Once referred to as ‘The Program’ by Sports Illustrated for its leading facilities, vast resources, and decades of on-field success, Ohio State University is one of the United States most revered college sports setups… but there is always potential to improve.

When Travis Morris, the assistant coach of Ohio State’s men’s soccer team, first joined the backroom team, he, along with head coach Brian Maisonneuve, identified an opportunity to enhance the program by improving video capture and analysis on the soccer field.

After researching a number of solutions, the team settled on Spiideo Perform, an automated sports video capture and analysis platform for its ease of use and variety of useful analysis tools.

Like most coaches, Morris has experienced the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of manual recording, with hours wasted filming games and sessions by hand, uploading footage to a computer, cutting it into useful clips, and sharing it amongst colleagues and players. With Spiideo installed, the time it takes to record and prepare footage has been significantly reduced, leaving Morris with more time to gather insight to share with his players.

At the Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium, all of Ohio State Buckeyes’ home matches are now automatically captured live through a Spiideo, with built-in AutoFollow technology autonomously focusing in on the most important area of the pitch without human guidance. However, with Spiideo’s camera setup capturing a full, 180-degree view of play, users aren’t limited to watching the area of the pitch captured by the AutoFollow technology — within Spiideo Perform, users can use Virtual Panorama to pan and zoom within a recording, whether zooming out for a complete view of the pitch or focusing in on a specific area or player, to view the footage in the best way to support their tactical or player analysis.

As a game unfolds, Ohio State’s coaching staff has their iPad ready at hand in the dugout, where they take notes, make clips, and label them in real-time using Spiideo Perform, while first impressions of an incident are still fresh in their minds.

That isn’t always possible, however, such as during away games when the opposition doesn’t record using a Spiideo setup. In such cases, Morris requests the footage after the game, transfers it to a thumb drive, and then uploads it to Spiideo on the bus home. While it is recommended to capture footage through a Spiideo camera, video from third-party devices can still be uploaded and used within Spiideo’s flexible drawing, tagging, presentation, and Data Explorer tools.

Once prepared, clips are organized into presentations, ready for the coaching team to share with their players the following day. Morris typically creates two different types of presentations: opposition presentations, where clips from past games are used to analyze a game or prepare for an upcoming fixture, and individual presentations, which are used to deliver feedback – both positive and negative – to a specific player.

“We incorporate a lot of the Spiideo clips that we take right after the game and we’ll do a video session the following day,” Morris says. “A couple of clicks and it’s done — It’s pretty simple to add clips to a presentation.”

While the team is already using Spiideo Perform to watch back and clip footage live during matches, they will soon begin to explore additional ways to use the system, including live-tagging events from the bench to ensure useful clips are prepared during play to share with players during those ‘critical’ moments at half-time.

Following the successful implementation of Spiideo Perform at Ohio State’s home ground, the team will soon introduce video recording and analysis to its training field. This will provide Morris and his colleagues with access to an abundance of new footage day in, day out. Once the camera is in place, the team will begin to analyze footage from the team’s 5v5 and 6v6 training sessions on a daily basis to monitor decision-making, defensive shape, attacking movement, and more. With manual processing taking up too much time and resources, making such frequent use of video wasn’t previously viable.

„I think most coaches when you ask them about video training it’s like, ‘Yes, we like to do video training, but it’s so much of a hassle.“, Morris says,