The English Premier League team Stoke City has recently collaborated with a Dutch company “Beyond Sports” with the aim to make their training sessions more tech-oriented by amalgamating Virtual Reality to analyze match performances for their goalkeepers.
Stoke City will start working with Beyond Sports and their newly introduced and rapidly evolving virtual reality practice sessions from next season.
The virtual reality offered by Beyond Sports is based upon real match data and it will fully allow the club to create situations on certain game-plan keeping certain approaches in perspective, hence improving the ability of goalkeepers to position themselves better, bringing “plug-and-play” feature for tailor made scenarios.
The practice training sessions will be comprising over four major areas, viz, on-field spatial awareness, decision making, high pressure in-game scenarios and a high frequency of scenarios fitted in a calculated time frame.
Stoke City will be benefiting from virtual reality technology to analyze game performance based on match records. Along with that, it will be providing the players an option to view different game moments from certain angles using VR headsets.
The new and constantly evolving scientific researches help to create possibilities for athletes to enhance their performances and in-field decision making abilities. The Potters will be taking this opportunity to improve the positioning tactics for their keepers, who play a crucial part in the game, whereby giving them a relapse into match moments which certainly gives great insights.
With Stoke City, all set to kick off their EPL season with an away game to high-spending Everton at Goodison Park on Aug. 12, it does not become the first club to use augmented virtual reality technology in their training sessions, Arsenal partnered with Beyond Sports two years back for the similar purpose.
