Review of McNamara et al. (2015) — examining between-bowlers variability in PlayerLoad and bowling velocity across repeated bowling spells, with broader implications for wearable technology validity in team sport monitoring.
PlayerLoad provided a stable measure of external workload between cricket fast bowlers — consistent with ball velocity. The study supports PlayerLoad as a practical monitoring metric in overhead throwing sports despite the small sample size (n=7).
The gold standard Hawk-Eye ball tracking technology was available but not utilized in this study. This highlights an ongoing issue in sports science: the most validated tracking technologies are often not used in research, while less validated consumer wearables proliferate in practice.