Miami’s Football Used Own It and Whoop to Save Their 2021 Season

The transition from high school football to a Power Five conference is a daunting one, given the physical demands of the sport at the higher level. So the University of Miami is among the programs that adds extra workouts for its true freshman, who rarely gain much playing time. 

Safety Kamren Kinchens was part of a daily 5:45 a.m. strength and conditioning session last fall, but as the Hurricanes faltered early in the season—a 2-4 record in mid-October—Kinchens and his freshmen classmates started seeing the field more and more.  

The problem, however, was the toll of those early workouts. A few dozen Hurricanes had begun wearing Whoop straps to track their strain, recovery and sleep, and those crack-of-dawn sessions were tanking their key biometrics, such as heart rate variability.  

“Chronically, they’re under sleeping, and it’s just not a positive gain on the body,” says Kyle Bellamy, Miami’s director of football nutrition and performance. “As they started to get more reps, and we relied on these guys to start or play a significant role in the game, we started to see the downtrend of a lot of our numbers.” 

In consultation with Justin Roethlingshoefer, founder of the performance consultancy Own It Coaching, Miami’s coaching staff shifted the freshmen’s workout times to later in the day. Prior to that week’s Oct. 23rd game against nationally-ranked NC State, Kinchens had his season-best sleep, HRV and recovery scores, all of which led the team, too. 

Then on game-night, with Miami clinging to a one-point lead in the final minutes, N.C. State faced a 4th and 8 near midfield and completed a pass in the right flat. But Kinchens recognized the Wolfpack’s formation from his pregame film study and saved the game by making a quick read to stop the receiver well short of the first down marker.  

After the game, Kinchens told reporters, “We just did it every day in practice. Every time they had stacks, he’s going to start off the line and do an out route, so I already kind of knew it was coming, so I just had to make the play.” 

That answer resonated with Bellamy, who wonders about Kinchens’ mental acuity in that moment and the correlational relationship with his altered schedule that week. 

“He reverted back to his film study,” Bellamy says. “For a guy who got more sleep and thus more REM sleep, and his body’s ability to get that mental restorative component to it—I don’t really believe in absolutes, I’m not saying that was the end-all, be-all why he made that play. However, if he’s not prepared for his mind and his data processing system, his brain, to compute all of that, in a short period of time with chaos going on and heart rate elevated? He might not have been suited to then make that play.” 

Kinchens wasn’t alone in seeing gains. Over the season, Miami players improved sleep quantity by 27% and decreased illness-related absences by 14%. The Hurricanes also won five of their last six games. 

Own It is the brainchild of Roethlingshoefer, a former performance coach for the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks who previously was a graduate assistant during Louisville’s 2013 run to the NCAA men’s basketball championship under Rick Pitino. (Coaching platform MaxOne acquired Own It Tech last October and integrated with Whoop in January.) He gained an understanding of and passion for maximizing internal load metrics—i.e., physiological metrics such as HRV—through what he has labeled the “eight controllables.”  

To be exact, the eight habits and activities a person can manage to set themselves up for success are: nutrition, exercise, hydration, sleep, immune function, self-care, mindset and environment. Roethlingshoefer’s analytics platform sits on top of the wearable’s raw data collection and offers additional insights and recommendations. “The more they started wearing [Whoop], the more they started to implement habits that I didn’t even have to talk to them about,” Bellamy says. 

Miami football began with 20 players wearing Whoop last season, but its reception by players was so overwhelmingly positive that they added budget to the project and increased the deployment to 37.  

“There’s a culture shift and a culture movement in professional and collegiate sports, knowing that they have to now empower their athletes,” Roethlingshoefer says. “It can’t just be this ironclad wall that all the data exists behind it, and your strength coach, your sport coach, your athletic trainer, your nutritionist are the only ones that have access to it and then are just telling athletes what to do.” 

Roethlingshoefer remained in almost daily touch with Bellamy but never directly with the players. Though Own It is an athlete-facing app, Roethlingshoefer believes the best communication comes from the trusted coach, rather than a third party.  

Own It is working with 27 college programs and, while the magnitude of change varies, improvement has been universal, according to Roethlingshoefer. “We’re seeing positive adaptation, positive adherence, positive uptake, positive impact on every single school that we’re working with,” he says. 

While Miami was already awash with external load measurements, ranging from Catapult GPS devices to force plate data, there was nothing for sleep and recovery. College athletes, like all students, aren’t always making the best choices to prioritize sufficient sleep. Everyone’s class schedule and lifestyle choices are different, and everyone responds differently to workouts of the same intensity and at the same time. 

“This is the coolest part about this whole process and what we’re able to track through this is, everybody is extremely individualized,” Bellamy says. “You can’t just give blanket recommendations to everybody. It’s giving you the big picture, where, especially from an internal standpoint, we were just kind of guessing.” 

For Bellamy, this mission is also personal. He walked onto Miami’s baseball team and learned proper habits for training

and nutrition, developing into a first-team All-American pitcher as a junior. The Chicago White Sox drafted him in the fifth round in 2009, where he advanced to Double-A ball and earned an invite to big league camp. Twice he was named the “Hardest Working Pitcher in the Organization,” but his career was cut short due to a series of injuries. 

 “I was one of those guys that you see in the Nike commercials and it’s like, ‘no days off, 24/7/365.’ And it’s all about work, work, work, work, work,” Bellamy says. “I had success up to that point. The harder I did work, the better the results I got. However, chronically over time, that probably broke me down.  

 “Because I know for a fact—knowing what I know now—I under-slept. I worked my butt off, I under-fueled, right, my nutrition was good, but I definitely didn’t consume the amount of calories and the proper nutrients that I needed because I just went off of what worked.” 

 While Bellamy saw massive gains by working hard after the reached college, the opposite is also true. Many athletes were so preternaturally talented that they coasted to higher levels before they needed the holistic support of a program like Own It. 

 “What you end up seeing is that a lot of these players have gotten there through talent alone,” Roethlingshoefer says, “and haven’t fully realized the potential that exists within them yet because maybe they haven’t been focused on this or they haven’t been educated on it.”