In Xavier’s weight room, a player steps onto a force plate and waits for a series of lights to tell her where to react. The system measures what happens underneath the movement, from ground-reaction force, countermovement, reaction time, to how efficiently her body is producing force.
Etelman can compare those numbers with what she has seen from the same athlete before, adding another layer of objective information to the readiness and workload data her staff uses to shape training. The force-plate readings can help the staff recognize changes in neuromuscular fatigue. Combined with PlayerPulse’s synthesis of qualitative data and training load, Edelman and her team are identifying injury risk and supporting earlier intervention.
“It acts as a check engine light,” Etelman said.
A player’s vertical jump might be high during preseason and then drop after a couple of weeks of games. The change can be measured against her own baseline, giving the staff another way to monitor neuromuscular fatigue. That information becomes more useful when considered alongside workload, recovery and readiness, the broader picture PlayerPulse uses in its predictive approach to injury prevention.
Etelman has spent much of her career thinking about what to do with information like that, particularly where the line falls between pushing an athlete toward what she needs and asking her to do more simply because more work is easy to equate with commitment.
The question has become increasingly relevant at Xavier, where Etelman took over as head coach in February after five seasons on the staff. Since joining the program in 2021, she has helped Xavier to 75 wins, two BIG EAST regular-season championships, a BIG EAST Tournament title and four NCAA Championship appearances. Xavier’s 75 wins over that span are the seventh most in Division I. Last fall, the Musketeers won their second BIG EAST Tournament championship, advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament and set program records with 71 goals, 68 assists and 210 points. They also went 13-0-2 during a 15-match unbeaten streak.
There is a particular precision to the way Etelman talks about training. It comes partly from her own background and partly from a sport she has spent years learning from at home. Her husband, Brian, coached college track for 14 years, and the two have used each other as sounding boards, comparing notes and asking questions about what they are seeing in their athletes.
Track is almost relentlessly measurable. A runner can look at a time, compare it with the last one and know, at least in one very specific sense, what happened. Soccer is less obliging. The same player can produce a different number on a different day for reasons that have little to do with whether she has become a better or worse soccer player.
“With track, you’re using a timing system,” Etelman said. “You just get straight numbers.” She goes on to share that, “Strength training is huge in track. That’s where you’ll really see athletes getting after, putting up weight, and you can really see their speeds improve. So I’ve thought a lot about, and borrowed, from that.”
I understood what she meant immediately. I walked on to a Division I lacrosse program, in large part because of the training foundation built through training in winter track, not my main sport. For example, Xavier uses a max aerobic speed test to establish an individual baseline for each player. The staff then uses those results to determine the distances appropriate for each athlete. The team may head out together, but they are not necessarily running the same distance.
When the players run, Etelman is not simply watching who gets to the line first. From the side of the field, the drill can look like a straightforward race, a collection of athletes chasing the same endpoint, but her attention is on what happens in between. How a player approaches the line, whether she can slow herself down, how cleanly she plants and pivots, how quickly she can
change direction and accelerate again.
“So much of what we do is acceleration, starts and stops, changing speeds,” Etelman said. “That’s really important.”
Two players can reach the same line at nearly the same time and have taken very different paths to get there. That is why Xavier uses both straight-line conditioning and running with turns and changes of direction. The staff is trying to make the work resemble the demands of the game, where a player’s ability to slow down and redirect herself can matter as much as how quickly she can cover the next few yards.
The same principle explains why the players do not all run the same distance. The endpoint may be shared, but the route to it does not have to be.
That is a small detail, almost invisible once the players are moving, but it says a lot about Etelman’s thinking. The point is not to produce another number for athletes to obsess over. It is to give the coaches a better starting point for figuring out what their training should actually look like. In the same way, the data and information collected by respective players in their PlayerPulse daily wellness reports matter. It’s how the coaching staff can help distinguish one athlete’s needs from another’s.
Athletes can easily become overly focused on the numbers themselves, Etelman said, particularly when an evaluation starts to feel like another standard they have to meet. She wants the information to do something more useful, giving the athlete and the coaching staff a clearer sense of what her training should look like that day.
