Officials use technology to support decision making in sports such as tennis, basketball and American football. In 2018, the video assistance referee (VAR) was introduced into professional soccer to advise referees of clear and obvious errors during matches. Research shows that the use of VAR significantly increased the accuracy of key match decisions from 92.1% to 98.3%.
Use double quotes to find documents that include the exact phrase: "aerodynamic AND testing"
Use double quotes to find documents that include the exact phrase: "aerodynamic AND testing"
As we transition into an increasingly online world, how can sport organizations not only cope, but thrive? What are the potential benefits of social media for sport organizations of all levels, and what are the downsides?
SIRC put these questions to Michael Naraine, an Associate Professor of Sport Management at Brock University. Naraine’s research specializes in digital sport marketing and management, including social media management and fan engagement. Some of his recent publications have focused on training sport administrators in analytics, wi-fi usage at NBA games, and the Toronto Raptors’ #WeTheNorth marketing campaign.
Naraine offered advice for sport organizations looking to “futureproof” themselves in an ever-changing digital landscape.
SIRC: What does the digital world mean for sport organizations?
MN: I think the easiest, simplest response is that it’s time to prepare for change. Back in the 80s and early 90s National Sport Organizations (NSOs) used to be administered by people showing up to kitchen tables or small board rooms to talk about how to manage our sports. Now in 2022, some NSOs have 8-digit budgets. It’s not a kitchen table type atmosphere anymore. It’s more of a corporate boardroom style (or at least it’s pushing to that frontier).
Think about the way that [organizations] communicated back in the early to mid-90s. They were faxing things, writing memos, and using snail mail, and then there was a slow, gradual transition towards email and text messaging. There’s been a natural progression as technology advanced over the last 5-10 years and we’re seeing that change timeline really start to shorten.
As a result, organizations need to be dealing not just with the “now” (“oh, we need to stop using fax machines, we need to start using social media more, and we need to start using mobile phones as opposed to landlines”) but to start to think about futureproofing themselves.
That’s really the crux of the question: what are you doing now? Not for next week, but to prepare for the next 3 to 5 years?
We know from research and practice that if you spend and dedicate 100% of your time dousing the fire that’s in front of you, that’s not an effective use of your time as an administrator. 60% of the operation should be focused on the day to day, and 30 to 40% should be focused on a long-term time horizon.
Organizations need to understand that change is inevitable. It’s what we do to prepare ourselves for that inevitable change that will separate the NSOs that are going to be on the forefront versus the NSOs and the P/TSOs that are going to left to the margins.
SIRC: We’re talking about the sport context, but that’s true of any field or organization, right?
MN: Absolutely. But particularly when we add in the sport context, the default response that everyone tends towards is “we don’t have capacity.”
I’ll give you a more specific example: in 2017, some of my research looked at Canadian NSOs and there were a few administrators who would say, “if you gave me a cash injection, I wouldn’t put it into digital, I would get a new coach. And I would get that coach because that coach would theoretically get better athlete results. Those results win medals, and the medals make me more money.”
So, there’s that tendency to think of the other “extracurriculars” as we’ll call things like digital, as erroneous or capacity drainers. But there’s a missed opportunity with the Canadian sports system to think about these elements not as capacity drainers, but as capacity enhancers.
We’ve seen this in other sectors where digital has been used to generate more revenue, whether it’s through sponsorship or to increase membership. For example, rather than having a press conference, which is an expensive endeavor, social media is a great way to broadcast to your public without those traditional expenditures.
SIRC: How does one deal with changes like bringing social media into your organization?
MN: There’s a natural inclination to want to “keep up with the Kardashians.” Like, “oh here’s this cool new thing we’ve got to do it because it’s cool and we need to stay relevant.” That’s the antithesis of good organizational management, period. No business should be so reactive.
So, the very first thing to answer your question, is to make sure that you have good club governance. Governance is not sexy, but it’s important. And it connects into the next piece, which is that you need to have a strategy focused on digital.
If you don’t have a digital strategy at the board level, then you’re just operating for the sake of operating. It’s a capacity drainer to expend resources without a plan.
You need to have board members that are diverse and reflective of different skills and competencies. If there are board members missing in terms of revenue generation, sponsorship, information technology, communication, then those are things that the organization should be looking to add (and could consider using a skills matrix to identify). Board meetings need to involve talking about: what does our digital strategy look like? How are we digitally futureproofing our organization over this next quad?
That doesn’t mean just parachuting a millennial or Gen Z in there and hoping that because they’re of this younger generation they naturally know what they’re doing. That’s a silly way to go about doing business.
