Hi Patrick, thanks for taking the time out, can you tell us how you got involved in the field of sport science and what is your role at StatSports?
No problem at all Conor, I suppose sport science was something that always appealed to me because I saw it as an area that could help me improve my own performance when I was training and competing in swimming and surf-lifesaving while in secondary school. I always enjoyed science and maths in school, so going on to study Sports and Exercise Sciences degree program in UL was a fairly straightforward choice for me. For my university work placement, I was lucky enough to get working with GPS units at an Irish sports technology company called Redback Biotek. After that, I got my current job at STATSports where I am a Senior Account Manager.
Throughout your early time in school, studies and earlier field experience how has the discipline changed?
As I said above, my first time using GPS units was on university work placement in 2014. For me there is two key differences between then and now. First of all, the demand for GPS data from teams at all levels has sky-rocketed! In 2014, the first team at clubs in the top handful of leagues in Europe would have been monitoring daily training with GPS data. Now, every academy at those teams will have a GPS unit and I don't think there is a single league in Europe where the top 2 or 3 teams aren't using GPS. Secondly, the use of live data has escalated. Secondly, the use of live data has escalated massively. STATSports iPad delivers key metrics for each player, for both the entire session and each drill, which allows coaching staff to make decisions based on the data in real time.
How big a role do you believe the use of data in Sports has played in the past few years?
Overall the role data plays in sport is very significant but obviously the extent of this varies massively between different sports and between teams in each sport. Certainly teams have more options now than ever before to gather different kinds of data (physical, tactical, psychological) with greater accuracy, but how this data influences decisions related to the team is ultimately down to decision makers at the club.
How open are football clubs in particular in engaging and feeding off the information you provide them? With some clubs it’s seems to be a “Keep up with the Jones’s approach” in copy-catting rivals and do little to understand it’s usefulness and impact?
Its important to remember that GPS data is one of a multitude of different kinds of data collected by the sports science/performance departments at clubs. GPS data is not the only data that has the potential to influence decision making. Having as much relevant information as possible to make a decision is what everybody wants and GPS data is there to help coaches and other support staff make informed decisions. The data is gathered but its entirely up to each individual club what they do with this data, ie. what they present, how they present it and how they include it in a decision making process. I don't think there's a keeping up with the Jones' approach to it nowadays based on what I've seen because even though the technology is quite powerful, at the most basic uncomplicated level the information provided, like total distance covered is not that advanced or glamorous. In some sports its easy to track distance, like swimming. Every swimming coach at every age group swimming club in the world is keeping note of the distance their athletes cover in each session.
Where do you see football going in the next few years in terms of sport science and data?
Over the next few years you will undoubtedly see some new technologies emerge, STATSports for instance will release a goalkeeper specific unit that will count the number dives left, right and high/low and produce a number of other metrics. Improvements on current technologies are also inevitable, one just needs to look back at how GPS monitoring has changed in the last few years. Clubs are collecting huge amounts of data and I think the integration of different data streams, which a number of companies are already doing, is going to give data more context than ever before.