Practice workspace
Reading the Work-rate Monitor
A coach's guide to the work-rate dial. Two minutes to read; everything on this page matches what the tool shows on screen. In Practice's Film sub-view, this dial is the Work-rate monitor — the first card in the panel deck below the video; the Squad sub-view shows the same index for the whole team at once, one compact tile per player.
Needle to the right (green): the player is moving at or above the rate they set early in this drill. Needle sweeping left: their active work rate is falling off.
Session roster: Work done and Work rate
Before you ever open the dial above, the Session landing page shows a compact arc meter next to every athlete's name. It measures something different — not decline from an early-drill baseline, but two plain physical facts about this session.
Work done — an odometer
It only ever adds up: the total movement load Catapult recorded for this athlete across the whole practice.
Work rate — a speedometer
That same load's intensity: how much of it landed per minute, at any point in the session.
Both numbers are in AU (arbitrary units), accumulated straight from the vest accelerometer's own PlayerLoad calculation — not calories, and not directly comparable to any other team or published fitness scale, only to this squad, this session.
Reading the meter's colour
The arc runs violet at the low end through blue and teal to green at the high end, scaled 0 to this session's own highest athlete. The colour marks WHERE an athlete sits on that scale — it is not a judgment. It does not mean good or bad, readiness, or injury risk, the same way the dial's own numbers don't (see "What this is not," below). A violet reading is not a warning; a green one is not praise.
Each row also states the athlete's value against the team mean in words (for example, "+12% vs team mean") — the same kind of comparison the dial makes against an athlete's own baseline, applied here to total load instead.
What the dial measures, in one sentence
It compares how hard a player is moving right now — measured by their Catapult sensor, counted only while they're actually working — against the rate they themselves set in the first part of the same drill.
Each player is their own yardstick
A 60 for one athlete and a 60 for another both mean "well off their own early pace" — it never compares players to each other.
Bench time doesn't count against them
Standing in line, waiting out a rotation, or getting water freezes the needle — it only reads live movement.
It resets every drill
A hard warm-up doesn't carry into the scrimmage number.
The number and the colors
| Reading band | What it means |
|---|---|
| 0–33 Within typical session variation | Holding at or near their early-drill pace. Normal. |
| 34–66 Notable work-rate decline | Their active pace has dropped meaningfully below where they started. Worth a look at the film. |
| 67–100 Large work-rate decline | Their active pace has fallen toward 30% or more below their own baseline. Watch the tape, then talk to the player. |
The scale ends at a 100 when the drop reaches 30% — a display choice we picked so the dial has a full sweep, not a medical threshold. The band label always appears as text next to the number, so nobody has to judge by color alone.
The film is the point
The needle is wired to the video playhead. Press play and it moves with the film; click any tagged movement in the event list and the film jumps to that exact moment, with the dial showing that player's state right then. The number is a flag; the film is the evidence.
- After (or during) a drill, glance at the Work-rate Δ column on the team board — it shows every player's score for the selected drill.
- Anyone amber or red: select them, click into their late-drill events, and watch the clips. Are they genuinely fading, or did their role change — spot-up shooter this rep, off-ball the next?
- If the tape agrees with the dial, that's a coaching conversation — not a conclusion.
Messages you'll see instead of a number
The tool refuses to show a number it can't stand behind. These states are honest, not broken:
The player is below the activity threshold right now. The needle holds its last active value, dimmed, until they move again.
The first ~3 active minutes of each drill are spent learning the player's pace. No reading until then — a needle with nothing behind it would just be noise. On the Squad board, a still-calibrating tile shows the wait as a countdown instead of a bare dash — "Calibrating · ready ~HH:MM:SS" on the video clock — whenever the tool can compute one.
Drills under 6 minutes never get scored (in this practice: Warm Up, Pre Practice, and Team Ball Handling). There isn't enough active time on both ends to compare fairly.
Too little active time, or an activity pattern the math can't split cleanly. The message names the reason. A blocked reading is never shown as a zero.
Athlete Seven's waist pod failed during this session (a dead sensor axis), so it's excluded entirely. Seven's vest readings are fine.
Vest and Waist
The toggle on the panel switches between the two sensors each player wore. Coach off the Vest view. Waist units read systematically higher (about 60% on average) and the two are never comparable — the tool keeps them separate on purpose. The team board and team averages are vest-only.
Team numbers
The average score across players with a valid reading, always shown as "n/7 valid" so you know who's in it and who abstained.
Each player's drill scores averaged together, weighted by how much they actually worked. It is not a "practice got slower over time" trend: drill intensity is set by your practice plan (warm-up is one of the highest-rate periods in this session), so we only ever compare within a drill.
A real example from this practice (Apr 25 · 3v3 Handle → Movement, 16:44)
Same drill, same minutes, seven players — the dial separated them:
- Athlete Two finished above their own early pace — score 0, green. No drop-off.
- Athlete Three's active rate fell about a third below their early pace — score 100, red. Ungated stats made it look even worse, but most of that was bench time; the real, work-only decline still topped the squad.
- Team average for the drill: 53, amber.
That spread — one player rising while another fades in the same drill — is exactly the situation this dial exists to catch, and exactly the moment to pull up Three's late-drill clips.
What this is not
This is a work-rate meter, not a fatigue test. The disclaimer printed under the gauge is the contract:
Printed under the gauge Derived work-rate index — vest-mounted PlayerLoad (arbitrary units), activity-gated, within-drill. Compares the athlete to themselves in the same drill. Not a measurement of fatigue, readiness, or injury risk, and not a medical or clinical assessment.
- Never use it to make return-to-play, injury-risk, or medical decisions of any kind.
- A red reading can be tactics, role, or effort as easily as tiredness — the film and the player tell you which.
- It knows nothing about yesterday: one practice, one baseline per drill. Trends across days need more sessions.