Catapult recently held its annual Football Workshop at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas. The two-day event was attended by more than 150 leading football staff from the NFL and NCAA. 

Pac-12, Big Ten, and SEC representatives, as well as speakers from some of the country’s most forward-thinking NFL teams, led various presentations on football training best practices, sports technology, performance data, and the future of video operations.

In case you missed it, here are the top 3 insights from this year’s workshop:

1. Technology is an essential tool to address football’s workflow challenges

One of the key topics discussed at the workshop was the workflow challenges that teams are facing when it comes to sharing and accessing content across multiple users. These challenges are particularly prevalent in the areas of video coordination, coaching, player engagement, and recruitment.

Video coordinators, for example, often struggle with accessing and sharing videos with the coaching staff. This can lead to delays in the decision-making process and can result in missed opportunities. Additionally, coaching staff often find it difficult to engage and collaborate with players and other staff members, which can impact team performance.

Players, on the other hand, face challenges accessing and consuming video and practice plans. This can lead to confusion and a lack of understanding of the team’s strategies, leading to on-field mishaps. Lastly, recruiters have a hard time searching, evaluating, and sharing recruitable players, this leads to missed opportunities for scouting and getting new talents.

The workshop provided a chance for attendees to share their own experiences and learn from one another. Through roundtable discussions and presentations, attendees were able to gain a better understanding of the challenges they face and to identify potential solutions.

Overall, the workshop highlighted the importance of effective communication, collaboration, and the use of technology in addressing workflow challenges. Coupling this with the improved, Catapult Thunder, has and will continue to enable coaches to better share content with players.

→ To learn how the improved Catapult Thunder can address your workflow challenges, click here.

2. Improved analysis with Next-Generation Tools

Another key insight gathered at the Football Workshop was the general excitement towards the new and improved analysis capability found within Catapult’s updated suite of solutions for Football.

• Document Sharing – allows teams to share PDFs such as playbooks and player reports with coaching staff and players more efficiently than before. This allows teams to access important information in a timely manner, and make more informed decisions.
• Presentation Tools – the new tools enable coaches to create engaging and informative presentations using player-tracked annotations, telestrations, and more. Attendee sentiments suggested that this will help coaches to communicate strategies and performance insights to players effectively.
• Player App – permits improved player collaboration through new ways of sharing video across any device. This allows players to stay connected and stay informed, regardless of their location.
• Scout App – Recruiters can now take advantage of the Scout App which allows teams to access recruitable players via the transfer portal and organize, evaluate, and share information across the team. This allows teams to make more informed decisions about recruiting new talent.

Catapult’s cutting-edge solution is set to revolutionize the way teams approach performance analysis. To inquire about these cutting-edge solutions, click here for a free demo.

3. Connecting the entire team with seamless collaboration

Workshop attendees were given an inside look at the innovative technology provided by Catapult Sports during their workshop. Another key takeaway from the workshop was the emphasis on connecting the entire team through their performance insights platform.

Catapult Sports understands the importance of seamless communication and collaboration within a football team and the inside look at the improved technology showed how easy it now is for teams to create and share performance insights across every user instantly. This allows for a more efficient and effective approach to analyzing and improving performance.

One of the standout features of Catapult’s solutions is its support for video coordinators. The technology streamlines and enhances the content that is delivered to players and coaches, making it easier for them to access and review important footage. This is especially useful for the coaching staff, who can receive and access video, data, reports, and presentations in a digestible manner.

The technology also allows players to access information from any location, across multiple device types. This is especially useful for today’s modern athlete, who often needs to access information on the go. Additionally, recruiters can also use the Scout App to search, select, evaluate, and share recruitable players on any device, from any location.

Overall, the workshop provided valuable insights into the technology and approaches used by leading football staff from the NFL and NCAA.  We want to take this time to thank all workshop speakers and attendees and look forward to seeing how technology will be used in the 2023 football season.

