Collaboration between coaches and athletes on different levels like national, regional and clubs can be really complex and time consuming. There are many aspects to consider like training plans, technical and tactical improvements but also competition planning and a lot of other things. All information have to be distributed between the levels to make it possible to collaborate.
Even just in a club with several coaches this could a hurdle and take away the some of the focus from what actually matters – the athletes.
Most organisations on different levels have created different administrative routines to manage their work. Often with office software like Word or Excel distributed via home pages or email. Many organisations have one system for reporting training, another system for match analysis and different routines for setting goals and do follow ups regarding technical and tactical aspects of their athletes. Each organisation has created it’s own solution and it’s hard to get an optimized information flow that simplifies collaboration between different levels.
Most of you will probably recognize the situation illustrated in the picture above. It’s difficult and time consuming to gather all needed information and even more harder to analyze it efficiently. In fact, that’s why we decided to create Athlete Analyzer – a complete judo software to keep everything needed in one place and enhance collaboration.
Training plans & diaries: The coaches create training plans and the athletes reports each workout. If the athletes uses the app they can report their training as done with one click. That’s quite straight forward and forms the base for the training plans and diaries.Coaches can also collaborate while creating plans. One coach can update judo sessions and another coach can update the strength and conditioning sessions. They can also add other events like camps or competitions in the same plan. Every update in the plan will instantly update all athletes calendars. Another collaboration feature is that for example a national coach can share a basic plan like “Build up period Cadets” to club coaches. The club coaches can then share that plan to all their cadets in the club. This saves a lot of time and also spread “Best practices” from national level down to club level.
Match videos: One decision we made early on was to let the athletes analyze and tag their contests by themselves. There are several reasons for this. The athletes need to watch their contests and reflect on what happened. It makes the athletes more engaged and makes it also a lot easier to discuss the situations and the outcome with their coaches. And to be honest, a coach with let’s say ten athletes saves a lot of time if the athletes tag their own contests. All coaches connected to the athlete can then easily analyze the contests and provide valuable feedback. All feedback are displayed below each video in a thread format making it easy to read the other coaches’ feedback.
Development plans & Goals: Coaches and the athletes themselves can set goals for basically every aspect in the system, for example “More Harai goshi from right neck grip”. The system keep track of all tags done by the athlete from the videos and when the goal is met all coaches gets an notification automatically. It also makes it very clear for all coaches around the athlete what they should focus on during future training sessions.
We have made a short video explaining how Athlete Analyzer works. Don’t forget to turn up the volume and please share it among your judo friends.