Etelman’s willingness to question repetition has become part of the way she coaches more broadly. Early in her career, she said, she had a tendency to over-communicate. She wanted to explain everything, to make sure the players understood every part of what she was asking, until experience taught her that making something simpler did not make it less rigorous. Sometimes a shorter message landed more clearly because the athlete could actually carry it onto the field.
The lesson has followed her into the training plan. PlayerPulse creates a central command center for GPS data, force-plate measurements and fitness evaluation results that give the staff a more precise picture so that the prescription becomes clearer. This is how the prescription for each players’ training distance, workload, and recovery is designed.
Etelman points to the example set by her mentor Dean Ward, former Women’s Head Soccer Coach at Xaiver, who she admired for his willingness to change things from year to year rather than allowing a successful program to harden into a template. In the same way, flexibility is prioritized in her program, adjusting the training to match the people filling out the roster.
At Xavier, the results have remained remarkably consistent even as the components of the training have changed. Players change, distances change, training blocks change, but Etelman is less interested in preserving the sameness of the process than the standard it is meant to reach. The extra run, the additional lift, the workout saved from Instagram, the conditioning circuit a professional player posted online all could have a place in a training system. The art Etelman has spent years developing is knowing which one belongs to the athletes in front of her, and when.
On a fall afternoon, the players crossing Xavier’s Academic Mall are moving through a campus that feels compact enough to become familiar quickly, even for those who arrived from somewhere far away. Bellarmine Chapel and Our Lady of Peace Chapel sit at opposite ends of the mall, creating physical bookends around the center of campus.
The players themselves come from much farther apart. Xavier’s 2026 roster includes athletes from Ohio, California, Connecticut, Michigan, Oregon, Utah, Florida and several other states, as well as players with international backgrounds. For some, Cincinnati is a few hours from home. For another, it can be an ocean away.
The distance between those places can surface in ways that have nothing to do with soccer.
Before players arrive, Etelman can look at the PlayerPulse readiness reports and see that someone’s mood is low. Maybe she misses home. Maybe she has gone through a breakup. Maybe something is happening with her family.
Etelman might send a text.
“How are you doing?”
The report scores gives her a reason to ask, and sometimes too, the comment section gives a clearer sense of what contextually is happening. What happens next is a conversation between coach and player, and Etelman hopes that makes home feel less far away.
Etelman has seen the world around that conversation change, too. When she began coaching, social media was already part of athletes’ lives, but the training environment on a player’s phone was different. Now an athlete can finish practice and immediately pull up a professional player’s workout, save it, send it to a teammate and decide she should try it herself.
What Katy and her coaching staff can bring to that decision is a much fuller picture of the athlete herself, including how much she has already trained that week, what her workload looks like, how she is recovering, what her force-plate measurements show and what she has told them about how she is feeling. A player who is zeroed in on what she can pull from one workout is seeing one piece of the picture. Her coaches are trying to see the rest.
Etelman does not want to take away the impulse to try something new. The player who sees a difficult exercise and thinks, I want to get better at that, is showing exactly the kind of initiative a coach wants. The work is in helping her decide whether that particular exercise belongs in her training, and when.
Knowing her own baseline gives an athlete something the feed cannot. She knows how her body has been responding, how much work she has already done and what the coaching staff has designed for her. PlayerPulse adds another layer to that picture, allowing the subjective information an athlete reports about recovery, mood and readiness to sit alongside the objective measures Xavier is already collecting.
Etelman has seen how easily athletes can become preoccupied with evaluations themselves, particularly when a number begins to feel like something they need to chase. She wants the information to move in the opposite direction, away from comparison and toward a more useful question: What does my training need to look like today?
The research reflects the same tension she sees with her players. A June 2026 study in Frontiers in Psychology surveyed 912 athletes between the ages of 12 and 24 and found that social media could encourage training while also interfering with it. More than 40 percent said it positively influenced their desire to train, while 57.1 percent said they had received encouragement or sport-related support through social media. At the same time, 63.6 percent said social media interfered with training or recovery, and 47.7 percent reported negative effects on sleep. Nearly 60 percent reported comparing themselves with others online, while 29.2 percent felt pressure to maintain a particular image.
