Barker College

We're so honoured that Alexandra Butt, Assistant Director of Girls' Sport at Barker took the time to share with us how they are utilising Nacsport and Klipdraw. 

Broadly speaking, what is Barker's sporting landscape ?

'It’s a completely different space, 15-20 years ago compared to what it is now. There are more resources at hand that we can utilise thus making our sports programmes more professional, engaging and competitive.

Our Barker program generally runs over 2 terms, so a semester. We generally have 10 rounds plus the semis and finals and we all place expectations to participate in the "business end of the season".

We have compulsory sport at Barker so that involves every student putting their hand up to play a sport over the winter and summer season. Netball is the largest girls sport that we have at Barker.

Barker has alot of students so what is the process of talent i.d and how do you build your teams?

We have 2-3 weeks of grading. 2-3 sessions a week. We get independent selectors in to have a look and help us make that decision and to grade the girls across 12-14 teams.

What is the requirement for a student / athlete participating in a Barker Sports Programme ?

In our firsts, there are high expectations in their level of training and game. Required to attend 1 fitness session plus the two training sessions. And they have an additional fixture as a part of an invitational comp with other local schools in the early part of the season.

Girls have access to the gym and the equipment used which is Barker's philosophy around integrated sport performance.

With other teams – it’s two training sessions plus a game on the weekend. Each team has an individual coach.

We put the coaches through an education process and try to upskill them through the season as well to try to maximise what we get out of the athletes and their development. 

Why did you introduce video analysis?

Each year, we try to look at something new to try and implement into the program to maximise the time we have with them because it is limited.

And we thought to do this through video analysis. In terms of giving them as much information as possible but also giving them a visual representation of the vision we are trying to achieve. It's one thing to tell the athletes about a particular moment or technique but we thought demonstrating to them with video and allowing reflection is far more effective

What is the level of analysis you offer the student athlete's?

It’s only short snippets that we are after to show them the key messages in the short time we have without spending hours and hours like elite teams do.

Was Nacsport the first software tool you used for video analysis?

We used a very simplified video analysis model last year where we just showed them replays of the actual game, whereas this year we brought on Nacsport to utilise the tagging, dashboards and presentations. This gave us a much more structured and methodical approach.

Are there a broad set of KPI's you capture across all sports or is it specialised depending on the sport ?

Netball for example is heavily based on strategy – how to maximise our possession but also limit the opponent’s possession. Video analysis for us was trying to work out what works and what doesn’t. Highlighting errors but also highlighting errors of the opposition so we can force them into particular zones and courts to try and maximise our turnover of the ball.

In terms for looking at it for the kids, other sports within the school utilise it already and there’s been some positive feedback on that. It’s a natural progression we try and implement that across the girl’s program.

Do you analyse the games live or is it done post match?

Video analysis for us is almost two fold – we encourage our coaches to watch the game live and make determinations. You can caught up in the game and miss the repetitive plays. With Nacsprt, when you go back and deconstruct it, it’s then very easy to start to see patterns emerge and that’s what we really focussed on. Looking for those patterns and look at what is successful from our teams view point in terms of court play and positioning.

Is Nacsport used across all sport teams?

We only did it with a handful of teams, the ones that we thought would be the most competitive games and/or potentially be the semis or finals opponents. Filmed the game and then post match reviewed it, then presented it to the athletes. We always like that Saturday – Monday turnaround and we’ve also got the holiday period where we can use it to get a more in depth analysis.

We were really lucky in terms of meeting the guys from Nacsport and getting a good demonstration and support from the guys at JARO. That gave us an eye opener to what’s possible.

Why Nacsport?

With Nacsport, it was the ease and the way you can customise the templates to get what you want so you can go as deep or as simple as you want to, which means for different teams we can do different things. With our first, we might go slightly higher analysis, whereas with our other teams, our seconds, thirds, etc. we may do a slightly different analysis for the season.

What value has Nacsport given your program?

We use Nacsport in two ways, first way was we print a PDF of the actual dashboard where we could highlight the strategies we wanted to implement and then we use that in conjunction with a presentation in terms of being able to present that to the student athletes and to be able to visibly show them what we’re after. So highlighting the repetitive centre passes or where they like to get the ball, or particular methods or whether it was holding instead of jumping. We did it as a visual representation one training session, either the first half an hour or in the lead up to the holidays when they’re not playing a game, we used a full session to run through and explain everything as well as look at the statistics that came out of the presentation as well.

It probably shocked the kids a little bit, they weren’t expecting the depth of analysis that we were able to provide but based on that, they utilised it to the best they could and enjoyed the process as well in terms of being able to understand it as well as implement what’s being asked from the coach.

In terms of schools, one thing is the ease of access, anyone can have access and the fact that you have a licence and multiple people can use that licence, makes it more appealing to a school based situation.

We want to get our other coaches upskilled so that individual coaches can use this and hopefully through the school system and set the expectation and what you need to do to win. The expectation to win a championship year on year is increasing, so it’s all these little things that don’t necessarily add to the students training time but give them a much better experience and help their development along the way.