Laboratory-Grade Accuracy on a Budget: Concurrent Validity of CC Athletics Portable Force Plates for Vertical Jump Analysis

Vertical jump assessments are widely used to evaluate athletic performance. As demand grows for field-ready systems with laboratory-grade accuracy, portable devices like the CC Athletics PlateMate force plates offer affordable and accessible solutions. This study examined the concurrent validity of PlateMate compared to a gold-standard AMTI force plate during squat jump (SJ), countermovement jump (CMJ), and countermovement jump with arm swing (CMJH). Seventeen recreationally active participants performed five trials per jump while force data were recorded simultaneously from both systems. Agreement was evaluated using Bland–Altman plots, RMSE, Pearson’s r, ICC, CV%, and SEM. Across conditions, raw force-time signals and most derived metrics showed excellent agreement (r ≥ 0.95; ICC > 0.93), with RMSE under 50 N and SEM for jump height between 0.2–0.9 cm. PlateMate demonstrated strong feasibility as a practical, low-cost alternative to laboratory force plates for field-based vertical jump testing.