When a Denison University athlete’s readiness score shifts from green to yellow or red, a coach can see the change almost immediately. That signal may lead to a conversation about training, sleep, academic stress, or recovery.
The tool behind this is the Denison Sports Performance Dashboard. It was developed by five Denison data analytics majors. They are all varsity athletes and spent two years building the visual dashboard for their own athletics department. The project demonstrates how colleges can turn athletics into an interdisciplinary learning laboratory, giving students meaningful experience while helping teams solve real problems.
Denison purchased force plates that measure the ground reaction athletes produce while jumping. The technology generates about 80 metrics related to fatigue, force generation, asymmetries, rehabilitation, and other indicators. Coaches, however, do not always have time to interpret that volume of information.
Students Jordyn Maurer, Jack Williams, Jack Rollo, Max Fishbein, and C.J. Geier helped close that gap. Their dashboard organizes force-plate results alongside information such as game statistics and injury histories. Coaches can identify patterns, assess athletes’ readiness, and use the results to inform training decisions. The students gained experience collecting, analyzing, and presenting data, and coaches received an immediately usable product. The project also offered Denison, a liberal arts institution, a scalable model for connecting athletics, academics, and career preparation.
At the University of Michigan, the Athlete Innovation Initiative shows how that concept can operate across a large research institution. Launched in 2024, the program connects Michigan Athletics with the university’s Human Performance and Sport Science Center and School of Information. Students can work in sports performance data analytics, applied sports science technology, and the Human Performance Athlete Innovation Lab.
The Michigan program provides access to advanced equipment and professional settings, but its most transferable lesson may be structural. Institutions need a genuine athletics challenge, faculty or staff supervision, a multidisciplinary student team, access to appropriate data, and a clearly defined product or research question. They do not necessarily need Michigan’s scale, but they do need guardrails.
Athletes should know what information is being collected, who can see it, how it will be used, and if and when it will be deleted. Institutions must determine whether a project is a classroom exercise, an internal assessment, or research requiring formal review. Faculty and qualified athletics professionals should supervise student access to identifiable health and performance records.
Consent also becomes complicated when coaches influence scholarships, roster positions, or playing time. Athletes must be able to decline participation without fearing penalty. They should also have opportunities to shape the questions being studied and understand the conclusions drawn from their data.
Athletics can become one of the most consequential applied-learning environments on a campus. The strongest sports labs will produce useful innovations and career-ready graduates while protecting the students whose bodies make that work possible.