Social media can make an athlete want to work harder while quietly convincing her that she is never doing enough. Etelman wants players who are curious about training, who find an exercise and want to try it, who take responsibility for getting better. What she does not want is for that curiosity to become a running tally of everything they believe they should also be doing.
That is part of the sports-psychology work Xavier builds into its training plans. The staff talks with athletes about habits, recovery and the difference between being highly competitive and becoming so focused on improvement that training starts to work against them. The goal is not to make ambitious athletes less ambitious. Rather, it is to help them recognize when the pursuit of improvement has begun to consume more than it is giving back.
Etelman knows there are always things she wants to add too. Even now, she said, she can finish a training session or head into a game thinking about another idea she did not get to cover, another adjustment that might help.
“There are things you always want to try,” she said. “Even today, we have a game and I’m like, oh, we didn’t talk about this or that.”
But she has learned that athletes cannot absorb everything at once.f
“It isn’t going to happen overnight,” she tells them.
The same is true of training. Strength takes time. Fitness takes time. So does learning how to recognize fatigue, communicate honestly and understand when an extra workout is useful and when it is simply extra. That is where Etelman’s approach to evaluation becomes less about measurement and more about trust.
She has had difficult conversations with players who waited too long to report something. The instinct is usually understandable. These are athletes who have spent years learning that being dependable means showing up, pushing through and not becoming the reason a team has to change its plans.
What Etelman wants them to discover is that speaking up can actually make them more secure, not less. If a player tells the staff what she needs, the coaches can change the training, involve the trainers and give her a better chance of continuing to develop. She learns that telling the staff what she needs does not mean she has failed to meet the standard. It gives them a chance to change the work in a way that can keep her developing.
She explains that, “There is no ‘letting me down’ in telling me what they need to get better.” In fact, Etelman continues to share insights on how when an athlete becomes more confident in her own judgment and more comfortable knowing that communicating does not make her less committed, it helps not just her but everyone around her. It gives the people responsible for her development a chance to help.
That understanding has to be reinforced by the players, too. In a competitive program, teammates see what happens when someone reports something early and the staff adjusts. They learn that the player has not disappeared from the team or stopped competing. She is still part of the work, even when the work looks different.
It also changes what “your best ability is your availability” means. For Etelman, the phrase is not simply about keeping players on the field. It is about teaching them to understand what they need in order to stay there, and creating a program where telling the truth about that need is treated as part of being a serious athlete.
Some of her former players have gone on to play professionally, and Etelman said it has been rewarding to see the support systems they developed at Xavier continue with them. The people they can call, the habits they built, the ability to be honest when something is wrong, all of it becomes part of what they take with them.
None of those things shows up in a sprint time, but they are part of what players carry with them when they leave Xavier.
Over time, the decisions Etelman makes with her players begin to teach them something the evaluations themselves cannot. A player learns that running a different distance from the teammate beside her does not mean she worked less. She learns that telling a coach something hurts does not make her unreliable, and that a recovery day can belong inside an ambitious training plan rather than outside of it.
Slowly, she gains confidence in the fact that being competitive does not require being in a constant state of proving it.
Xavier enters the 2026 season with the expectations that come from what the program accomplished last year. The Musketeers won the BIG EAST Tournament, reached the second round of the NCAA Tournament and produced the most prolific offensive season in program history. The 2026 schedule includes five opponents that played in the 2025 NCAA Championship, including quarterfinalists Michigan State and Vanderbilt.
The people filling the roster will change again next year, and Etelman will change with them. Some players will need more. Others will need less. The distances may change, the training blocks may change, and there will almost certainly be another idea she wants to try.
The force plate will still be there.
So will the questions it cannot answer. How is this player doing? What has changed? What does she need now?
Etelman will be precise in the solution she creates, factoring in all the data points. But first she will ask the player standing in front of her.