Identifying Relevant Team Sport Metrics

Team sport involves the collaboration of multiple players towards a common goal. Aside from the social and health benefits, team sports are also a great way to build your fitness level and reduce stress. They also help you learn how to handle defeat and loss and improve your problem-solving skills. Additionally, participating in team sports can help you maintain a healthy weight and prevent depression.

Whether you’re an athlete or a coach, you can reap many benefits from participating in team sports. In addition to helping you stay active, playing team sports can help you develop your social skills and teach you how to work with others. Furthermore, these activities can help you meet new people and form long-lasting friendships. While there are many different team sports available, these games often require a large time commitment. Hence, it’s important to choose a sports activity that fits your schedule.

Practitioners are besieged with tracking system metrics, which can make it challenging to distil data into simple, meaningful information that informs decision making (e.g., training load assessment). Identifying which metrics are most pertinent to a given context is a critical process, and one that should involve key stakeholders in the process. This is particularly relevant in team sports, where the demands of competing against other teams requires a high degree of cohesion and communication.

Aside from the need to identify relevant tracking system metrics, it is also important to consider the context within which the metric will be analysed. For example, American football is an intermittent contact sport with a game structure that incorporates a series of stoppages and commercial breaks, extending the total match duration to up to three hours (Fig. 1). These factors influence the physical demands of the game, such as high-speed running and accelerations, which should be captured by the tracking system.

The use of tracking systems in team sports may also be constrained by the dimensions of stadia and field sizes. For instance, the use of GPS technology in Australian football and rugby codes is limited by stadia field dimensions that range from 175 m by 145 m (University of Tasmania Stadium) to 155 m by 136 m (Sydney Cricket Ground). This constraint should be considered when selecting a tracking system, as well as its corresponding metrics, to ensure that the data are valid for the context of a particular sport.