One such example: If Athos shows an imbalance in glute-hamstring or quad-hamstring ratios, coaches will be given advice on how to best push the athlete toward regaining symmetry.

“At the end of the day if we can’t utilize data, why are we watching it?” says Milonas.

Like Valentin, about a dozen other Portland players wear Athos in addition to Catapult. Milonas says the two systems complement each other: “Catapult is an external measure of what they do. Athos shows how they’re responding to what they’re doing.”

“We use that information [from Athos] to get a better understanding of certain trends and asymmetry a player would have in terms of left and right imbalances: glute to hamstring ratios, glute contribution,” says Milonas. “Athos allows you to see how the body is moving and when it’s apt to train. It can dictate what kind of training we need to do not only to recover but prepare for the following game.”

The Timbers train 15 miles west of Providence Park in a state-of-the-art facility that once served as a Frito Lay processing center. Located in Beaverton, Ore., the training center has undergone several renovations over the past few years. Athletes are now treated to cryotherapy machines and kombucha kegerators. There’s a game room and a team barber. Renowned Portland chef Rich Meyer even left Trifecta Tavern, the popular southeast Portland eatery he launched in 2013, to run the club’s pristine white kitchen.

To facilitate player development, the main practice field is lined with a few 4K Spiideo cameras that record video and send live streams to the smartphones of everyone on the Timbers’ sports science team. Indoors, some devices, such as the Sparta Science force plate, are automatically connected to the Timbers’ athlete management system, enabling the transfer of real-time training data. The force-plate technology in particular has made training more prescriptive.

“This allows us to see an individual athlete’s movement signature: how he’s creating force, transitioning and basically expressing force over time,” says Milonas. “If we can utilize our time a little bit more efficiently, we can get to the point quicker to what his limiting factor is. If we can get an idea of what limitations he may have in order to be a balanced athlete, that will help us determine if he needs to work a little bit more on elasticity, or overall functional mobility. It dials us in a little bit.”

Elsewhere in the training room there’s a high-altitude treadmill, a Megawave wearable system that measures athlete readiness, Keiser functional trainers, a Power Plate that uses body vibration therapy to assist in recovery, and NormaTech leg pumps.

Having access to so much performance data can be scary, Timbers general manager Gavin Wilkinson says during a tour of the space: “Overanalyzing leads to paralysis in some ways where you’re scared to make a decision and you have to go with your gut. It’s about finding the balance.”

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That balance is constantly being tested as the organization makes sports science a growing priority. As open as the Timbers’ 49-year-old coach is open to analytics, Savarese’s 18-year playing career, which included stints on teams in Venezuela, Italy’s Serie A and MLS, preceded the Moneyball insights that are now pervasive throughout sports. He views analytics as “support” to natural gut feelings.

“I don’t believe math is the answer to every question. I will never make a decision only on a number,” he says. “You still need to have feeling; and you support that with numbers.

“We’re one family. We don’t always agree on everything, which I think is healthy. But we all are on the same page when it comes to finding a solution that’s best for the organization. We also pressure each other to be at a high standard … and everybody’s accountable.”

The next phase of the Timbers’ analytics overhaul will include the adoption of artificial intelligence, algorithms and predictive models that will scan and analyze mass quantities of data and automatically surface areas of interest and concern. Says Milonas: “What we’re trying to do is basically get as much automatic feedback as possible so that the data serves, essentially, as another set of eyes that allows us to pick up on things that we might not have noticed as quickly.”

The players already fill out daily journals in which they rate their quality of sleep and, for instance, write down what they had for dinner. “The team wants to know as much about our daily lives as possible, so if we do pick up an injury, if we do perform badly, if we are dehydrated, whatever it might be, they can try to trace back and find that exact point in time in which that happened,” Valentin says.

The hope is that the new predictive models can help prevent injuries before they happen, but Milonas says that will be “a really hard thing to” accomplish. Still, he believes that the more knowledge they’re able to compile—not only performance touchpoints, but also information from other departments such as player wellness and scouting—the better the organization will be at understanding the determinants than can keep players on the pitch.

“Everything coming together from different departments allows us to not only reflect but enables us to prescribe something that’s even more optimal than what we did in the past,” says Milonas, who’s in his fifth season with the Timbers. “How does all of this overlap with an athlete profile? How many game minutes did they play? Which players are apt to play in certain environments, whether it’s a home game, road game? We can take into account the amount of travel that might go into that game, or what type of climate they’re playing in.

“There’s so much, but at the end of the day it’s important for us to get to the point where we can utilize it all because otherwise we’re just collecting for the sake of collecting.”

The most crucial thing has nothing to do with being tech savvy. Milonas says the greatest weapon in the Timbers’ arsenal is still communication; and Wilkinson wants all of the team’s departments to integrate more than they already have. “We want the scouting to overlap the physical to overlap everything else,” the GM says.

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“Outside of all tech we use, [our success] really comes down to how we use [data] as a group and our ability to work really well together to build the best plan to support the athlete,” Milonas says. “If we can’t communicate the information properly, how are we going to get to that ultimate level of sustainable success?”

Keeping the messaging clear and simple also gives the players key takeaways from the data.

Valentin, for one, often asks the sports science team for his performance data so he can draw correlations between how he felt during training or a game and what the numbers show.

“I enjoy the analytics side of it because when you look at trends, I find my body reacts differently at different moments,” he says. “For example, I hadn’t played in three weeks and I was extremely exhausted after the game. Turns out that was the most I had run the entire year. If I’m feeling great and I’m covering a lot of distance, then OK, I’m fit, I can move forward. The times I don’t cover that much distance and still feel terrible, then I need to figure out what type of work to put in the rest of the week.”

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