Video and Data in Grassroots Sport
I was gobsmacked last week when I found that I was able to follow my son’s under-12 cricket match score card against another local village team ball-by-ball online.
(Although less surprised that no one has ever asked his permission as to whether his participation data should be publicly available — but that’s an article for another day).
What Play Cricket are enabling in this regard, in partnership with the English Cricket Board (ECB), has huge potential in sustaining the game at youth and grassroots level, not just in terms of player and fan engagement, but also in player development and talent spotting. That my son’s cricket club could additionally, for a £950 investment and a rolling £250 per season, live stream the game using FrogBox (which is part of Sportradar) shows just how far access to video and data in grassroots sport has come.
My daughter’s football club uses Pitchero, mainly as a tool to manage player registration, membership, payments and availability. It’s an invaluable app for parents to keep on top of what’s going on at the club. On top of this Pitchero offer a range of other services, one of the main ones being club website management tools. Their expertise here I guess made them the obvious choice to power the websites of two of the three Trident leagues in England (levels 7–9 of the 14 level deep football pyramid which has the Premier League at its pinnacle), as part of Entain’s ‘Pitching In’ initiative. I’m fascinated by what’s happening here, because it bridges the gap between professional and grassroots sports, while bringing to that important mid-tier an improvement in the availability of game data, moving it closer to what’s available higher up in the game.
Pitchero also have a GPS tracking product and a video product, so arguably its grassroots following would perhaps be able to do similar for football clubs as what I described earlier in cricket, where it’s easier to access match video and data. I do though think there are some big hurdles here to jump; time, quality camera equipment, know-how and players correctly wearing wearables as just a few. I asked my daughter’s coach, who spends a lot of time on Pitchero if he’d tried videoing any games with the tools they offer. “No”, he told me, “we don’t have the cameras. But I know a lot of people have had success with Veo.”
Veo is seriously impressive end-to-end solution of 4K-camera, editor (which will detect highlights) and analytics, for an initial £1300ish investment and on-going costs per season of about £600.
I’m really close to buying a set-up myself, although clause 7.1.2 of its T&C’s would limit what I’d want to do with it in an ideal world, although there, I think, is Veo’s wider opportunity…
I’d be really keen though to sit down with a club who are using it, as well as any club using Pitchero’s GPS or Video tools, or any club using Playerdata’s GPS trackers.
Until I get to that detail, my initial thoughts and questions on it (some of which I’ve already have answered and on which I need to update my research site) can be found in the video below.
Digital decisions are never a walk in the park, so please get in touch and let me help you find the right way through the technical landscape.
