“If you win in IT, you tend to win.”
It appears that Sir Clive Woodward is taking his superb attention to detail to a new level. The ex-England Rugby Head coach is well known for his use of technology when it comes to coaching and preparing athletes & sports teams. He is now using his approach with the British Olympic team alongside a company called Dartfish.
During his tenure as England Coach between 1998 and 2004 he implemented a number of methods with which his team could gain “half a percent” advantages over the opposition. He employed a large number of coaches to cover specific aspects of the game, a practice previously un-conceived. He brought in Sherylle Calder, a visualisation specialist who worked with the highly successful Australian cricket team of the 1990’s. She developed a software package to help the players improve their spatial awareness. He also worked with the team’s kit supplier, Nike, in order to develop a tighter fitting shirt. This made his players more difficult to tackle.
Woodward also introduced ProZone, a technology package that fed him data on his players from a series of cameras placed around the Twickenham Stadium and allowed him to analyse their levels of performance. The methods employed produced results of the highest quality...winning the Webb Ellis trophy.
Sir Clive is now continuing to use his technological innovations in his current role as the director of elite performance for the British Olympic Association. In speaking at a recent BOA event he outlined how highly he rates the Dartfish technology and expects it to have a similar impact on the Olympic preparations as ProZone did on the England Rugby team.
The package that Dartfish provide allows the coaching staff to access live feeds from their athletes during competition, analyse the pictures which are sent directly to ipads and laptops and then make decisions using the most accurate performance data.
The Dartfish product has already been given a resounding thumbs up by Peter Bentley a performance coach with the British Sailing Team and the British heptathlete Louise Hazel. In speaking at the same event as Woodward, Hazel stated that she would often disagree with her coach, however after seeing the analysis and footage she agreed with his assessment and was able to adjust the settings of her blocks for races in the recent World Championships. She ran a PB in the 100 metres hurdles. She also feels that in being able to study her performances in detail she has been able to improve her technique and avoid injury.
Whilst I fully accept that the use of technology in professional sport makes a significant difference in the levels of performance I do have concerns that there will be an over-reliance on video analysis and less on the innate skill and intuition of a coach.
There have been recent arguments in both Football and Rugby that in England in particular we are not producing coaches of a strong enough calibre. I have often felt that coaching is as much of an art as a science. The best coaches of course will have a balance of the two, however for British sport to be encouraging the development of coaches surely the intrinsic qualities required to be successful should over-ride the ability to be handy with a PC.
I agree that technology works, but I worry that the ability to inspire, the inherent skill to improve people and the inborn gift of working with others will be lost in favour of a generation of computer geeks. The coaches who had the biggest influence on my love of sport Steve Edwards at Wolverhampton Rugby Club, Dave Evans at New College 6th Form and Pete Carter at Nova Utd FC fed my enthusiasm and improved my skills, knowledge and understanding of the sports that remain an important part of my life. They matched my passion with theirs and with their committment on many a cold and rainy sunday morning. I would hate to see people like them shy away from coaching and aspiring to develop as coaches themselves.
Perhaps England doesn't produce good coaches because the best ones would rather stay in the amatuer ranks of sports and enjoy working with athletes and sports men and women rather than spend more time with their eyes glued to a laptop, concerning themselves with broadband speeds and data downloads.
