For decades now, public enemy No. 1 for parents, doctors and P.E. teachers alike, has been video games.
Physicians have told us it leads to a sedentary life, inactivity and generally poor physical health.
KJ Costello, a junior at Santa Margarita, and
top recruit utilizes virtual reality training.
Photo by Jann Hendry
But now, it appears high school football coaches are encouraging their most important athletes — quarterbacks — to be at one with a very sophisticated form of gaming.
It is called virtual reality training and it will not only expand mental preparation, proponents said, but it will help prevent needless injuries on the practice field.
A year ago Branden Reilly launched Kansas City-based Eon Sports VR, a company that provides virtual reality experiences to coaches and players.
A former football player himself at
Aquinas (Overland Park, Kan.), his playing career was cut short by a head injury. So, after pursuing a college coaching career, he's now made his life's work to help highly trained athletes evolve mentally.
"I talked to Navy Seal trainers and neuroscientists, people who are focused on how we are wired to learn," Reilly told
Siliconprairienews.com. "I noticed that the best way that elite athletes learn had some component of virtual reality."
Over the last year, Reilly's company has developed a reality game called SIDEKIQ that allows high school football coaches to send in game film and recreate action.
"It is more like a simulator than a video game," said Reilly, noting that the simulator gives a quarterback a first-person point of view.
That was music to the ears of assistant
Santa Margarita (Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif.) coach Nate Longshore, who doubles as an instructor for All QBS, a training program for Orange County-area quarterbacks.
Longshore starred at quarterback under famed Southern California coach Harry Welch at
Canyon (Canyon Country), started at Cal and got a couple brief tryouts in the NFL.
See video presented by GMC on virtual reality training
He said his young protégés take to virtual reality training naturally.
"The (SIDEKIQ) technology is normally the stuff you see in Iron Man movies," Longshore told Siliconprairenews.com. "These kids have grown up on video games so it was seamless getting them to understand how to use it and how to learn the game with it."
His standout at Santa Margarita is
K.J. Costello, the fourth-ranked junior pro-style quarterback in the country according to
247Sports. Costello said virtual training is the next step for greatness.
On the field he's completed 132 of 208 passes for 1,762 yards and 10 touchdowns this season.
"Athleticism is God-given, but you look at the Peyton Mannings and Tom Bradys — they take mental preparation to a new level," Costello said. "Experience is everything in playing quarterback. You have to be comfortable out there. … The more defenses you read, the faster you get."
Longshore said SIDEKIQ is a bridge between game film, white board X's and O's and "the actual perspective you feel and see on the field. It's actually what it looks like when you're in the game. … Once you experience the software and dive in, this is what everyone will be using to get better."
He said his quarterbacks use SIDEKIQ two times per week and get more practice time without the fear of injury. They get an extra 100 repetitions per week, or the equivalent of "an extra six days of practice every week."
Micah Young, Byrnes
Photo by Samuel Stringer
He noted: "We have 14-year-olds who have played 1,500 games through this virtual training, so technically they have just as much, if not more experience, than an 85-year-old coach with 30 years on the field."
According to Reilly, high schools in Georgia and South Carolina, along with California, are training with SIDEKIQ.
That includes 11-time South Carolina state champion
Byrnes (Duncan).
"You have to be cutting edge if you want to be a winning program," Byrnes coach Brian Lane said.
Lane really needed to jump into the technology fray because he had a first-year starting quarterback in
Micah Young, a talented junior with limited experience.
Lane got Young loads of repetition through SIDEKIQ.
"You can look at the defenses and tell what coverages they're playing, man or zone," Young said. "It's a great view. It's helped me to recognize more quickly."
Byrnes coach and director of virtual reality Freddie Brown said: "This system allows you to process information very, very quickly and over and over and over.
"The brain is being fed football IQ. That's where it all happens. Once they play fast in their head, they're going to play fast on the field."
