Editor’s Note: asterisks adjacent to names signify that a pseudonym has been used per the request of the interviewee.

In Fall 2021, Hamilton Women’s Soccer had an undefeated home season, a №17 ranking in the NCAA Division III league and a spot in the NESCAC semifinals. Players achieved this success in part with the help of WHOOP: a wearable fitness band that, according to the WHOOP website, “monitors your sleep, recovery, and daily effort around the clock to deliver actionable insights on how you can optimize your performance.” In July, players received their WHOOPs via mail, and their coaches instructed them to wear the WHOOPS at all times.

Additionally, players and Women’s Soccer Head Coach Colette Gilligan had access to the entire team’s personal health data via a leaderboard. The leaderboard used a numerical system to rank each player based on their athletic performance. The numerical system calculated on a log scale from 0–21, with a score of 21 being the highest. The system analyzed each player’s WHOOP data to determine the player’s score (and subsequently their ranking). For example, if one player ran five miles one day, the numerical system would rank that player above another who did not exercise or had exercised less that day.

This tool has never been used at Hamilton before. “It was such a foreign thing…What is this? Does it track you?” said Olive*. She continued. saying: “I remember during summer training I’d be like, oh my God, this girl did a 16 value workout, which is really high. I only did 10. I’d just feel that pressure, that unnecessary pressure to do more.”

Instead of players using the WHOOP as a personal exercise and progress tracker, the summer leaderboard made the WHOOP a means for athletes to measure and compare themselves to their teammates, pushing some to want to be the hardest working player. “It’s you comparing yourself to other people with different bodies, different lifestyles,” said Lucy*. “It was just really, really not good.”

“There were a couple of days where it was shared at the beginning of the year,” said Coach Gilligan. “That was my lack of knowledge and knowing how it functions and once I realized….it was turned off.” The team deactivated the leaderboard on Aug. 28, a week after players arrived on campus.

Rylie Mutton ’23 said she refused to join the WHOOP page until the team deactivated the leaderboard. “I could not do that. I can’t look at other people’s calories. Let’s say I’m having a hard day and I just can’t work out today. If I went on that and saw that everyone else went for a run and had a 19 strain, and I’m at the bottom, with a four strain, just walking around, that wouldn’t feel good.”

The idea of using the WHOOP came from Isabella Roselli ’22, who personally used one as a way to monitor her fitness after tearing her ACL. She proposed using the WHOOP as a team activity so everyone could monitor their own fitness. “We wanted to better ourselves as athletes, have a better season, have a stronger season and compete, which is what everyone on this team wanted,” said Roselli.

In addition to monitoring their fitness though the WHOOP, the team implemented a zero tolerance alcohol policy, commonly referred to as playing through a “dry season.” “I looked at the last three years of records, when [players] would go out, and how that affected our next weekend,” said Coach Gilligan.

By examining previous schedules and identifying Saturdays that the team had off (i.e. Saturdays when the team could go out and drink), Coach Gilligan’s research concluded that the next weekend, Women’s Soccer would not win their game. Hamilton Men’s Rowing has historically instituted a full dry season, and many other teams have policies that forbids players from drinking 24, 48 or 72 hours before their game.

At a team meeting in Spring 2021, Coach Gilligan brought up the idea of using the WHOOP. Players then held meetings without the coach to discuss the decision, and eventually committed to wearing them for the full season, with some wearing them the summer prior as well.

The inspiration behind using a product like WHOOP came from constraints on the team’s activity during the 2020–2021 academic year. Due to COVID-19, the team could not finish out their season. Instead, they used that year as a reflection period for discussing where they wanted to be as a team once they could play again. “We finished fifth in the NESCAC after my freshman year, so this year, Collete asked us what our goal was, and we all agreed that we wanted to get a NCAA bid,” said Mutton.

Only the top four teams in the NESCAC get NCAA bids, meaning that the Hamilton team would have to place at least one spot higher than their 2019 NESCAC ranking in order to get a bid in 2021. The team realized that they needed to change their behavior during and outside of practice to achieve this goal. “This doesn’t come by just speaking words, you have to act upon it,” said Isabella Rosselli ’22.

