Marquette Men’s Basketball Adds New Technology To Aid In Skills Development

We got a bit of a treat the other day from the Marquette men’s basketball Twitter account, as they showed off a new bit of technology available to the team in the McGuire Center.

I did a little digging to figure out what’s the deal here, as it appears that Sacar Anim is playing a basketball version of Dance Central. The device in question is the Lazer 900 from Handle Fitness, a company based out of Arizona. Here’s their description of the device:

The Lazer™ 900 delivers ball-handling drills from the top NBA skills coaches and trainers directly to users around the world. Powered by award-winning software, it's the world's first motion-based cardio trainer designed to mimic the movements of pro basketball without the rim. Requiring a real basketball to train, our unique fitness innovation tracks every move of your body and every bounce of the ball as you aspire to dribble to the tempo of the audiotrack in progress; and much, more including over 1 million LIVE and on-demand signature workouts. With three adjustable levels of stability, featuring downloadable content (DLC) to accommodate all skill-sets, this interactive evolution for player development is engineered for personal/group fitness settings.

A MILLION DIFFERENT WORKOUTS HOLY CRAP

My intuition that Anim is playing a basketball version of Dance Central is almost exactly on target. The FAQ on the Handle Fitness website point blank mentions the “compound timing benefits of Guitar Hero,” and one of the slides in a rotating set of graphics at the top of every page includes a Kinect For Windows logo. The only thing separating the drill that Anim is doing from the Xbox Kinect dancing game is in fact the basketball that he’s dribbling.

Here’s a couple other videos from the website:

The FAQ explains that there’s four different types of drills available in the set of 1 million workouts: Isometrics, Footwork, Dexterity, and Reactivity. It’s not just a ball-handling trainer, as the Footwork and Reactivity angles help develop post moves and defensive movement speed.

If you take a spin through the Handle Fitness website, you’ll clearly see that this is designed as a new angle on an every day workout for the average every day person. However, for a suggested retail price of $5,000, this seems like money well spent for the Marquette athletic department. It’s skill training that the players can do without anyone there to rebound or pass for them so it maximizes the activities that they can do in their free time. In addition to that, both the men’s and women’s basketball teams can use the Lazer 900 to hone their skills, not to mention any other athlete on campus if the strength and conditioning staff see the benefit in having soccer, lacrosse, or even golf run through drills that are outside the normal activity for their sport.