Fitness centers: Sanford is giving athletes a number - Sioux Falls Argus Leader

Sanford Health officials want to assign numbers to athleticism.

It’s called the Sanford Score. It’s a rating from 1 to 1,000 to serve as a composite measure to indicate someone’s fitness, dynamic movement quality, speed, power and agility. The system now is in use for basketball and hockey, with measures for soccer and volleyball to come next.

“We quantify athleticism, which provides an objective measure to assess what someone’s strengths and weaknesses are,” said Thayne Munce, associate director of the National Institute for Athletic Health and Performance, a Sanford affiliate.

Officials hope it catches on as something akin to an athletic version of an academic test. Just as a high school senior quotes an ACT score in applying for college, so would an athlete have a single numerical value as a personal frame of reference.

That could open up a world of bragging rights among players. But it also could provide information that becomes the basis for safer and more effective training. A rating, including video analysis, would show how someone jumps, lands, accelerates, stops and changes direction and could pinpoint tendencies that lead to injury. Athletes often are screened after an injury to determine cause or to measure recovery.

“We had this wild idea. Let’s screen them before they get hurt,” Munce said.

Someone acquires a score by running through a series of tests at the Sanford Pentagon in northwestern Sioux Falls. It takes 30 to 40 minutes and costs $25. Or someone can go to sanfordscore.com and apply electronically for an online result. The website will ask a series of qusestions, including level of play for basketball, offering the choices of middle school, high school, college, professional and adult recreational.

The result is not a fixed piece of data like blood type or DNA. Instead, it’s a number with a potential to change as someone improves with time.

Officials concede that they don’t know where all this is going. They don’t know whether college basketball coaches would use Sanford Score numbers as a reference for comparing high school recruits. But Sanford is banking on there being a role for such a number someday.

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“That number isn’t out there. We want it to be the Sanford Score,” Munce said.

Officials also see a broader value in the effort beyond the individual performer. They hope the system by collecting numerous profiles can provide enough data to help coaches and trainers tailor their work in player development. A bank of information collected over time could indicate how injuries 10 or 20 years from now relate to athletic performance habits today.

“It’s going to take several years to collect data, to fine-tune the tests. Ultimately, your aspiration is to be a widely recognized and accepted measure of athleticism,” Munce said.

Munce, 38, is a 1993 graduate of Roosevelt High School who played football as an offensive lineman at Augustana College before earning a graduate degree at Penn State. He is well acquainted with locker room culture and aware that an individual rating system could add stress to the fun of athletics.

“For some, it certainly may. The majority of the others, they want to get better at their sport and stay safe while they’re doing it. I could conceive a time when sports metrics are mandatory.”