Tactic brings social media and the love of sport together for youngsters
WE LIVE IN a world where social media is omnipresent, while sport continues to capture the imagination of the masses.
Conor Duff is hopeful that his new product, Tactic, is the perfect meeting point between the two elements.
Tactic is a free web app that allows kids and teenagers to analyse games and training, converse with each other about their chosen sports and learn from their coaches.
Source: TacticTalks/YouTube
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Louth man Duff, who has a background in product design and the automotive industry, launched Tactic in 2015 and it went live in October of last year. It already has 400 users, but Duff and his team have plans to hit the 10,000 mark by early 2018.
Duff played rugby for 23 years and now coaches his 12-year-old son, meaning he has had regular insight into how youngsters engage with sport.
“Listening to the guys, they talk about sport in a different way than adults would. They don’t talk about data and percentages, they talk about how Messi flicks the ball or how Zebo passes. It’s really interesting how visual they are.
“There hasn’t really been a way for them to talk about sports visually. My son could come home from school and sit for two hours looking at YouTube, browsing videos of rugby, Gaelic and soccer.”
Tactic aims to give young players at grassroots levels a natural home for analysing and discussing their sporting interests, while it also serves as an extremely useful tool for the coaches of their teams.
How does Tactic work? Users first create a profile as they would on Facebook, adding their name, team, photo, and background image.
“Child protection is huge,” points out Duff. “Within Tactic, when a minor – an U14 – signs up, they have to provide a guardian email address and that means that when a coach follows a minor, an email is sent to the guardian just to inform them of it.
“There are a couple of structures there to keep it child-friendly.”
Tactic went live last year. Source: Inpho/Billy Stickland
Once their profile is confirmed, the users can get stuck into analysing and reviewing footage of games. They can follow other users and channels, and get various notifications when new items of interest come online.
‘TeamTalks’ are a big part of Tactic, whereby users to create close groups with their real-life team-mates and coaches, allowing them to review footage of their own games and training sessions or learn from footage of professional teams in action.
The footage in Tactic comes from YouTube – simply by copying and pasting the URL of the relevant video – but there are plans for Tactic to host video itself in the future.
“Using YouTube means you can get lots of video of everything, but also the videos have already been screened, so there are restrictions there that are child-friendly,” explains Duff.
“A coach can upload their match or training session to YouTube, keep the video unlisted so it can’t be found, then bring it into Tactic and share it with their team.”
Coaches and players then use Tactic’s editing suite to analyse the footage, with a range simple tools such as lines, arrows, circles, text. Users can also add audio commentary over the footage.
One particularly interesting function is the ability to ask questions of other users in your TeamTalk.
“That’s a unique part of Tactic,” says Duff. “The clip pauses and the question pops up, ‘Where should he pass?’ for example, or, ‘Does he score?’
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