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Technology > Play makers: software for designing and presenting plays in team sports
Play makers: software for designing and presenting plays in team sports
Issue: Volume 29 Number 1
It is a balmy, weekday evening at Olympic Park, the summer home of A-League football (soccer) team Melbourne Victory.
After a gruelling session on the pitch, players reassemble inside to watch segments from the previous Sunday, chosen by coach Ernie Merrick to illustrate the key patterns of the match. The patterns are courtesy of Pattern Plotter, software developed by the Victorian Institute of Sport to log passes, dribbles, crosses, shots and free kicks.
Rewind six months and another group of football players regroup indoors, a goalkick away from Olympic Park. But in place of Pattern Plotter and a TV stands a whiteboard that the coach of this amateur team has covered with stick figures and arrows to reveal the match strategy for the following weekend.
The props could not be more different, but they are both solutions to a challenge familiar to all coaches of team sports: how to identify good and bad patterns of play and present them to your team.
The limitations of traditional solutions like whiteboard and marker are obvious. Players can’t easily take diagrams away with them; you have to redraw them for each presentation; and if you can’t draw in the first place, your diagrams could confuse more than enlighten.
Fortunately for most coaches, a six-figure investment in custom software and video equipment is not the only alternative. Melbourne Victory’s Merrick is at the leading edge of a whole genre of software open to all budgets. These computer-based solutions simplify dramatically the process of getting that competition-beating play or training drill from your head and in front of your players.
The first generation of these solutions, known as 'play diagramming', focusses on putting those lovingly crafted whiteboard diagrams into an electronic format.
Play diagramming software typically comes with a library of symbols representing players, opponents and other elements specific to one or more sports. Creating a diagram is then as simple as using your computer mouse to drag and drop these symbols around the virtual field the software displays on your monitor.
If staring at a blank field frightens you more than the your next opponent’s star striker, most play diagramming software also comes with a library of hundreds of ready-rolled plays and drills specific to your sport.
Coaches can collect the plays they have created into a single “play book” (hence the software is also known as play book software). The play book can usually be generated in Portable Document Format (PDF) and sent as an email attachment to others. Any feedback can be easily incorporated into the diagrams, which can then be printed out for players or shown as a presentation using a projector and screen (or on a computer monitor if the group is small enough).
While play diagramming software shifts the focus from the quality of the symbols to the play itself, it still relies on lines and arrows to represent movement. This can be hard for players to visualise.
Enter 'play animation' software. Play animation software transforms those lines and arrows into actual movement that players can more easily comprehend.
For coaches, creating a basic animated play is no different from plotting the movement of the ball and players on a static diagram, with the software doing all the hard work of producing the animation. However more sophisticated animations will require coaches to learn how to add timing information and to connect two or more sequences of play.
The prospect of any sort of learning curve turns many coaches off. This may explain, in part, why Australian coaches, unlike their American and European counterparts, have been slow to trade their markers for a mouse.
Harry Bingham, manager of coaching and development at Football Federation Victoria (FFV), agrees coaches below the elite level still need some convincing the technology is relevant to them.
There is simply not the finance available in even a Premier League (Victoria’s top football competition) for a set-up like Melbourne Victory’s,' he reasons. 'A more generic form of the technology is needed for amateur clubs, as well as induction and training for coaches and their assistants.'
Indeed, the attention given to Pattern Plotter and other high-end solutions may be obscuring from coaches the range of generic and affordable software already on the market.
The makers of that software insist they ask very of little coaches in terms of technical expertise and resources. 'We ask only that our coaches have a PC and a web connection (to view 'how to' videos),' says Jeff Barrow of Wheelbarrow software, which makes play animation software for basketball.
But while Basketball Play Designer is used by a number of local basketball coaches, WheelBarrow and its mostly North American and, to a lesser extent, European rivals, do not market their products widely to Australian coaches. And, with the exception of football, few products are designed specifically for team sports not played in the United States.
This is beginning to change. As with all things technological, what is fresh from the labs of our institutes of sports today will, over time, come within reach of coaches at all levels. In particular, the addition of video analysis to provide the input for play diagrams and animation represents the third, natural evolution of this exciting genre of software.
For his part, the Football Federation Victoria’s Bingham is confident these developments will eventually get the attention of Australian coaches. 'Coaches continue to rely on observation at-a-glance, but they want to back that up with more tools to reinforce that information,' he says.
Play Designer
www.wheelbarrowsoftware.com
Play diagramming and animation for basketball and American football
Price: $60
Play Manager
www.playmanager.com
Play diagramming and animation for football (soccer), hockey and basketball.
Price: $250 – professional edition
$400 - internet edition, plus $133 each subsequent year for the web publishing component
DataCoach Manager
www.datacoach.net
Play diagramming software for football (soccer)
Price: $50
Note: prices in Australian dollars
