The San Diego Seals’ quest for a championship led them to Point Loma Nazarene University’s Balboa Campus on Thursday morning.
There, the college and club announced a collaboration that’s believed to be the first in professional lacrosse.
The Seals will now have access to PLNU’s state-of-the-art Center for Human Performance. PLNU students studying to become strength coaches, biomechanists or sports scientists will work side-by-side with Seals coaches and members of the team operations staff.
The students will analyze game and practice data to help inform the team’s training while also applying biomechanics and sports science principles in a professional setting.
Seals players began their biometric testing there on Thursday. Training camp will be held this week at the Balboa Campus. The Seals will open the 2025-26 season on Sept. 29 against the Ottawa Black Bears at the Canadian Tire Centre.
Dr. Brent Alvar, PLNU’s associate dean and the graduate program director in the department of kinesiology, calls it an “innovative initiative.” The Seals follow in the footsteps of baseball’s Padres, who began using PLNU’s biomechanics pitching lab last year.
“Our shared goal really is to just enhance performance,” Alvar said. “We’re going to do that in a myriad of ways. We’re going to do it in the classroom, we’re going to do it in the clinic and we’re going to do it on the field.”
Analytics in professional lacrosse has been mostly one-size-fits-all, with leagues like the National Lacrosse League partnering with various companies to collect and distribute data to fans and teams.
The real breakthroughs came on college campuses. In recent years, lacrosse powerhouses like Maryland and Syracuse embedded students into their programs in hopes of gaining a performance edge on the competition.
Despite lacrosse’s continued growth in popularity, it hasn’t been funded like baseball, football and basketball. There simply hasn’t been money to fund data analytics, player analytics and biometric and biomechanical testing.
The Seals hope their partnership with PLNU can be a win-win, improving their performance while introducing some of the data-driven elements to professional lacrosse.
Seals captain Wes Berg said lacrosse is behind when it comes to its use of analytics.
“The stats really haven’t changed since I’ve been in the league for 10 years, or since I’ve been playing, really,” said Berg, who began learning lacrosse around the same time he learned how to walk. “I started when I was probably a year or 2 old, with my older brother playing. My dad got me into it.”
Initially, the lab will measure the Seals’ strength, speed, power, agility, force development, and movement efficiency.
Seals coach and general manager Patrick Merrill believes the partnership will be “game-changing — not only for our team, and getting us one step closer to our ultimate goal of winning a National Lacrosse League championship, but also I think it’s going to be game-changing for our sport.”
The 32-year-old Berg joked that he wants the program to focus on injury prevention for us “old guys.” He said there are some days he can barely get out of his truck in the afternoon after practicing with players a decade younger than he is.
“There’s so much we’ve never really utilized. Our baseline has been pretty simple,” he said. “I’m excited to see where it goes.”