St. John Bosco using VR to improve play of QBs
Braves hope latest technology will pay off with titles
BELLFLOWER » The St. John Bosco football team is embracing new technology as it attempts to win back-toback national championships for the first time in school history.
Coach Jason Negro revealed that “virtual reality” played a large part in the team's spring practices.
The football program is working with a company named “REPS,” which offers a virtual reality sports training platform that focuses on providing extra repetitions in deep-learning environments.
Negro said he believes “REPS” is another tool to help his student-athletes, particularly the team's quarterbacks — junior Caleb Sanchez, freshmen Ashton Pannell and Matai Fuiava and sophomore Jack Nyman.
The additional training is important because none of the four quarterbacks has started a varsity football game. Sanchez is the most experienced of the quartet. He was senior quarterback Pierce Clarkson's backup last season. Pannell and Fuiava split time at quarterback on Bosco's freshman team.
“We're doing this new VR training with our quarterbacks, which has really been phenomenal and fantastic for their growth,” Negro said.
Normally, virtual reality is a resource that's found on the college or professional level, but Negro said Bosco's players have access to the latest technology.
“It's pretty fortunate. We want to try to get out in front of the game,” Negro said. “We want to be a pioneer, be at the forefront of this new technology. It's been really helpful for us in terms of training our quarterbacks and giving them the necessary tools that they're going to need to be successful off of the field.
“We talk all the time about our kids being really good in all three phases of the game of football, whether it's strength and conditioning, the actual tactical work that they're putting in on the field, as well as the mental game in the classroom and trying to become the best allaround football players they can be.”
Negro said Bosco has
Coach Jason Negro, center, wants his program to be at the forefront of using technology to help his players improve.
been using virtual reality to improve quarterback play since January.
“Our kids are going to be
hopefully a little bit more skilled in the mental side of the game come August,” Negro said. “We have a couple of extra headsets. We're able to check it out to the kids, let them go home. We upload all the film and video from our managers and our coordinator here does a really good job of tagging it and getting them to understand what we're trying to accomplish and they go home, they train on it and then we talk to them about the results. It's all mobile. It's all digital so it's really easy to follow and track and we can grade them off of it as well.”
Bosco went 13-1 last season and won the high school football national championship. The Braves' season was highlighted by a 24-22 win over Mater Dei in the CIF Southern Section Division 1 championship game and a 45-0 win against San Mateo Serra in the CIF State Open Division championship game.
Bosco will kick off the 2023 season at St. Thomas Aquinas in Florida on Aug. 26. The Braves will host Miami Norland on Sept. 1 and Baltimore's St. Frances Academy on Sept. 8. Bosco's nonleague schedule concludes with a game at Kahuku in Hawaii on Sept. 16.
Bosco's Trinity League schedule includes a highly anticipated home game against rival Mater Dei on Oct. 13.