→ Click here to reach out to your Catapult Account Manager or Customer Success Representative to learn more about the workshop. Or to express your interest in attending the 2024 Football Workshop click here.

Insights from the 2022 Football Performance & Video Workshop

This section was originally posted on February 8, 2022.

In 2022, Catapult held its annual Football Workshop at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. More than 115 leading football staff from the NFL and NCAA attended the two-day event. By coming together in person, football staff from the best teams in the U.S. were able to connect, network, and learn more about sports technology, performance data, and the future of video operations.

Pac-12, Big Ten, and SEC representatives, as well as speakers from some of the country’s most forward-thinking NFL teams, led various presentations on football training best practices, hamstring management and injury prevention, how to improve internal communications to head coaches, strength and conditioning insights, and much more.

In case you missed it, here are the top 3 insights from this year’s workshop:

1. Avoid siloing yourself, and collaborating before communicating performance insights.

Performance staff, like strength and conditioning coaches and video coordinators, are some of the most hardworking staff in football organizations. They work tirelessly to deliver the key insights coaches need to make performance improvements.

Their tireless efforts have resulted in staff building their own workflows and routines. These are unique to each staff member and, by their very nature, can silo their work from other departments.

This leads to a lack of collaboration between a football team’s performance departments – coaching, video, performance, medical, and many more. But often, the work of performance staff and video coordinators will overlap without them collaborating, resulting in the production and delivery of the same performance insights to team coaches, but from differing perspectives. This overlapping causes the doubling up of work, and can even confuse head coaches as to which is the best perspective.

The unique workshop allowed those who attended to appreciate the work of their counterparts, often seeing parallels between the insights they provide head coaches. After various roundtables, presentations and discussions, it was clear that despite the intense work S&C coaches and video coordinators do, there is a greater need to break down the walls put up by established workflows and routines, and collaborate before delivering performance insights to coaches.

In doing so, performance staff and video coordinators can work more efficiently, avoiding the doubling up of work, and present clearer, more impactful insights with greater context. This ultimately enables coaches to make better decisions that truly impact football performance.

2. In-person is better than virtual learning.

With the remote working that has resulted from Covid-19 social distancing precautions, in-person collaboration has suffered. This year’s event only served to highlight the importance of in-person learning and networking.

At the conference, performance staff and video coordinators engaged in multiple roundtable sessions where they cross-referenced the challenges teams, coaches, and other performance staff face on a day-to-day and strategic basis.

Video conferencing technologies like Zoom have helped to keep some communication alive but very little can replace both the tangible and intangible benefits of in-person collaboration. Safety clearly should always be the priority, but where possible, we should try to meet in person.

The Football Workshop demonstrated that meeting in person builds stronger relationships, and therefore trust. This trust deepens connections, permitting more honest conversations and an ability to share the professional and personal impact of our work.

In addition, the in-person roundtables enabled the 115 attendees to focus more effectively on the topic of conversation – football performance. Too often on Zoom, people refrain from sharing their anecdotes, but being in-person means you have to be more present and engaged in the discussion.

3. Integration is the future – performance data with video.

Remember XOS? Well, the foundations of the video product are still around albeit they are now built into the Catapult platform, providing coordinators with deeper and more meaningful insights that are then used to better help coaches unleash athlete performance.

At this year’s conference, coordinators were shown the upcoming product roadmap and given ample time to give feedback on previous products. The evolution of XOS into the Catapult brand enables two technology verticals – performance data and video analysis – to integrate effectively.

The integration of performance data and video allows different departments within a team to better collaborate, encourages cross-functional learning, offers an all-in-one solution for performance data and analysis needs. Most importantly, it enables performance coaches and video coordinators to improve their impact on the performance of athletes and teams.

If you were not able to attend the 2022 Football Workshop and would like to learn more about the collaboration between performance, strength and conditioning, and video analysis, click here to arrange a demo at your convenience.

We look forward to seeing you at the 2023 Football Workshop – to register your interest, speak to your account manager or click here to speak to sales.