Every fortnight, Deborah Stuard and I offer online training to get you started with the Analyzer, Tagging and dartfish.tv. Three one hour lessons gratis (English only, sorry). You should join us! We love having the opportunity to help people who otherwise may not have time or budget for training and we especially love it when, occasionally, we learn something too…
Last month one of our regulars told me of an idea that he had implemented since we’d last spoken; crowd sourced tagging.
As the coach of a junior soccer team, he faces two problems. First, he has no desire to spend his remaining spare time tagging up that day’s match video and second, his young players aren’t too interested in re-watching the entire game either! His solution was to email each of the parents a Dartfish Easytag tagging panel with a single button, labeled with a player’s name. Their instructions are simple “Start the clock when the game begins and tap that button whenever your boy does something with the ball. At the end of the game, email it to me”.
Easytag is an iOS and Android app which comprises of a timer and a set of up to 32 buttons defined by you. Tapping a button creates a new entry in an events log, each event being defined by a timestamp and descriptor. Instant feedback in the form of number and heat-mapping of event frequency is given – this is of no interest to Dave but the possibility to link the events to video is. Using Dartfish software, he imports each of the eleven emailed files into the events list of the match video and that is his tagging problem solved.
But what about the other issue? From Dartfish you can choose to publish the tagged game to a dartfish.tv channel but we already know that Dave’s players aren’t interested in the game. Instead Dave filters for a set of events using each player’s name and publishes them as a personalized highlights movie.
So now his players watch a series of ten second scenes featuring the star of their show and, to encourage engagement with what they are watching, they are asked to reflect on their performance. It is a win (Dave’s time), win (player engagement), win (a few more matches!) situation and beautifully simple too.