The third piece is to evaluate. Look at the trends, do some social listening, look at the metrics. What type of engagement did we get? What was good, what was bad? What time of day, what time of month, what time of the year did it work out for us? What is our calendar looking like for the next season or the next calendar year? Start to populate an action plan for that and then execute.
SIRC: Your answer reminds me of the saying: “if you don’t rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems.”
MN: Totally.
SIRC: Are there any downsides to social media use for organizations that that you would try to avoid, caution upon, or, you know, sort of plan before you act?
Sport organizations, particularly those in the Canadian sports system, have tended to use social media from more of a standpoint of “we’ll post results, and then we’ll post that we have an upcoming event,” and there’s not a lot of engagement. We need to remember that social media is about being social.
The most effective organizations have a coherent strategy that’s being implemented. And that strategy and those guidelines involve the temperament and the personality of the organization and how that is going to exude through the content that’s being posted and the engagements that will take place.
That comes back to the problem of parachuting a 20-year-old person in there who may not necessarily reflect the best parts of the organization or might go out and do something or say something or maybe has [the organization’s socials] on their personal cell phone.
Other things to consider: Who has access to the social media accounts? What are the rules of engagement?
You don’t want to amplify misinformation or continue inappropriate conversations. Again, you have to ask: what is the personality of our organization? Are we more extroverted? Are we trying to be a little bit more sarcastic and edgy? Or are we more professional, perhaps more, I’ll use the term “uptight?” Wherever the lines are, those lines of demarcation need to be drawn.
Before implementing new technology into your program, first ask yourself, can the technology be believed? Assessing the validity and reliability of a new technology is one way to determine its credibility. Validity assesses if the technology is measuring what it promises to measure, while reliability speaks to its consistency and degree of error when providing measurements.
Technology is rapidly changing the sporting landscape. A recent study showed that advances in footwear technology since 2017 have significantly improved seasonal best times for distance runners. New shoe technology is responsible for a 1.7% performance increase in women’s marathon time (approximately 2 minutes, 10 seconds).
Technology can help coaches with decision-making, but actually getting the necessary data may be unreasonably cumbersome. When evaluating whether a technology is appropriate for your needs, ask for a trial. Trials can help coaches discover if they can access the necessary information and evaluate whether the technology meets their needs.
Before implementing a new technology for your sport or physical activity program, consider the burden it might impose on program leaders, participants and support staff. Using technology can often cost time, energy or convenience. For example, using GPS to monitor a soccer team’s training volume could easily take up to 4 hours a day: 1 hour to prepare the equipment, 2 hours to monitor the session, and 1 hour to process data, create reports and provide interpretation.
In wheelchair sports, wearable sensors present an opportunity for para-athletes to assess and analyze their gameplay and training statistics, such as wheelchair speed and acceleration. Wearable sensors can be used to measure electrical signals in muscles, allowing athletes and their support teams to assess training and performance in nuanced ways.
Playing sport video games could encourage people to follow and participate in real-life sports. In a study of American college students who played sport video games, 72% became a fan of a real-life sport team and 87% said that playing video games increased their interest in playing the sport in real life.
Over a coffee, we recently reminisced about different sporting environments we’ve worked in and how many times we’ve seen expensive technological solutions sit in a corner, collecting dust. Perhaps you can relate to the pattern. A new technology hits the market, and a few marquee teams or athletes adopt it. You truly believe that the technology will help you in the same way that it’s helping them. You purchase the technology and anticipate how great it’s going to be. Then, for whatever reason, it doesn’t go as you anticipated. Using the technology is cumbersome. Athletes or staff resist the technology. You don’t know what the data means or what you should do differently now that you have the data. Eventually, the value isn’t as apparent as you first anticipated, and you eventually stop using the technology. The dust collection begins.
These days, coaches are inundated with technological options claiming to offer “solutions” for athletes and teams. However, many coaches have limited budgets and don’t want technological investments to fail. Based on experiences implementing technology in different applied sport settings, we’ve proposed using a critical decision-making framework before implementing technology in sport (Windt et al., 2020).
In this blog, we review 4 key questions for coaches and other decision-makers to ask if they want new technology to help, not hinder, their ability to coach effectively.
Question 1: Is the data useful?
Everyday, it seems a new technology hits the market with bold claims and fancy marketing. Many technologies are intriguing, and as a coach, it’s easy to be curious or interested. However, the first thing to consider isn’t whether the technology is exciting, but whether it’ll deliver on its promises to inform decisions.
