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.
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.
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.”
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.
Nestled in between the Mississippi River and the Mark Twain National Forrest is a HS at the heart of a revolution. Bryan Austin, head coach of the Jackson Indians, had known about this revolution for some time. He knew the coaches employing it just down the road at Southeast Missouri State (SEMO). He knew some of the drills associated with it. But when the opportunity arose to really commit to training one of the most under appreciated, yet vital, skills of baseball hitting, Coach Austin jumped at.
In the end, hitting a baseball is simple; where and when. A batter just has to predict, within millimeters and milliseconds, where the ball will be when it is within striking distance. It sounds simple, but as any hitter will tell you, it is not. Accurately predicting the when and where is called pitch recognition.
Coach Jackson knew how important this skill was so he emphasized the training in his practices. He outlines how they stressed pitch recognition as an integral part of their training.
“We got a late start but began training our pitch recognition. Each kid was responsible for 5 drills a day Mon-Fri on the pitchers we chose. As a staff we created a competition for weekly winners with the overall off season award being exempt from field work. We held kids to a high standard and if they did not complete the drills they would receive zero points for the day and have makeup conditioning.”
The approach worked. After a couple of weeks kids started to buy into the training as they saw their improvement. It didn’t hurt that major regional colleges like SEMO, Missouri, Iowa and Indiana bought into Pitch Recognition training too. It also didn’t hurt that the kids knew they were some of the first to use the training. They were in on the ground floor.
A few years prior, SEMO hitting Coach Dillion Lawson contacted Dr. Peter Fadde of nearby Southern Illinois University. Dr. Fadde is the world’s leading expert on baseball pitch recognition. Dr. Fadde and Dillion decided to work together to help implement a program at SEMO to help batters train their pitch recognition. SEMO prior to implementing the PR training were a middle road team in offensive stats. Following the implementation, SEMO went on to dominate the Ohio Valley Conference and become one of the nation’s offensive powerhouses.
Turnarounds like that get noticed. The SEMO coaches moved on to bigger opportunities and Dr. Fadde set out to spread the techniques he had been perfecting for decades. Having been near the epicenter of pitch recognition training, Coach Austin caught wind of Dr. Fadde’s new software designed to test and train pitch recognition. Coach Austin signed up for the software and the Jackson Indians bought into the program completely, requiring their kids to train on it consistently.
Here is Coach Austin discussing some more of their training methods.
“Once the season started we cut back to 2 drills per day for the pitchers we chose. Our accountability was still high and they had makeup conditioning if they did not complete the drills. Our BP changed to hitting colors on the plate with each color representing 1/3 of the plate. For 0-0 or hitting counts they had either the “away color” or the “in color” along with the middle third. They had to tell us what they were looking for. Sometimes we would throw to the wrong zone to make sure they would take. With 1 strike we also covered 2/3 of the plate and expanded with 2 strikes. We could switch the mentality of which 1/ 3 were looking for throughout the season, depending on what the pitcher was trying to accomplish against us.”
“We also adapted our BP to fastball and curveball every other pitch with the sequence remaining the same. Our thought was we needed to be able to hit the pitch we know is coming before trying to hit a pitch we didn’t expect. By doing this I feel we hit the off-speed pitch better throughout the season.”
Their hard work paid off as demonstrated by their 2017 stats.
2017 Season Highlights
· (23-8): Most wins in school history
· Set new school record for Hits, Runs, RBIs and stolen bases
· Individual records for triples and RBIs
· Team Offensive Stats: Batting Average (.333), OBP (.442), SLG% (.474), 168 walks, 124 K
· 285 total hits, 225 RBIs, 288 runs averaging 8 runs per game
How do great hitters lay-off a slider with a two strike count? How do they jack a changeup? Simple, they are very good at predicting the Where and When. They recognize the visual cues displayed by pitchers and the flight of the ball. They can pick these up because they have seen so many live pitches. In fact, pitch recognition can only be trained by seeing quality pitches. The need to see quality live pitching is why it takes so long to get good at pitch recognition, until now….
With pitch recognition training Coach Austin capitalized on the benefits of playing small ball: Get runners on base, advance them and score. Pitch recognition does not train hitters to be passive at the plate, just the opposite. Pitch recognition training creates the selectively aggressive hitter pitchers hate to face. Pitch recognition training creates a confident hitter, a hitter that knows what coming at them. And a confident hitter is dangerous indeed.
