Play for Youth Academies: Lee Man (Hong Kong)
When a player begins their developmental journey at a young age, therein lies the potential to mold them as they grow and learn skills, acquire new habits, and adjust their day-to-day play.
But youth academies hold a massive amount of impact not only on each player‘s game but also on the coaching staff‘s development. Metrica Sports wants to help fortify that impact with the influence of video and data analysis.
As a complete solution from coding the game to player sharing and analysis, Play by Metrica Sports can effectively communicate the message to the youth in soccer and help you help them elevate performance.
We spoke with a few of our clients who implemented the software in their day-to-day youth academies.
Here‘s how Play has helped:
Coaches
At Lee Man, Play has been used to demonstrate the philosophy in action to any new trainers that have been appointed on the coaching staff. With practice clips, drill examples, and more, they can have visual benchmarks to meet when they‘re given the whistle and sent on the pitch.
“One big thing that coaches suffer with is time at youth academies,” says Matt Holland, Youth Academy Director at Lee Man. “They’re often part-time and can’t dedicate their time to watch clips of the opposition. Metrica Sports helps us smoothen that workflow and give good quality analysis to them, which in turn helps the players, too.”
Managers can use Play to communicate with the coaches both pre and post-match.
“The process—from inputting the video, coding, cutting, selecting the clips for your playlist, and annotating was the smoothest transition from me.”
There are so many possibilities, from using presentation mode at remote meetings to highlighting key points and from visualizing important concepts to adding live drawings for a more direct line of communication from coach to player.
Players
On an individual level, players can go through their highlighted playlists and discuss each individual decision-making opportunity with their coaches, managers, or teammates. This goes way beyond watching game film.
“I think it helps us understand the graphics better and more clearly, to help us then play better in the game,” says Lam Di Nam, U14 player at Lee Man. “We have a better understanding of what the coach is talking about in the meetings.”
Grouping academy players in groups or gathering them as a team, coaches can then use Play to help pinpoint specific instances throughout the game or practice to give more direct feedback. This elevates pre-game preparation or post-game review to a whole new level.
“The process of the usage is quite straightforward,” says Holland. “We have a great analysis platform and workflow now. We analyze the video, obtain the statistics, utilize the software, and relay the information to the players before training—for both opposition and ourselves.”
Managers
The benefits of Play also spread the entire field when it comes to communication within a youth academy. In a world where our face-to-face meetings have been moved online, Play can create that in-person environment for each in-game moment.
“It helps us understand how the team has played tactically. It helps us to deliver those types of drawing and annotations to give the players,” says Chow Lok Him, Coach at Lee Man.
Every past player or coach knows that studying the game is a massive part of making a player great. We‘ve seen academies like UDA Soccer in the UK and Lee Man in Hong Kong take full advantage of its user-friendliness with Play. Turning the tables on analysis, Play allows the players to cut their own clips of critical actions, organize them into playlists, add dynamic visuals, and present them to their peers.
“For a youth academy, it helps the coaches and managers grow as individuals and then as an academy as a whole. And ultimately, with Metrica Sports, we deliver the best analytics to our players and coaches. We don’t want to just talk about analysis, but make sure we do it right. Metrica helps us do that.” So whether you’re focusing just on the power of game analysis for your players or want to try it out across the entire academy, the completely FREE version of Play educates your players, puts analysis in the hands of your coaches, and gives management control they could use in your academy. Play just works.
About Metrica Sports:
Metrica Sports was founded in 2014 by CEO Ruben Saavedra, CTO Bruno Dagnino and CMO Enzo Angilletta. Metrica uses artificial intelligence to bring insights and performance improvements to clubs, academies and athletes all over the world. The vision of the founders is to give cutting-edge video and data analysis solutions to every coach, analyst and player in the world.