‘On the cutting edge.’ Curtis the first football program in Washington to use VR headsets
Curtis High School football coach Darren McKay will be the first to admit he’s not the best with new technology. So imagine his surprise when he put on a virtual reality headset at a coaching clinic in Seattle last year and thought he was looking at a still photo.
A few seconds later, “The linebackers are moving!” he shouted.
His son, Carter, laughed. Carter McKay, who is the offensive coordinator for the Vikings, sat in on a demonstration of how the technology worked the next day.
“We have to have this,” he later told his dad.
And now Curtis does. The school has multiple VR headsets from a company called “REPS,” which were paid for by the Curtis Viks Football Boosters club. The upfront cost for the technology was about $5,000 and the annual cost to use the software runs about $1,000 per year.
As far as they’re aware, the McKays believe Curtis is the first high school football program in Washington to have the technology, which they’ve been using since last spring. UW, WSU and locally, PLU have also used the technology. Carter McKay has been working hard to make it part of the program this year.
“We’ve always tried to be on the cutting edge with stuff,” Carter McKay said.
The technology works like this: a GoPro camera is attached to the quarterback’s helmet and a day or two is carved out filming different offensive and defensive plays and concepts. Those looks are then organized and cataloged onto a laptop and sorted accordingly. Over time, there’s a library of plays to choose from.
If Curtis is preparing to play a team that primarily utilizes a two-high safety look on defense, for example, McKay can pull up that defensive look for his quarterbacks to practice against virtually.
With the headset on, players can look around the field with a 360-degree view, just like they would in real life. Freshman quarterback Sam Patterson and sophomore quarterback Cooper Hordyk, who are in the midst of a competition this fall and have split time at QB through two games this season, have to make quick decisions and use voice commands to simulate throws.
Whether they consistently make the correct read, and how fast they do it, is all measurable by the Curtis coaching staff. The first time Hordyk put the headset on, he couldn’t believe it.
“I almost fell over the first time,” he said, laughing.
“It was just cool to be able to see all the routes,” Patterson said. “It’s our plays, so it’s like the same as running a practice.”
The customization possibilities are endless. Carter McKay is in the process of building different real-game scenarios, e.g. a two-minute drill at the end of a half or game.
“They’re going through the two-minute drill and getting all the mental reps of knowing, ‘OK, it’s 3rd and 1, I’m at this yard line, where can I go with the ball?’” McKay said.
Like any football coach, McKay would sometimes wonder after an errant throw by his quarterback, “Where is he looking?” Now he knows.
“You see pretty close to what they’re looking at,” he said. “So it’s, ‘Look over there, that’s the main read.’ … This isn’t just a film tool, this is an actual cognitive response time tool.”
Darren McKay encourages his football players to play multiple sports. It’s part of a holistic approach to being a high school student-athlete that is encouraged at Curtis. So when one of the quarterbacks is at a summer baseball tournament somewhere in Oregon and they have some time to kill in between games, they can throw the headset on and get some reps. During the season, they’ll go through a series of reps at home before going to bed.
“There’s no substitute for live reps, but how many live reps can you actually take?” Darren McKay said. “And when your kids play multiple sports, they’re gonna miss some time. We have a ton of kids that play multiple sports. If Cooper goes out and throws 90 pitches, he can still get reps and not be wearing out his arm.”
Is it working? The results are promising so far. Curtis beat Mount Si 35-14 in Week 1 and beat Peninsula 42-6 last week. Hordyk and Patterson have combined to throw eight touchdowns through two games. Of course, it helps having Montana State commits Parker Mady and Xavier Ahrens — 2023 TNT All-Area selections and two of the state’s most dynamic receivers — to throw the ball to. Still, the extra reps through the VR headsets certainly can’t hurt.
Especially having two underclassmen quarterbacks, the McKays think the VR equipment has helped their development.
“This has helped quite a bit,” Darren McKay said. “They’ve gotten way more reps than they would have. It has helped speed their process along. … We’ve been able to get the ball to our playmakers.”
Up next: Curtis hosts 3A Puget Sound League opponent Lakes at 7 p.m. Friday in University Place in a non-league contest.
This story was originally published September 20, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
