As I mentioned in this post, I attended a Continuous Professional Development (CPD) workshop titled Coaching Children & Young People. It was one of three CPD workshops I needed to take to complete my Volleyball England Level 3 coaching certification. I won’t call the workshop one that really expanded my knowledge. In part that’s because I’ve got a fair bit of experience. Also, in part it’s because some of it was covered on Day 2 and Day 3 of the Level 3 course itself. Mainly, it came down to some interesting discussions between the four of us attending and the instructor. All of us had different sports backgrounds. Out of that came a couple of different ideas for coaching resources.
The first is more a concept than an actual thing. It’s the idea of Long-Term Athlete Development (LTAD). This is a subject worthy of a post of its own, though. I won’t go into it here beyond saying it’s a kind of training and sports involvement progression model.
Of more practical value…
Reaction time
The workshop instructor talked about reaction time apps. One of the old school ways of measuring reaction time was to have someone hold a yard stick (meter stick?) between the thumb and forefinger of a second person. Then you let it go to see how far it drops before that person catches it. These are mobile apps for phones and tablets which essentially replicate that idea They measure how long it takes you to react to something.
Video app
There are a number of apps out there the coaches can use to do video analysis. A specific one we looked at was Cricket Coach. I think, like other similar apps, it’s based on stuff originally done in golf. You can do side-by-side video comparison and also mark-up. Coach’s Eye is another one along these lines that I know a number of volleyball coaches like.
More video
Another potentially quite useful resource is Chromecast. While I haven’t used this USB plug-in device in the gym myself, I’m familiar with it as something that can be used to stream content from a computer or mobile device to a TV or monitor. If you use a phone or tablet (or other WiFi enabled device) to record video during training, you can use Chromecast to stream that to a large screen for easier viewing.
And even more…
As a little add-on, during the coaching conference, I had a conversation with one of the Volleyball England staff who showed me a really small GoPro camera they were working on getting a good deal on. The camera was so small that a player could wear it on a headband and with their app the video can be streamed to a mobile device, which was quite interesting.
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3 Responses
Hi John,
I use an app called “bustamove”. (http://www.orangeqube.com/bustamove/index.html). It is a video delay app to give you instant visual feedback of what you are doing, hands free. It continuously shows you what just happened seconds ago. There is no alternating record or play phase, just continuous playback but with a given delay. This way you get fast and easy accessible video feedback.
This gives my players directly feedback during the training which they really appreciate.
Kind regards,
Onno Bos
Thanks Onno. Running delayed video is definitely something very useful. Collegiate teams in the States with the financial resources have been using systems to do that for a number of years, but this is the first app I’ve come across so far that makes it easy for those of us operating on a small budget. I’ll give it a look.
I like O’SEE video delay better. I recommend the pro version. I can’t remember why I liked it better than Bam now 🙂