Data Collection in Sports
All sports, from the European Soccer Clubs to American Professional Leagues including the MLB and NFL, are adopting athlete monitoring systems. Coaches are transitioning to these systems over their own internal tools and measurements as more of the daily workflow is consumed by technology. Adding a data collection and monitoring system can provide a meaningful competitive advantage while saving time and effort for coaches, administrators, and athletes.
There are many solutions that serve the different categories of athletics that include wearables, smartphone applications, and software.
Team Sports
At any level of team sport, Tully provides a comprehensive solution. Tully Tracking is a web application that is designed to fit into the way athletes and coaches already train. It maintains a low profile, allowing the coach to amplify themselves, tailor training to each athlete, and increase engagement.
Tully Tracking gives teams the tools to track metrics that are most important to them without complicated and expensive hardware sensors. It has an affordable annual fee for every level of sport: youth, high school, club, college, professional, and amateur.
Professional Sports
Systems like Catapult, Zephyr, STATSports and Garmin are making it possible to track detailed external performance data and internal biometrics. Having insight into the heart rate, distance traveled, and temperature of an athlete allows coaches to optimize load and identify health issues before they led to significant injury.
These systems produce complex data that require an analytics team to interpret the data and suggest actions. These insights can be used to adjust training or make front office decisions about an athlete.
Like most enterprise businesses, these companies require you speak to their sales team and will create a custom offering often requiring a large annual or multi-year contract.
Consumers, Recreational Athletes
Consumers have flocked to fitness monitoring wearables with the help of giants like Whoop, Apple Watch, and Fitbit. Garmin Cycling Power Meters and Nurvv Running Insoles are examples of sport specific devices.
These monitoring systems are optimized to be used for a single athlete and carry either a high upfront cost, a monthly subscription fee, or both. They do an exceptional job at taking complex data and turning it into understandable insights that encourage users to train more.
Why are these solutions different?
These groups have adopted different solutions, which may come as a surprise. Athlete monitoring is the process of collecting, storing, and producing insights from athletic training and competition. Shouldn't this process look the same for a professional athlete, an amateur runner, and high school wrestler?
Below, I've summarized the top three requirements these groups have when seeking a monitoring system. This is a high-level summary – every organization has unique needs that may be more important.
Professional Sports teams:
Sophisticated tools that mirrors the homegrown systems their pre-existing data analytics teams produced
Control of who has access to the data
Large per athlete budget
Team Sports:
Simple tools that fits their current process
Improving engagement is as important as performance
Small per athlete budget
Consumers:
Simple product that supports their athletic journey
Small, digestible summaries of their data
Medium per athlete budget
It is obvious why there are different products gaining traction in each group when looking at these summarized requirement lists. At Tully, we've built Tully Tracking for Team Sports. Tully Tracking is designed from scratch to satisfy their unique needs and requirements.