How the Springboks use tech to gain a performance edge

Former Springboks coach Andre Markgraaf once infamously claimed that ‘rugby is not rock science’ but luckily the current management have a slightly more enlightened view on progress.

The Springboks have embraced the tech age.

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HOW THE SPRINGBOKS USE TECH?

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Modern technology plays an increasingly important role in the realm of high-performance sport and the Springboks have embraced that.

“Technology plays an important role as it allows us to measure and monitor performance. For example, we may have been quite dominant in the last game, but we might not have achieved our internal objectives; we couldn’t measure that without the technological tools at our disposal,” South African Rubgy Union (Saru) technical support manager Willie Maree told Tech Central. 

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“Secondly, from a conditioning point of view, it helps us to intervene in the coming weeks. Are there players we need to get off their feet and do others maybe need a top-up?”

The Springboks use all the usual bells and whistles that top athletes have at their disposal, like state of the art GPS pods manufactured by STATSports and heartrate monitors.

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Maree is equally proud of the tools that his team have developed to analyse match data in real time to provide rapid feedback to the technical team.

“We developed the system a few years ago with our partner, Mobii System – a local company. Our latency, at 0.25s from live, makes us the quickest system in the world at this stage,” Maree said. 

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PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION

The focus is not just on gathering data but also to find ways of implementing what they have gleaned in a practical way.

“From the GPS pod together with STATSports, there are probably over 200 or even 300 metrics that you can look at. But it is about narrowing down what is going to make a difference. We have a bespoke metric called high-metabolic load distance, which we call our ‘rugby metric’. With running, distance is distance, it is then how quickly you get from one position to the next that makes a difference in the game,” Maree said.

“We use bespoke systems that speak to performance, both technical and tactical, at individual and group and team level. We also use athlete management systems so that each player has a profile and we are able to make conjectures like so and so is undertraining while so and so may be overtraining.”

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