Performance data gleaned from wearable devices and tactics scrutinized on video tend to be the domains of two distinct groups within a sports franchise. Merging those disparate workflows into one productive feed is the core problem Catapult Sports’ new video analysis tool, Vision, is trying to solve.
“One is led from the science department and the other is led very much in the coaching department and, as a business, we’d like to start to help to bring those two things together,” said Catapult product director John Coulson, who oversaw the development of Vision.
Coulson’s background includes time at leading soccer analytics companies OptaPro and Prozone, with stints working for the 2010 Ivory Coast World Cup team as well as Middlesbrough and Norwich City in the English Premier League. From both experience and regular conversations with coaches, Coulson understands the frustrations of inefficiency and time loss when preparing scouting and analysis videos for a team.
Vision is intended sports whose play tends to flow rather than stop and start, such as soccer, rugby, basketball, lacrosse, and handball. The program syncs wearable tracking data with video, giving analysts and coaches another key input when reviewing game play. If a midfielder was out of position in a formation, the wearable might indicate either a poor decision or a physical inability to get to the intended spot.
The Vision platform adds features to the player data such as the ability to draw on the video, automated tagging, and sharing. In its heritage as a wearable company, Catapult has previously emphasized individual performance. But the Australian tech company is broadening from micro to macro by including data from the team to consider group tactics through formations and other patterns of movement.
Catapult acquired sports video company XOS Digital in 2016 with an eye toward diversifying its offerings beyond wearables. Vision is the first product born from that merger.
“It represents, in some sense, another milestone in our transition to being a sports technology platform as opposed to a provider of wearables,” Coulson said. “To reiterate a point that’s been made in the past, wearables are now just a product that we have over a whole ecosystem of solutions.”
Catapult’s CEO for North America, Matt Bairos, held the same title at XOS before the acquisition, emphasizing coaches as the key consumer and “our lifeblood.” Everything about the video products, he said, was tailored to their concerns and demands. Speaking a year ago, just as Catapult began laying the groundwork to develop Vision, he spoke of a need to marry tracking data with video to ensure maximum value was extracted from both.
“There’s always a little bit of fear, uncertainty and doubt as it relates to something like this,” Bairos said. “It seems like it’s ‘big science’ and ‘too far away,’ but it isn’t. Now it’s all about taking all of this great data that’s used by scientists to analyze and putting it in a consumable format that coaches can embrace and then start to find ways to use it in ways that we never would have thought of.”
To that end, Coulson said some events will be auto-tagged in Vision, but the coaches are granted a lot of control to customize the product.
“A lot of things they’re looking for in the video are so subjective, nuanced, and relative to only their thinking and the tactics they’ve asked,” Coulson said.
While Vision includes cloud-based storage and sharing, the core editing tools exist in local software that will withstand the vagaries of WiFi in hotels and planes—a very real concern in high-level sports.
“In a world where everything is moving online, it also seems kind of counterintuitive that we’re launching a local application,” Coulson said, adding: “Speaking of coaches, their frustration with online products is that they’re in a dressing room deep in a stadium where there’s not reliable WiFi network or they’re on the road or they’re on a flight. Or even just standing in front of 50 athletes and hitting play on a video, they do not want to be worried about that video buffering or not loading.”