Practically, coaches should “start with the end in mind” (Covey, 2004) by envisioning their decision-making process, and how the technology could contribute. The technology’s data should inform coaches’ decision-making, not “make” the decision for the coach (Gamble et al., 2020).
Another important consideration is whether coaches could access the same information in another, but more affordable way, especially when budgets are tight. For example, global positioning systems (GPS) can provide information about players’ training volumes and physical capabilities, such as maximum velocity, and the information can be aggregated to understand a team’s training progression throughout a micro or macro cycle. If the latter (team load progression) is the coach’s priority, consistently collecting the session rating of perceived exertion (sRPE) responses from each athlete could provide insight into how the team’s training sessions vary across the training cycle. This would reduce the need for GPS to answer this specific question. If players’ maximum velocities during match play are the most important question, then GPS will prevail as the answer.
If coaches can’t imagine how the information would make life easier with more effective decision-making, or if they can already access similar information through other means, then there’s no need to further consider the technology.
Question 2: Is the data trustworthy?
Technology companies have a bottom line: their own. Often, they ultimately care more about selling their product to increase profits than about openly sharing their products’ imperfections. Given that commercial products vary in accuracy, and none capture information perfectly (Linke et al., 2018; Stone et al., 2020), coaches must consider if marketing promises are to be “sufficiently believed.”
This question has 2 parts. First, can the technology be believed? In the scientific realm, this is about validity and reliability. Broadly, validity assesses if the technology is measuring what it promises to measure, while reliability speaks to its consistency and degree of error when providing measurements (Impellizzeri & Marcora, 2009). To answer this believability question, coaches can search for academic, peer-reviewed papers about the technology such as the 2 papers referenced in the previous paragraph. Coaches can also speak to someone in a related academic field to recap available literature on the company. No news or no papers is often not a good sign.
The second question is about sufficiency, after the validity and reliability have been evaluated. Since no measure is perfectly valid or reliable, one must judge whether the errors are small enough that the data can still be sufficiently used for the coaches’ particular purpose. For example, while errors are always present, if a GPS unit is off by an average of 10 metres each day, you’ll be more comfortable relying on it for reviewing a training session’s physical demands than if it’s off by 1000 metres per day. Ultimately, trusting technology is a judgement call, based on understanding a technology’s limitations and weighing them against how precise the data must be to inform your decision.
Question 3: Can coaches access and use the data effectively?
While a main goal of technology is to provide data to help with decision-making, actually getting the necessary data may be simple or unreasonably cumbersome. When evaluating whether a technology is appropriate for your needs, ask for a trial. Trials can help coaches discover if they can access the necessary information and evaluate whether the technology meets their needs. For example, how long does it take to get the data? Is it available live or post-session? Can data be accessed on a cell phone or only on a computer? Is there enough detail? Can data be customized, and how is it displayed? Can the data be exported to compare it to other available information? The importance of each question depends specifically on each coach’s context. Trialing a technological solution can help coaches to answer each of these questions (Torres-Ronda & Schelling, 2017).
Question 4: Is the technology usable in real-life situations?
When implemented, what burden will the technology impose on coaches, athletes, and support staff? This may be among the most overlooked questions when considering technological options for sport. Using technology costs 1 or more people their time, energy or convenience. For example, implementing GPS with a soccer team could easily take up to 4 hours a day: 1 hour to prepare the equipment, 2 hours to monitor the session and assign players to the proper drills, and 1 hour to process data, create reports, and provide interpretation. When deciding if a technology is worth it, don’t just weigh the price, but also factor in the cost it’ll demand of everyone involved.
Conclusion
It’s easy to think that new technology will solve the problems we’re having in sport. Coaches and practitioners (especially in amateur sport or in sporting organizations with fewer resources and smaller budgets) may believe that technologies already used in professional environments are the solution. In fact, while professional sport environments often have lucrative budgets and excess technologies at their disposal, technologies can distract from the real performance process and collect dust when implementation fails. Many teams succeed with low budgets and few technologies. In turn, many incredibly well-funded teams fail, even with many technological toys. We hope that by encouraging practitioners to ask these 4 questions, we’ll help others avoid this trap, ensuring that technology they adopt is a help, not a hindrance.
The COVID-19 pandemic has catalyzed the widespread implementation of streaming technology for youth sports. Beyond allowing family and friends to stream games live, streaming improves game-tape reviews, analytics and evidence for in-game penalties. In the SIRCuit, learn more about how the pandemic has revolutionized technology at all levels of sport.