For the past three years, Universal Speed Rating has helped power the performance side of the PLL Combine, an exclusive, invite-only event built to identify the top high school lacrosse players in the country.
From the beginning, the opportunity was clear.
PLL Play was creating an environment designed to bring together elite talent. But evaluating top players includes more than just stick skills and on-field play alone. Athletic performance needs to be part of the equation.
That is where Universal Speed Rating entered the picture.
From year one of the PLL Combine, Universal Speed Rating’s role was to bring structure, credibility, and verification to the performance side of athlete evaluation.
Through the Universal Speed Rating Speed Lab network, trusted coaches were placed on-site to ensure testing was run the right way: accurately, professionally, and with a consistent standard athletes and coaches could believe in.
Across the past three years, that testing has been led by Jose Catano (Catano Performance) and Marcus Block (Ambition Athlete Development), two experienced performance coaches from the Speed Lab community.
What makes the partnership work is that both organizations are solving for the same thing.
PLL Play wanted more than a showcase. They wanted a real evaluation environment. They understood that lacrosse talent is a combination of skill and performance, and that the athlete who separates at the highest level is not only skilled, but explosive, efficient, powerful, and fast.
As Scott Hillier, VP of PLL Play, put it: “The PLL Combine was built to identify elite talent in a meaningful way, and that means evaluating more than just lacrosse skills. Athletic performance is a major part of the picture. Universal Speed Rating has helped us bring a verified, professional testing environment to the event from the start, and over the last three years that has created a much stronger framework for how we evaluate athletes.”
Universal Speed Rating was built for exactly that kind of moment.
At the event, the coaches run a comprehensive testing battery designed to measure the athletic qualities that matter most: broad jump, 5-10-5, 40-yard dash, vertical jump, MPH, 0-10 acceleration, bench press, and serpentine.
These assessments were specifically identified to assess the qualities that matter to performance: speed, power, agility, explosiveness, strength, and movement control.
Performance testing only becomes useful when the testing is trusted, verified, and standardized.
Anyone can set up drills. Very few organizations can build a verified system that produces meaningful data over time. That is the difference this relationship has created.
For three straight years, PLL Play has committed to using professional coaches and standardized testing, and that consistency is now turning event-day results into something much bigger.
It is creating context.
With three years of Combine data now collected, we are no longer looking at isolated numbers.
The picture is becoming clearer of what strong looks like, what average looks like, and what elite looks like inside this specific athlete population of elite high school lacrosse players.
That is where this story becomes especially important for coaches.
For performance coaches, verified data is only valuable if it leads to better decisions. Better standards. Better conversations with athletes. Better understanding of where a player actually stands.
What has been built through the PLL Combine is not just a cleaner event experience. It is a growing benchmark for elite lacrosse performance.
As Les Spellman, Co-Founder of Universal Speed Rating, said: “The best performance data comes from consistent testing, trusted coaching, and enough reps over time to create real standards. That is what has made the work with PLL Play so valuable. Over three years, we have not just collected results, we have started building a benchmark for what elite athletic performance looks like in the sport.”
That is also why visibility matters.
In addition to running the testing, Universal Speed Rating created a PLL Combine leaderboard experience that allows athletes to view rankings and compare results with their peers.
On the PLL Combine Leaderboard, athletes can compare results with the current year’s event, or look at all historical data to see where they stack up against the athletes from previous Combines.
That real-time feedback loop has become an extremely engaging part of the event.
When asked about it, Jose Catano and Marcus Block, the Speed Lab Coaches responsible for the testing, said, “The feedback from athletes has been great. They’re constantly asking, ‘What’s my time?’ and ‘Where does that rank me?’ That level of engagement tells you how much the athletes care about their results and how much they enjoy competing with each other.”
For athletes, it creates clarity.
For coaches, it creates accountability.
And for the sport, it begins to create a stronger language around performance.
This is what makes the last three years meaningful. The system is being built. Together, this has elevated the standard for the sport of lacrosse.
Three years in, the value is becoming more obvious. The data is more credible because the sample is larger, and the standards are more useful because they are based on verified results.
Now, what lies ahead is a bigger opportunity to grow the game of lacrosse through standardized, verified performance data.
The foundation is already in place.
If you are a performance coach and want to get involved with Universal Speed Rating to be a part of opportunities like this, see if your facility is a fit to become a Speed Lab. Fill out this form to see if you qualify!