If you have ever been to a big lacrosse event with a fan zone, such as a club tournament, a PLL game, or the college lacrosse national championship weekend, there is always one booth that has a line significantly longer than the others… the fastest shot. At first glance you would think that this line tends to be the longest because knowing how fast you shoot is cool, and who wouldn’t want to know that? And in most cases, you would be right. However, there are many benefits to shot speed that can make you a better player when applied.
Goalies don’t have time to react to fast shots. According to this episode of ESPN’s Sports Science, PLL Founder and former multi-time MLL MVP, Paul Rabil shoots on average in a game 105 mph from roughly 30 feet away. At this speed the goalie has 0.19 seconds to react to the ball coming at them. According to Reference.com the current fastest reaction time on record is 0.101 seconds. Technically the fastest reaction time ever recorded could react to this shot and make the save.
However, according to this same article the average reaction time is 0.215 seconds meaning that on average it is physically impossible to react to this shot coming at them. Therefore, with a fast enough shot you can put the ball past the goalie before they have even had time for their brain to process that there is a ball coming at them and send signals to their body to do anything about it.
By knowing your shot speed, you can change your shot speed for the right situation. Very similar to what I said about angle in our past article on angle of release, when you only have one speed to your shot - as fast as you can shoot it in that situation - then goalies are able to key in on those things and it makes your shot easy to save. A goalie might not always be able to see your shot perfectly, but goalies will pick up on patterns and adjust their game accordingly. This is why you need to keep a goalie guessing and adjusting the speed of your shot is a great way to do this. Just like a pitcher in baseball will throw an off-speed well-placed pitch, you can also throw an off-speed well-placed shot and get a similar result, getting the ball by the goalie just like a pitcher gets the ball by the batter.
The SPAITR platform allows you to maximize this shooting potential by providing the shooter with all this data in the palm of their hand. After taking a single shot an athlete using the SPAITR platform will be able to know exactly how fast the shot was just by looking at their phone.
But it doesn’t stop there. The SPAITR App tracks all your shots in a game or practice session so not only will you be able to see each individual shot, but also a breakdown of your averages and how each shot compared to your average.
These never-before-seen aspects will allow players to take a deep dive into their game and their playing statistics allowing them to make minute changes to their play that will provide massive improvements on the field allowing players to take their game to the next level.
