British Wheelchair Basketball gets an assist from Vodafone

Vodafone PLAYER.Connect Performance Consultant, John Mulcahy, sharing performance data with British Wheelchair Basketball Men's team players.

PLAYER.Connect technology is supporting British Wheelchair Basketball’s Men’s team ahead of their upcoming international summer competition.

Wheelchair basketball first emerged in the US after the Second World War as a means of allowing injured servicemen to continue playing team sports. It has since become one of the most popular disability sports globally.

Its UK origins can be traced more specifically to the second-ever Stoke Mandeville Games in 1949 – then held annually – where British war veterans started playing wheelchair netball. In 1955, however, the invitation of the USA’s Pan Am Jets wheelchair basketball team soon led to the switch from netball to basketball.

Today, British Wheelchair Basketball – the national governing body for wheelchair basketball in the United Kingdom – presides over national leagues consisting of 55 men’s, 18 women’s and eight junior teams.

And, just like their counterparts in the running game, the players that make up these teams are high-performing athletes with high-performance needs. Which is where Vodafone PLAYER.Connect comes in.

A platform for performance

PLAYER.Connect is a performance app designed to help athletes across various sports get the most from their training, performance and recovery.

First used by the British & Irish Lions, and then Wales Women’s Rugby, the mobile-first app achieves this by enabling players to track everything from fatigue, soreness and training load to energy levels, sleep and mood.

Vodafone has now tailored the technology for wheelchair athletes, catering to the unique challenges they face, such as higher energy demands in certain situations and increased load on key muscle groups.

Alongside six-time Wimbledon champion Alfie Hewett OBE, it is British Wheelchair Basketball that has become the first wheelchair team to experience the benefits of Vodafone PLAYER.Connect.

“Vodafone PLAYER.Connect technology really helps the athlete’s performance team, and this is led by the fact that it’s a mobile-first app,” says John Mulcahy, Vodafone PLAYER.Connect Performance Consultant.

“The players can upload their data anywhere they’ve got a mobile signal. That data is then uploaded to a central mobile database, where their performance team can act upon it almost instantly.”

Driven by data

To get to this point, Vodafone has worked closely with both Hewett and British Wheelchair Basketball medical staff, tailoring the data players and their teams want to collect around the particular demands of wheelchair athletes.

“Vodafone are very keen to get the players’ perspective on the development of something that should be specific to our needs,” says Dr. Dale Thomas, British Wheelchair Basketball Clinical and Performance Psychologist.

“We’re dealing with elite athletes, so there are times when physical or mental fatigue is quite high, and that’s allowed the supporting staff to make the best decisions for rest and recovery.”

Physically, overuse injuries are common in the sport. These are injuries where the same muscle groups are consistently being used for both small, precise movements linked to hand-eye coordination, as well as large body movements related to core stability and posture.

Thankfully, the range of data that can be tracked by players using Vodafone PLAYER.Connect can help performance teams to design player preparation schedules with injury prevention in mind.

“I recently posted a red for an injury, which meant I wasn’t able to do a conditioning session in my chair,” explains British player, Ben Fox.

“But Vodafone PLAYER.Connect meant that, as a player, I was able to take the decision to go and do a conditioning session on the rower. So, I’m still getting the same amount of training load, just in a different way.”

Player power

For the players themselves, the opportunity to understand their bodies even better is key, as Fox’s teammate Kyle Marsh suggests:

“I interact with Vodafone PLAYER.Connect every morning – it’s pretty much the first thing I do. It’s so useful to give that information to my performance staff about how I feel, how I slept, and how my body is feeling.

The app also allows athletes to contact their team psychologist when they need support – something that is particularly important for less well-funded sports, where it often isn’t possible for them to travel on tour with the team.

“A lot of the players live abroad,” explains Thomas, “so what Vodafone PLAYER.Connect allows us to do is maintain connections with those athletes both in and out of camp.”

“Investment in wheelchair basketball is huge for me, but not just wheelchair basketball, disabled sport in general.”

Terry Bywater, British Wheelchair Basketball player

This work with wheelchair athletes isn’t the first example of the app undergoing new developments to meet athletes’ evolving needs. In 2022, menstrual cycle tracking capabilities were added in support of the Welsh Women’s Rugby teams.

All of which suggests that that Vodafone PLAYER.Connect will continue to evolve to meet the needs of UK athletes.

“Investment in wheelchair basketball is huge for me, but not just wheelchair basketball, disabled sport in general,” says British Wheelchair Basketball player, Terry Bywater.

“Kids out there don’t often get a chance to try different disabled sports but, by working with a huge company like Vodafone, we can change that.”

Read the full press release here, and stay up to date with the latest news from Vodafone by following us on LinkedIn and Twitter/X, as well as signing up for News Centre website notifications.