Sports Sciences Commons^™

Simplifying External Load Data In Ncaa Division-I Men's Basketball Competitions: A Principal Component Analysis, Jason D. Stone, Justin J. Merrigan, Jad Ramadan, Robert Shaun Brown, Gerald T. Cheng, William Guy Hornsby, Holden Smith, Scott M. Galster, Joshua A. Hagen

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

The primary purpose was to simplify external load data obtained during Division-I (DI) basketball competitions via principal component analysis (PCA). A secondary purpose was to determine if the PCA results were sensitive to load demands of different positional groups (POS). Data comprised 229 observations obtained from 10 men's basketball athletes participating in NCAA DI competitions. Each athlete donned an inertial measurement unit that was affixed to the same location on their shorts prior to competition. The PCA revealed two factors that possessed eigenvalues >1.0 and explained 81.42% of the total variance. The first factor comprised total decelerations (totDEC, 0.94), average …