Modern professional football, that’s soccer to US readers, is no stranger to video analysis. The data gathered throws out stats, some of which have become part of the conversation regurgitated even by ardent fans and, with this level of awareness, it’s no surprise that low cost tagging solutions like Dartfish have become sought after by clubs lower down the professional leagues as well as amateur and college teams.
Increasingly though, those at the pinnacle of their sport, in national and international federations, are turning the cameras back on those who we’d normally expect to find pointing them at players – the coaches, the judges and referees – using Dartfish to both educate and give performance feedback to their referees.
If you want to referee at the top of the world’s most popular sports, you need a vast wealth of experience. You could gain that through hundreds of hours on the pitch or you can acquire some of it on a fast track by using video and that’s exactly what football, field hockey and handball referees do using a library of scenarios on dartfish.tv.
The advanced cataloging features of dartfish.tv allow those responsible for producing a new generation of elite coaches to make content searchable. Furthermore, dartfish.tv allows them to devise customized navigation systems which allows match officials to browse content relevant to specific scenarios then using the attached notes to understand appropriate decision making for that situation.
Some federations have gone a step further; recording referees in training and in matches and using Dartfish video tagging to identify, time-stamp and evaluate behaviors and decisions. This makes giving targeted feedback immediately available available after the match, with no editing required, while the events are fresh to mind and when the training will have most impact. As you can imagine, this form of reflection is incredibly powerful in referee training and development.
