With the rapid advancements in sports technology, wearables have become an integral part of analyzing and managing player performance.
Sports wearables are a multi-billion-dollar industry, thanks mostly to professional sports teams and their desire to gain an edge by getting the most out of each of their players. NBA teams, for example, are using six cameras strategically position to track everything from player movement to speed, distance, player separation and ball possession. They also track how many times a player touched the ball, how many passes he made, how many rebounding opportunities he had, and much more.
All that, however, can lead to challenges for the coaching staff, the obvious one being “Paralysis by Analysis”. The amount of data that can be collected is enormous. Sifting through what you don’t need to find what you want can be time-consuming and counter-productive.
A Forbes.com article put it this way: “While technologies like “Player Tracking” seem like the wave of the future, there is a level of difficulty in determining how to utilize the surplus of information … to help players and coaches gain an advantage. With so many criteria to choose from, what should an evaluation be based on in the first place? The sheer volume of data can be overwhelming.”
How do you avoid Paralysis by Analysis? The key is knowing what questions you want to answer. You have to know what you are looking for before you can find it.
“What you should collect should depend on what you want to know, and it can be anything,” said Darcy Norman, the performance director at Italian soccer club AS Roma and a DRIVN user.
“Everything is measurable.” Norman added. “You just have to decide what you want to measure, what it’s going to tell you. The information collected is more valuable when you are able to compare it to other information you have collected on a player.”
DRIVN is a simple way to track the collected data. It’s easy to input and can be done by players or staff. Data can be converted into charts or graphs, and everything can be stored for later use.
“With the trackers and the data sheets in DRIVN, you can look at that data and refer to it any time you have an issue. DRIVN makes is super-efficient and easy,” says Norman. “Then with the more data you collect, you get more insight into the total picture.”