2018’s Leaders in Innovation: gameSense Sports honored by Coach & AD

The abundance of innovations in team sports has changed the way games are played and managed. Don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

For Coach & Athletic Director’s fourth annual innovations issue, we took a close look at more than 100 new and improved products. In the end, we settled on 10 that addressed specific needs or took a unique approach to solving common problems in athletic programs. This year’s class of innovative products is led by software and digital systems designed to help coaches and athletic administrators analyze athletic performance.

GameSense Sports

Players who are able to react before everyone else are said to have good instincts. Nobody is born with these types of instincts. They must be learned through countless hours of practice and play.

GameSense Sports created an app that trains the instincts that turn good players into great players by using “video occlusion.” It forces players to focus on the beginning of plays or events within a game, challenging them to accurately predict the outcome with limited information. GameSense Sports currently trains baseball, softball and football players, with more sports to come.

GameSense Sports is described as “Twitter simple.” It doesn’t require virtual reality gear, sensors or a lot of money. Players can use the app on a laptop, tablet or phone. GameSense Sports provides a scientifically sound, effective and efficient way for training the quick decisions athletes must make. Coaches, athletic directors and athletic trainers can give their athletes a faster way to become elite players through brain training. It gives players that extra edge, something to do when the weather is poor, or when they are injured.

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The Ultimate Playmaker – Relying on Cognitive Development in Baseball

The Ultimate Playmaker – Relying on Cognitive Development in Baseball

By Daniel Peterson and Leonard Zaichkowsky, Ph.D.

Editor’s note: This is a book excerpt from The Playmaker’s Advantage, published by Jeter Publishing/Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster. The hardcover, eBook and audiobook versions are available now online and in bookstores everywhere.

As co-founder and director of sport science for GameSense Sports, Dr. Zaichkowsky is a pioneer in athlete performance and, specifically, cognitive training using the science of occlusion. Many of the ideas and research included in The Playmaker’s Advantage form the foundation for the concepts and design of GS Pitch-IQ and FastpitchIQ.

Mark Newman has watched a lot of baseball but he had never seen anything like this. “Over the twenty-six years, I was with the Yankees, we trained shortstops, at every level in the organization, to be there on that play,” Newman, the team’s recently retired senior vice president of player development, said in an engaging conversation. “[Derek Jeter] was. Many others weren’t. I’m not sure if he was trained any differently than the other twenty-five shortstops. His ability to pay attention, be in the moment, and respond to his environment was superior. That play’s an example of it.”

That play is, of course, “the Flip,” which defined Derek Jeter as the quintessential playmaker. Down two games in the 2001 American League Division Series, the Yankees were protecting a 1–0 lead in the seventh inning on the road at the Oakland Coliseum. With two outs and Jeremy Giambi on first, Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina gave up a sharp line drive down the right-field line. Outfielder Shane Spencer chased the ball into the corner and heaved it toward home plate, over the heads of both of his cutoff men. “I let it go and it took off on me,” said Spencer. “I had a little too much on it.”

Surprisingly, Ron Washington, the A’s third-base coach, waved a charging Giambi home for a play at the plate. Jeter instinctively knew where he needed to be. Sprinting to the first-base line, he fielded Spencer’s overthrow with both hands and then

made a forty-foot backhanded flip to catcher Jorge Posada, who tagged Giambi a split second before his right foot touched home plate. The Yankees held on to their 1–0 lead to win the game and then the series.

“It was my job to read the play,” said Jeter after the game.

“The kid has great instincts and he holds it together and that was obviously the play of the game,” said manager Joe Torre about his twenty-seven-year-old shortstop.

Newman has seen thousands of ballplayers in his career, not only with the Yankees but in eighteen years as a college coach at Southern Illinois and Old Dominion. He likes the label of “playmaker” to describe that something extra that differentiates the Jeters of the world from players with talent alone.

