Home/Industries/Sport & Athlete Performance
IndustryMeasuring what a player actually did.
Position for every player and the ball, updated fast enough to measure a sprint — indoors as well as out, where satellite tracking stops working.
What is actually hard here.
Satellite tracking works well on an open pitch and not at all in a hall, a dome, a velodrome or a covered stand. Anywhere with a roof, GNSS-based systems degrade from a measurement into an estimate — and indoor sport is where a great deal of training happens.
The second problem is resolution. A metre of error is invisible in a season-long distance total and fatal in anything positional: pressing distance, defensive line spacing, separation at the moment a pass is played.
What it looks like on site.
The outputs worth having.
- Distance by speed band — total is the least interesting number; the split between walking, jogging, running and sprinting is the one that maps to load.
- Accelerations and decelerations — count and magnitude, which correlate with soft-tissue load better than distance does.
- Sprint count and top speed — per player, per session, trended.
- Positional heat maps and pitch occupancy — where a player actually spent the session, against where the role expected them to be.
- Distance to nearest opponent, team shape, line height — the metrics that need true positions rather than a wearable's own dead reckoning.
- Ball events — with a tag in the ball, possession, pass length and time on ball become measurements rather than annotations.
Why these, and not the others.
UWB leads because it is the only technology on this site that produces a true coordinate indoors at a useful update rate. Anchors go on the perimeter — gantries, stand fascia, lighting rigs — and the tag goes in a vest pod or the ball.
RFID earns a place off the pitch: kit issue, boot and equipment tracking, and matching a pod to the right athlete without anyone typing a serial number.
A sensible order of work.
- Survey the venueAnchor positions on the perimeter, mounting to existing structure wherever possible, cable routes and power.
- Set the update rateTen to twenty hertz per player is normal; the ball needs more. Rate times tag count is the constraint that shapes the design.
- Fit the tagsVest pod for players, in-ball module where ball data is wanted. Ergonomics decide adoption more than accuracy does.
- Calibrate to the pitchAnchor coordinates tied to pitch markings so the output is in the coordinate system the coaching staff already thinks in.
- Feed the analysisExport into whatever the performance staff already use. A system that needs its own separate workflow gets used twice.
If it works.
- Indoor sessions become measurable rather than estimated.
- Positional questions — spacing, shape, pressing distance — become answerable from data instead of from video and argument.
- Load management stops depending on which surface the session happened to be on.
Does this look like your site?
Tell us the space, what moves in it, and the decision a position would change. We will tell you which technology fits and what a first deployment would involve.