3 Insights: 2022 Football Performance and Video Workshop
Recently, Catapult held its annual Football Workshop at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. The two-day event was attended by more than 115 leading football staff from the NFL and NCAA. By coming together in person, football staff from the best teams in the U.S. were able to connect, network, and learn more about sports technology, performance data, and the future of video operations.
Pac-12, Big Ten, and SEC representatives, as well as speakers from some of the country’s most forward-thinking NFL teams, led various presentations on football training best practices, hamstring management and injury prevention, how to improve internal communications to head coaches, strength and conditioning insights, and much more.
In case you missed it, here are the top 3 insights from this year’s workshop:
1. Avoid siloing yourself, collaborating before communicating performance insights.
Performance staff, like strength and conditioning coaches and video coordinators, are some of the most hardworking staff in football organizations. They work tirelessly to deliver the key insights coaches need to make performance improvements.
Their tireless efforts have resulted in staff building their own workflows and routines. These are unique to each staff member and, by their very nature, can silo their work from other departments.
This leads to a lack of collaboration between a football team’s performance departments – coaching, video, performance, medical, and many more. But often, the work of performance staff and video coordinators will overlap without them collaborating, resulting in the production and delivery of the same performance insights to team coaches, but from differing perspectives. This overlapping causes the doubling up of work, and can even confuse head coaches as to which is the best perspective.
The unique workshop allowed those who attended to appreciate the work of their counterparts, often seeing parallels between the insights they provide head coaches. After various roundtables, presentations and discussions, it was clear that despite the intense work S&C coaches and video coordinators do, there is a greater need to break down the walls put up by established workflows and routines, and collaborate before delivering performance insights to coaches.
In doing so, performance staff and video coordinators can work more efficiently, avoiding the doubling up of work, and present clearer, more impactful insights with greater context. This ultimately enables coaches to make better decisions that truly impact football performance.
2. In-person is better than virtual learning.
With the remote working that has resulted from Covid-19 social distancing precautions, in-person collaboration has suffered. This year’s event only served to highlight the importance of in-person learning and networking.
At the conference, performance staff and video coordinators engaged in multiple roundtable sessions where they cross-referenced the challenges teams, coaches, and other performance staff face on a day-to-day and strategic basis.
Video conferencing technologies like Zoom have helped to keep some communication alive but very little can replace both the tangible and intangible benefits of in-person collaboration. Safety clearly should always be the priority, but where possible, we should try to meet in person.
The Football Workshop demonstrated that meeting in person builds stronger relationships, and therefore trust. This trust deepens connections, permitting more honest conversations and an ability to share the professional and personal impact of our work.
In addition, the in-person roundtables enabled the 115 attendees to focus more effectively on the topic of conversation – football performance. Too often on Zoom, people refrain from sharing their anecdotes, but being in-person means you have to be more present and engaged in the discussion.
3. Integration is the future – performance data with video.
Remember XOS? Well, the foundations of the video product are still around albeit they are now built into the Catapult platform, providing coordinators with deeper and more meaningful insights that are then used to better help coaches unleash athlete performance.
At this year’s conference, coordinators were shown the upcoming product roadmap and given ample time to give feedback on previous products. The evolution of XOS into the Catapult brand enables two technology verticals – performance data and video analysis – to integrate effectively.
The integration of performance data and video allows different departments within a team to better collaborate, encourages cross-functional learning, offers an all-in-one solution for performance data and analysis needs. Most importantly, it enables performance coaches and video coordinators to improve their impact on the performance of athletes and teams.
If you were not able to attend the 2022 Football Workshop and would like to learn more about the collaboration between performance, strength and conditioning, and video analysis, click here to arrange a demo at your convenience.
We look forward to seeing you at the 2023 Football Workshop – to register your interest, speak to your account manager or click here to speak to sales.
*2023 Football Workshop Insights
If you are looking to take your football game to the next level, you won’t want to miss the insights from Catapult’s 2023 Football Performance Workshop.
At the workshop, attendees gained a deeper understanding of the workflow challenges that teams are facing and the potential solutions to overcome them, including the importance of effective communication and the use of technology. They were also introduced to Catapult’s updated suite of solutions for football, including the improved analysis capability, document sharing, presentation tools, player app, and scout app.
Finally, attendees were shown how Catapult’s innovative technology can connect the entire team through seamless collaboration, streamlining and enhancing the content delivered to players and coaches, and making it easier for them to access and review important information from any location and device.