How can analysis improve sports performance?

Whether you’re a coach, a casual fan, or an ultra, do you want your team to make good decisions, stay healthy, out-strategize opponents, be well-organized, and win year-after-year?

Of course you do. That is the baseline that all teams work towards. Behind those general goals, analytics are a driving factor. While analysis is most pertinent to professional teams, this is true for all levels of sports!

Looking at five overarching pillars of sports performance, I’ll breakdown how analysis ties into traditional elements of earning success in sports.

1. Identifying strengths and weaknesses of individual athletes and teams

Where are players most comfortable? Where are players uncomfortable?

Through shot charts and heat maps, trends can be observed. Through advanced possession and usage stats, team tendencies can be identified. Use Pixellot to shape your gameplan. Analyzing those tools over any relevant span leads to strategy. Offense can be catered to strengths, or attack weaknesses. Defenses can allow or force certain actions. This is a core piece of implementing a good scheme.

What attributes do certain players rely on? Dominant hand or foot?

Similar to building a scheme or forcing opponents into uncomfortable plays, research over a quality sample size can be used to diagnose player tendencies. This is where the video solutions and analysis that Pixellot provides contributes to visualized learning

What have other opponents exploited?

In addition to analyzing individual tendencies, studying how other teams have approached your opponent leads to effective strategizing. Identifying what schemes/actions they rely on, and determining how to most efficiently succeed is a key methodology for maximizing opportunities.

2. Maintaining a healthy roster

Monitoring workload and usage quantitatively

Noticing that a player “does everything” for their team is beneficial, but knowing to what extent is even more beneficial. Tracking total touches and passes in soccer is valuable. In basketball, true-usage percentage is an advanced metric for measuring the percentage of a team’s plays that a player uses while they are on the floor. It’s a strong indicator of workload.

Evaluating how much fatigue a player has and how much strain they suffer

Pixellot is working with Playermaker to evolve team knowledge of a player’s workload. Playermaker is a company that provides wearable technology for soccer teams. The company’s unobtrusive sensors are worn on a player’s boot and data collected from the sensors is automatically integrated with Pixellot’s videos to create clips containing full statistical data about a player’s distance, movement, and speed.

Utilization of these tools enables timely substitutions in-game, helps evaluate the effectiveness of training/recovery methods, and aids strategic distributions of playing time.

3. Good coaching decisions

Continuous Adaptation

Technological innovation has generated rapid availability of analytics. Coaches can work faster and provide real-time feedback. With Pixellot, video and video breakdowns can be brought to practice the next day.

Adjustments

In addition to maintaining health, a coach making timely, strategic substitutions can be motivated by winning. The ability to use analytics to create mismatches, execute specialized strengths, or discipline poor play is furthered by analytical performance data. Grow awareness of the “why” behind what is effective or ineffective.

4. Consistent Winning & Growing

Enhancing the analysis of video footage to improve scouting

Modern sports analysis looks into more than just numbers. Converting numbers into context is part of the evolution for improving sports performance analysis. Examples include:

• Using data to overcome small sample sizes
• Using efficiency metrics to balance inferior competition
• Using advanced metrics to gauge contextual factors, such as quality of teammates, offensive or defensive scheme, or a necessitated role a player is in

Sports are global, analytics make thorough evaluation possible from anywhere. Video solutions enhance the analysis of footage to improve player development. Share reference points for players to identify key flaws and strengths. Share comparisons/examples exposing players to new skills. Having quality video analysis is key.

5. Operate with methodology & systematic thinking

Big-picture Analytics

Analytics can be used to predict performance and improve a team’s ability to set realistic expectations.

Comparing performance to league average can be studied. Who is due for progression or regression based on what is reasonably expected? Where do we rank?

Analytics encompass long-term data. Whether a month, a year or a decade, trends emerge. Identifying trends and patterns in performance data to make decisions and set goals is leading to higher-quality sports. There is still insane unpredictability and variance, but analytics help close the gap.

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At the local and youth levels of sports, analytics facilitates development. Just like strategizing to improve at any respective goal, people should always be receptive to new information. Sports analytics is a blossoming example. Players and coaches are gaining resources to improve.

That translates to the top-tiers of sports. Analytics increase the likelihood that the best players get opportunities to showcase their talent. From there, player performance analysis helps identify where players could be best utilized. The final product: Improving sports.