Sports & Spatial Services Pty Ltd

About

Sports and Spatial Services provides services in two primary areas: a) cricket coaching and b) videoanalysis.

Spatial information provides the third dimension to our services, focussing on policy, strategy and potential benefits of spatial analysis and mapping in, for example, sports club strategic planning.

While these three areas may appear at first glance to have little in common, what brought them together was a love of the game of cricket, professional training and work experience in the spatial domain, and the common thread of spatial awareness.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth perhaps ten thousand.

When trying to find you way from A to B, do you "get the picture" more readily from a map or from a long, textual description?

The art of coaching requires communication and sharing of common understanding - of what a player is doing, of what the coach wants, of how a desired outcome might be achieved, and importantly of some assessment of how effective any coaching strategy has been and whether a change of tack is required.

Our experience is that video analysis is an exceptionally effective tool in that context, especially with younger players and, often, their parents.

Both video analysis and spatial information are capable of adding significant value in the classroom.

With video for example, students may undertake a "physical education" class in which they participate in - and capture video from - a variety of track and field athletics events. Imagine the source material available to teachers across a range of curriculum areas, from basic maths to analysis of distance/velocity/acceleration, to projectile motion, to anatomy and physiology. Imagine also the relevance and meaning to those students whose own performance is part of their learning experience. Those same students may find, years later, that their early experience with video analysis has given them a head start as they pursue a research doctorate in biomechanics at a university or other technical laboratory.

Spatial information can engage students similarly in both practical field work and the academic interpretation and application of their own outcomes across a range of curriculum areas, as evidenced by the popularity of "GIS in Schools" programs, extending to information technology and communications, database design and development - and to some very clever systems to capture the locations of "things of interest", to analyse the captured data, and to present outcomes creatively and aesthetically (cartographically) to assist real decision making.

In times of strictly limited access to funds, any investment that is capable of serving multiple and sometimes disparate functions has a chance of adding value and being demonstrably cost-effective. If, for example, video analysis software can be used for coaching all of the sports in a school, for teaching the playing of musical instruments, for measuring and analysing almost any situation where the movement of a person or object is of interest, and if, after all of that, the software can have practical application across a wide range of curriculum areas, why would it not demand consideration as a multifaceted educational tool?

Our vision is to foster the realisation of benefits in education and sports participation, particularly cricket coaching, by working consultatively with our clients to achieve cost-effective access to relevant and appropriate tools for video analysis and spatial information.