Lucy* was worried that her coaches would keep track of sleep schedules using the WHOOP: “What happens if we’re staying out late at night? And it’s like three o’clock? Will we be reprimanded for this?”

One feature of the WHOOP tracks sleep performance, efficiency and consistency. It shows when players were in “deep sleep”, when they woke up and when they should go to bed. Olive* was also anxious of the coaches’ judgements and decisions on playing time based on WHOOP data. “If she sees me at X amount of sleep, there’s no context around that. So she could be like, oh, this girl is just not working on a recovery. I was worried about that aspect.”

Lucy* and Olive* felt that monitored sleep schedules would put themselves under a microscope that extended beyond the field. “[Coach Gilligan] wasn’t transparent about how she was going to use the information, so we were all kind of on edge, thinking, is she going to use it against us?” said Lucy*.

After Coach Gilligan learned about

The Spectator

’s investigation regarding Women’s Soccer’s WHOOP and dry season policies, she sent an email to all of her players telling them that she would “like to know if you know ANYTHING about this.”

Gilligan later said that WHOOP “allowed me to better manage practice and not put players at risk for injury. For them as individuals, it just allowed them a ton more information on how their body is actually working.”

During practices, the coaches used the metrics from the WHOOPs to adapt drills for different players and for individual recovery needs. “Everyday [before practice] I would go to recovery and click on this and see who was in the red,” explained Gilligan.

The WHOOP places players into three zones — red, yellow and green. A player is placed in the red zone when their recovery score is between zero and twenty percent. The red zone shows that a player has pushed herself to the limit, and that they need to recover before they exercise again. Gilligan used this measurement to monitor her players: “If you are in the red for a couple of days, you should probably not be practicing, because, if you’re practicing under high intensity conditions, you run the risk of injury.”

Mutton explained that Gilligan once separated players for recovery. “Once she came up to us and said: “Oh, you played most of the game and you worked really hard, your legs must be really tired. Take the last half of practice and go to the pool and shake out your legs.”

In addition to indicating intense exercising, the red zone also highlights irregularity in a player’s general routine. For Coach Gilligan, this was also a useful tool. “It brought about further conversations… [like] have you been sleeping or, do you have a lot going on academically?”

In general, these conversations did not bother the players; if the WHOOP indicated that they were in the red zone, they knew Gilligan would ask them about it, and that she would not reprimand them. “I was in the red for three days, so I was kind of anticipating her coming up to me on the third day, she just brought me aside, it wasn’t that bad” remarked Olive*.

Now, despite initial concerns, players have grown accustomed to the WHOOP. “The fact that she has access to it doesn’t really cross your mind anymore” said Lucy*. On a day-to-day basis, “Coach doesn’t vocalize her usage of it. So she’s not like “so-and-so, you’re in the green and you’re in the red, maybe you should take it easy.” Now, it’s just become more of a personal thing,” explained Olive*.

Players have also found the WHOOP beneficial for personal reasons. For example, Mutton uses her WHOOP data to track her sleep: “[the device will] send me an alert. Oh, it’s time to start getting ready for bed, you need nine hours of sleep tonight. And I’m like, oh, I better go to bed.” For others, it is a motivator to work harder, on and off the field: “If my strain is really high, then I want to keep getting it up,” explained Lucy*.

Still, she remarked that some players still have some concerns. “The WHOOP makes you feel like you’re doing less, even though you’re doing the same amount. If your strain is low, you almost feel like you’re not reaching your goals … some people on the team will look at it and be like, oh, my strain is really low. I’m going to go on another run.”

Women’s Soccer is the first Hamilton team to simultaneously institute a dry season and the WHOOP. These new policies contributed to the Women’s Soccer team’s best season in recent memory.

However, this season was cut short when the team lost in the NESCAC semi finals to Wesleyan. The team was without over ten players for this game because Coach Gilligan suspended those players for breaching the “dry season” policy.

Coach Gilligan argued that the team chose to implement the WHOOP and the dry season policies because players “did want an increase in competitiveness and compared to how we did in NESCAC [last year] they wanted to go to a final four in NESCAC. They wanted to go to the NCAA tournament. So, from us as a coaching staff… what do we need to adapt or change to make us better?”