Either you’re a scouter, a team performance analyst or an opponent analyst, you should be prepared and ready to the task you’ve assigned. Here we take you to a few steps you can take to make your job easier and faster.
- Planning and Preparation
The starting point is planning. You need to schedule the games you’re going to attend, where they will be held and how much time will you spend to prepare yourself. Can you record the game? Bring a camera, two batteries, a nice tripod and never forget your pen & paper. That’s the most basic analysis tool, if everything else fails to help you get the job done. Nowadays you can also use a simple tablet to help you collect some crucial data for the upcoming report you’ll have to create.
- Observation
Choose your position according to the work you’re realizing. If you’re scouting you need to choose a different position from a tactical team analysis. Remember – every analysis job has it’s own specifications.
The parameters also change according to your main goal. For example, if you’re analyzing your team, the observation parameters are different than opponent analysis.
- Data collection and Analysis
After your observation you need to start collecting data – it can be quantitative or qualitative data. Along the process of collecting information, you start your analysis.
The analysis isn’t more than organizing the data and identifying the patterns you find. Now you can breakdown the video and create simple clips that represent a sample of the pattern you identify as important.
Remember, you should consider strengths and weaknesses – if you’re a scouter or team analyst.
- Report Construction
Now you have collected every important information, you need to start structure a simple, clean and objective report to present to your players or coaches. The best way to save time is creating a template that suits your needs and is ready to work & edit. That way you just need to insert data and is ready to go.
You may look at it as a SWOT analysis – along with the description, you can add strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
- Reporting
Once you have done most of the work, the easiest part is presenting the information. It should be really concise, short and objective. You can’t take too much time and you should have the ability to highlight the main questions to be answered – this makes you a better analyst.
Don’t take more than a few minutes to explain the key points and answer the questions by bringing more data and information to the presentation.