“Derek is an extraordinary example of a playmaker, someone who takes talent and skill and is able to use them in game situations,” he told us. “There’s a big difference when you’ve scouted and signed as many good players as we did with the Yankees. Many players who we thought were gonna be good and weren’t. You become acutely aware of the difference between talent and performance. That bridge is the link of all those skills that allow a young player to go from being a prospect to a performer. That’s what distinguishes the playmaker from the one who aspires to be a playmaker.”

Newman joined the Bronx Bombers in 1989 as an instruction coordinator, then was promoted to vice president of player development and scouting in 1997. During his tenure the Yankees made the playoffs eighteen times, appearing in seven World Series and winning five of them. Beyond the well-known “five tools” of baseball talent—hitting for average, hitting for power, speed, throwing, and fielding—Newman and his scouts were always looking for that sixth tool, which was hard to describe but obvious when they saw it.

“In baseball, the old-school guys will call it instinct. As we thought more about it, we knew it’s more than instinct; that term wasn’t good enough to describe it. We wanted something with more specificity. Something to allow us to go out and search for this in the environment. Of course, we’re always trying to identify the things that we need to sign, versus the things we can develop. How much of this stuff is innate or what particular things might be more innate versus what things we can develop?

“That’s a huge part of the effective marriage of coaching and scouting or coaching and evaluations: understanding what the coaches can improve; what’s more easily teachable and what’s more difficult to teach. Beyond that is cognitive development: the ability to mentally and emotionally be tuned in to the environment and respond appropriately to it.”

 

© 2018 Daniel Peterson and Leonard Zaichkowsky

THE SCIENCE BEHIND VISUAL TRAINING AND COGNITIVE TRAINING IN BASEBALL

TECHNOLOGY

THE SCIENCE BEHIND VISUAL TRAINING AND COGNITIVE TRAINING IN BASEBALL

 

gS Pitch-IQ™ uses the proven video-occlusion method. Players view video clips of pitches that were shot from a batter’s box point-of-view. The pitch videos are cut off at different points of ball flight. The player identifies the TYPE of pitch and/or the LOCATION of the pitch in the strike zone. The player gets immediate feedback on the correctness of his choices and can view a full ball-flight replay to reinforce “what I see out of the pitcher’s hand” with “what it means at the plate.” 

The easy to understand occlusion method relies on repetition, immediate feedback, and progressive difficulty (like a video game) to build players’ pitch recognition. They don’t need to (and should not) mentally “grind” to recognize pitches. Coaches can provide clues (skinny wrist for curveball) or strategies (shift focus from pitcher’s cap to release window), but the work is done inside the mechanism by players’ eyes and brains.  

Other systems use staged video of pitchers shot in a studio, or 3D Virtual Reality (VR) modeling of pitchers but gameSense is committed to Real Video (RV) of real pitchers throwing real pitches to real hitters in real games. We can even include video of pitchers you will face next.

CORE SOFTBALL TRAINING: gameSense Improving Pitch Recognition

Pitch recognition is one of the hardest things to develop in players. The question is; how does gameSense make the process easier? Fadde explains how “the only way to develop pitch recognition is to see thousands of pitches. Chances to practice off real pitchers of equal or better quality are hard to come by. It’s a lot to expect players to “work on it” in the game. Being able to practice “reading” thousands of pitches on video is a lot easier. It can be done on the phone, in the car, lots of places.”

Sportstechie Highlights gameSense Sports Pitch-IQ

gameSense Sports continues to gain recognition in the sports world.

The oft-told standard in baseball is that a 90-mile-per-hour fastball takes four-tenths of a second to reach home plate and, because the act of swinging a bat takes about half the time, a hitter must identify the pitch, its expected location and decide what to do in about 0.2 seconds. Those numbers seem small and impossibly fast, but one can hardly appreciate the reality until seeing a pitcher enter his windup, release the ball and then for the video to stop at the juncture when a decision must be made.

That is the premise behind the work of gameSense, which draws on research that began in the late 1970s into anticipatory behavior based on early visual cues, showing a clear distinction between the abilities of experts and novices at quick-reaction tasks.

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