I love the pragmatic approach that coaches take to technology use. Nevertheless, sometimes it is a tough gig to pull out a laptop in front of people who often lead active lives avoiding screen-time and may never have had the support of a teched-up corporate environment. So how would it be to face two hundred of England’s most talented young coaches and officials at the Youth Sport Trust’s annual academy?
The Youth Sport Trust is a charity devoted to changing young people’s lives through sport. Their academy is a three day hot-house for the new talent nominated by the national governing bodies funded by Sport England. The idea is to inspire and educate by bringing them into contact with new ideas, top level coaches and their peers in other sports. When I joined them at 8:30pm on Technology Night, they were well into the second day of the academy and, considering they had been on the go for twelve hours already, the energy and enthusiasm were striking.
Dartfish was honoured to have been invited to deliver the keynote address launching the evening and I was curious to discover whether the extent of visual feedback use by 14-19 year olds differed from that of previous generations. My quick straw poll revealed that almost all of those attending had been videoed by a coach and all had found it beneficial. Interesting then, that only around half had used video as a coaching aid. Notable that all but a handful of these had recorded their video on a smart phone or tablet.
The activities were inspiring to be a part of. Small groups were each given 15 minutes to discover a technology then move on to the next station. Dartfish designed two of these; one where the shots and ‘great play’ of a basketball game were time-stamped with the EasyTag app and the other where a Dartfish Express still shot analysis was used to instruct the key features of a sprint start, then the app was used to record and give feedback to the ‘athletes’ emulating what had been learned, and also sharing it with them via dartfish.tv. Yes, mastering all of that is possible in fifteen minutes as you can see from the image below.
Batak, iSplit and Smartgate also provided stations, but I have to say that my personal favourite was the Design-a-sports-app station; where participants were challenged to think about how they could use mobile technologies to benefit coaches. There were many great ideas emerging from this, including those of one group who planned to go into competition against Dartfish Express. They do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! The idea that stood out for me though was a social media app; a kind of YouTube meets Snapchat, where the goal is to crowd-source answers for coaching and officiating dilemmas – if you build it, I’ll be your first subscriber!
This was a genuinely fantastic event to be part of and I would encourage other sports technology providers to get involved next year. I witnessed 100% engagement with all the tasks and was touched that many went out of their way to give me positive feedback – including one lad who told me that who couldn’t wait to get his iPhone 5s and Dartfish Express for Christmas.
The National Young Coaches and Officials Academy is run by the Youth Sport Trust, funded by Sport England. The camp took place 20-22 December at Loughborough University, UK.”
