“Transforming the Sports Arena with Data & Science”

Alan Clarke, Founder and CEO of STATSports’ qualities merge around his leadership abilities, and the pace and intensity with which he works at. His ferocity is the driving force behind the company, both internally and externally. Many CEOs tend to become increasingly hands-off as the entity grows, but Alan remains intertwined at each level of the busines – from technology to customer care. His ability to synergize the various departments into one cohesive, ultra-creative unit is unparalleled. Over the years, Alan’s ideas have materialized in products that have transformed the market, helping professionals to collect, process and understand sports data in ways that nobody could do before.

"Global leader in athletic performance monitoring, with a client roster featuring sport's biggest franchises."

STATSports was founded by Alan and Sean O’Connor in 2008 with a pitchside conversation about how teams should use fitness testing equipment to help improve their performances. Originally, the idea was that STATSports would go to teams with smaller budgets and offer to do fitness tests for them using the technology they’d develop without a high price tag. “Digging deeper we realised the large professional teams weren’t using this technology extensively and we progressed from there,” says Alan.

STATSports Apex device addresses a coach’s constant need for information on player performance and wellbeing, who are the number one priority of any sporting organisation. “That is the reason STATSports Apex is used by thousands of the world’s most renowned sports stars. APEX is wholly innovative,” adds Alan. “The first ever device to incorporate both GPS and Ultra Wideband Technology to provide data accurate in all environments.” Apex is also the first device in this industry to use Bluetooth LE, allowing users to connect to up to eight other device at one time, enabling Apex to become the ‘hub’ for wearables collecting data from all other devices and providing it in a concise format through a user-friendly software. APEX data can be viewed on an iPad, iPhone and Smartwatch live during a session, which is a major advance for the industry. “This means coaches can now be in the middle of a session whilst still receiving the live, accurate data allowing them to make key decisions during training,” says Alan.

It is the merit of Alan and Sean that they were able to imagine and put together the team that integrates the knowledge and expertise to fuse the expertise in creating the sports metrics in multidisciplinary co-operation, in the wearable pods. The Apex pod has a multitude of sensors capturing different classes of signals from the athlete’s / wearer’s system, mainly (but not limited to) kinematics data, physiological data, environmental. The sensors are covering device collected data, but also the pod is connectable to a full network of body worn sensors, network that creates a full eco-system. Processing the data in each pod, creates two opportunities:

1. For highly accurate, live, instantaneous data to be presented by each athlete.

2. The full pitch of players creates a multi-processor platform that co-operates to provide a complete image of activities in a team game.

The stored data lets the coach to further analyze and post-process the information for deep analysis and correlations that were impossible without the revolutionary system that STATSports created. “We listened to our end users and the number one problem for them all is TIME,” says Alan. “With Apex and the use of a micro USB for charging/downloading via single USB, 10-way hub and 16/32-way download we have been able to get 16 x 2-hour session downloaded and 5 separate PDF reports created in under 10 minutes meaning that the data can be used instantly in a practical sense for planning recovery or the next session and leading to greater player and coach buy in.”

Like every successful business, STATSports has a vision, a strategy, and a good understanding of the environment that it must impact - all of these areas driven by dedicated and resourceful minds that can understand all the intricacies of the domain the business acts in, and then revolutionizes that domain. “Data is knowledge only if you can use and interpret it properly,” adds Alan.IE