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Newsletter 10: May 2007Welcome | Technical Support | Products | Coaches Corner | Case Study Sportstec has a community of approximately 3,000 users around the world in a variety of sports and at a varying level of competition. All users are striving to achieve the same outcome…improved team/individual performance and ultimately the constant winning ethos.
User’s Conference In this months issue:Technical SupportHave you ever been confused when coding one movie for different purposes? In this issue's Technical Support section, learn how to code multiple timelines for the same game. ProductsTo find out about the latest updates of Sportstec products, click here. Coaches CornerIn the Coaches corner, learn how to use the Frequency tool, which is in all our SportsCode products, and see how much precious information you can get. Case StudyA disciple of the SportsCode range of products for the last eight years, Perth Glory head coach Ron Smith has mastered the effectiveness of the software. The rewards are priceless – being able to extract the precise information he needs for his coaching duties in minimal time. Read more Technical SupportCoding multiple timelines for the same gameIf you have one movie that needs to be coded for different purposes, linking more than one Timeline to that movie may be your solution. A common example of this is when you are advance-scouting a game that involves two future opponents. Instead of coding both opponents in a single Timeline, you can avoid the potential for confusion by creating and linking a new Timeline to the same movie, thus keeping each advance scout separate.
2. Go to File > Save. Name the new Timeline and select the movie you want the Timeline to be associated with.  3. Go to File > Link movie to timeline window. Select the .mov file inside the movie package, then select Open.
Now when you open the movie file, two Timelines and Movie Windows open. Open a Code Input Window and use it in conjunction with either Timeline. The Code Input Window will link with the front-most Timeline. You can now keep each opponent's codes independent of one another to avoid confusion.
 ProductsLast Newsletter I talked about the software we had acquired, named Volleysoft. Mercury was the Roman god who served as a messenger of the gods. Appropriate name we think.
Sportstec Mercury will be our first product that looks at automatic representation of preference patterns with corresponding trajectories and video editing. It will also real time export statistics in XML or HTML format for future analysis outside of the Sportstec Mercury product.
Currently Sportstec Mercury will apply to Volleyball and Beach Volleyball but we will develop the product further for other sports that require this type of automatic representation. We envisage sports like Tennis, Squash, Baseball etc to benefit from this new development.
The trajectory information maps the flow of the game, each path can be reviewed by viewing the video.
All the information created in Sportstec Mercury can be imported into other Sportstec products.
Coaches CornerFrequency: Simple yet powerfulLike everything in life the more you put in the more you can get out. This is particularly true when using the Frequency Report within all SportsCode products. The Frequency Report counts all the codes that have been made for an open timeline. The Frequency Report provides four measurements for each line of Code.
Count The “Count” simply counts how many instances within each line of code. This is a great way of keeping track of how many times an event occurs within a game. In this example we can instantly see how many Shots at Goal England has had in the game.
Total Time
The next measurement “Total Time” shows us the total time for all the instances within the timeline. In this example it shows us how much involvement each player has had within the game.
Percentage % The “Percentage” measurement show us how much of the time period was taken up with an event. In this example we can see how much of the game the ball was within the Australian W Zone.
Mean Time (or Average Time) Here we are given a measurement of the average time for each instance within a code row. This example show us that not only were there 43 instances of Man to Man Defense but on average they were 13 seconds long. The Frequency Report is located within the Analysis menu at the top of any open SportsCode project. In this original window we get a count for instances Inside the 25 metre line and a count for the number of Turn Overs. In this new window we now have a count for the new row created showing us all the Turn Overs inside the 25 metre line. Case StudyRon Smith - Perth Glory (Football/Soccer) Western AustraliaThere’s no doubt the ever-evolving world of technology has made life a great deal easier for sports coaches. Technology, and its impact, has become part and parcel of the modern sporting scene but how that technology is being put to use is also becoming an increasingly important component.
“SportsCode is only limited by your own imagination” Smith said. “It’s so flexible you can do anything you want with it and that’s the thing that I like about it. It really is a dream when it comes to software.” “It’s not difficult to use at all and I’ve found that I’ve spent seven years coming up with defining a way of coding stuff so that I get exactly what I want but if I wanted to find anything else afterwards I could still go back into it and find just about anything I wanted.” “I can code a game live and film it and get all of that information pretty much in one take. The key to being able to code a lot of information is to be able to do it in one go.” In that respect, Smith has refined the way he does his coding during matches which has resulted in saving a lot of man hours while still being able to glean the same information. He changed his strategy from grabbing segments of games to focus on coding the whole team and going through the game in one hit. That covered all his bases at the same time, for less time in the long run. “Grabbing segments became ineffective because I had to go in afterwards and extend or reduce each incident” he said. “The issue then became the amount of time that you spent actually going through it and over it to amend all of the information.” “I’m more interested in the strategic side of the game rather than how many times someone touches the ball or who they kick it too. I’m more concerned about how effective the team is once they’ve got possession or where did they win it and how good are they at transferring the ball from one end of the field to the other once they’ve got possession. That tells you where you need to focus your coaching attention on the team.” “Little things like that mean you can be very selective. With the Elite system you can activate the different teams during a match and go from one team to the other but still keep coding and it just relates to whichever team has possession.” The multifunctional nature of the software, which offers a broad range of options, means there is a degree of trial and error for coaches while they sift through exactly just what sort of information they want from it. “You just make a start somewhere but the beauty of capturing a whole game is that the nature of the software whichever way you use it will give you a statistical analysis’’ he said. “It will give a count of everything coded throughout the match. You get extra information to what you actually set out to find.” “It’s a fantastic piece of software. I’ve seen other sorts of coding systems that cost an awful lot of money to use and I just question why people would spend huge sums of money on something that SportsCode can give you just about immediately, like straight after a game.”
Smith had his first contact with SportsCode in 1999 when working in Malaysia and was attracted by the system’s potential. Initially, he used it purely to look at football in his role of running education programmes for coaches at the elite level. “I could see that the software would give me an opportunity to look closely at games and be able to edit out examples of different things and have them in a presentable form for educational purposes’’ he said. Smith then became involved in doing some research into goal-scoring patterns and finished up doing a detailed study of three premier league teams over a three-year period. “Coding football matches was something that was an interest at the beginning but became almost an obsession, to the point where I still do an awful lot purely out of interest but more specifically have the things relate to the performance of my team and the teams we are going to play” he said. “I’ve now devised a coding system which is pretty sophisticated and allows me to do almost anything that I might like to think of. I can find anything that I want from a game within a matter of minutes.’’
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A disciple of the SportsCode range of products for the last eight years, Perth Glory head coach Ron Smith has mastered the effectiveness of the software. The rewards are priceless – being able to extract the precise information he needs for his coaching duties in minimal time.
Prior to the last year where has been based at Perth Glory, Smith spent two years working for the Football Federation of Australia (FFA) helping preparing the national team for their World Cup final campaign.