Just about everything that applies to the care, maintenence and improvement of elite athletes also applies to the people in charge of elite athletes. Organizations have habits and it is rare for a team to have good habits when coaches and front office lack them. European soccer writers have done a nice job documenting how coaching is changing as the facets of sports science become increasingly important, to game tactics as well as for player development. (Outside of the Boot and The Original Coach).
Two things jump out at me: The coaches’ mental bandwidth requirements and the ongoing workload are sizable, at times crushing, and related, every game is an intellectual dogfight where better tactics can (and sometimes does) beat better talent. At some point, probably soon, computing will be yet another thing for coaches to understand in-depth.
The coaches’ endurance is every bit as critical as the players’ fitness. I’m looking forward to the NBA season and will pay attention to which teams are “all in” and which teams say “fuck it.” Detroit Pistons’ coach Stan Van Gundy told nba.com’s David Aldridge about his workload:
Me: How have you found your time management is going now that the season has started?
SVG: First of all, after being out two years — I said this to my brother the other day — it’s going to take some time, man. I’m slow on film right now. I really am. I’m taking, probably, 45 minutes longer on each game to get through a film than I was in the past. I noticed that trying to map out my day, and say, ‘All right, I’ve got two and a half hours to do the film.’ And it’s taking me 3:15, 3:30 now. I haven’t done it in a while, so I’m slower. The other part of the job, not too bad, because Jeff Bower’s handling all of that. But it’s still, it takes time. It does. There’s probably an hour in my day that, if I’m not talking to somebody in that role, I’m at least thinking about something in that role. So it does cut into your time a lot. Your assistants have to take on a little bit more of a responsibility. But I think the main thing is just getting back into the flow of working. After the game, breaking down the film and looking at the next opponent. And I’m slow right now. I really am.
Technology has a big role to play. Specifically it is the human-computer interaction of the tools that teams choose to use that determine how much time a team allocates to analysis and how much it allocates to everything else that needs attention. The emergence of video analysis in the past 15 years ultimately evolved into products like Synergy, a huge library of players and plays on video backed by a sketchy dataset and taxonomy. The old adage of, what do you want in your software–speed, quality or price–pick 2, applies. Video is inherently slow, and a product like Synergy is necessarily going to be low-quality and high-price.
Computer tools that are productivity-enhancing can depend on the know how a user brings. Domain knowledge can help to manage speed-quality-price tradeoffs. Statistical analysts are able to leverage much of what they know and move through work quickly with R than Excel. Athlete management systems (like Fusionetics and SMARTABASE) are coming online and they are going to attempt to give similar benefits to athlete performance staffers. (I have prototyped interfaces for showing play-by-play data for an entire NBA game in a single data graph, http://nbagraphs.tumblr.com.)
Interfaces for presenting and understanding sports data are going to be a source of competitive advantage. Germany, it was reported, gained real advantages for technology in their World Cup campaign. There was a data partnership with SAP and there was a major opposition-scouting project with the German Sport University Cologne Better tech tools for teams and their athletes are coming. Safe to say, teams will win they seek to improve themselves technologically with the same vigor that they try to improve on the court, pitch and field.