Babu is a 15-year-old who dreams of playing cricket for India. He does not miss weekend practice under the watchful eye of his father. But living in Vellore, 130 km west of Chennai, Babu is deprived of a good coach to mentor him. That's where virtual technology comes to his rescue.

>Cricketmentor.tv , a video-based online mentoring platform, is all about virtual coaching to improve the performance of players. The culmination of the dreams of a team of former cricketers and cricket enthusiasts, this platform looks to groom talent better while creating a more productive coaching environment too.

The platform allows its users to broadcast videos of strokes played during practice sessions or a match. Out of the videos, the platform extracts intelligence in the back-end on the trends and patterns of playing. This helps a player to identify the strengths and weaknesses in his performance.

Giving an example, S. Ramakrishnan, Managing Director, Sports Mechanics, which has developed the platform, says Babu's videos showed that he had a problem with his ‘foot work' while playing an ‘off drive' and the ‘pull shots.' The platform pointed out the flaws to him and he went to a coach to get them corrected, says Ramakrishnan. “Babu may not have corrected his mistakes without the help of technology,” he says.

Performance analytics is the core business of SportsMechanics. “Our mission is to facilitate productive interaction among the coaching and playing fraternity using technology and focusing on the next-generation coaching methodologies,” says Ramakrishnan, a former cricketer who played for Indian Bank for over a decade.

Cricketmentor.tv stores digital videos for users and provides a channel to broadcast the videos to the world. Uploading videos is free for now. But as a premium service, the company shoots videos for cricketers in a match.

The platform took off in February and the company has over 600 registered users. “The concept is yet to catch up. We are going to schools and colleges to create awareness,” says Ramakrishnan.

“In my days, when I attended a practice session, I did not know what I was practising for. The coaching was not customised to my needs. I would have fielding practice for close-in catching whereas I would never field in the slips, forward short leg or silly point in a match,” he points out. Generally, nearly 99 per cent of coaching is done with the naked eye. “We are trying to change this methodology by making it more video and visual-based,” says Ramakrishnan. The naked eye can watch something happen in a flash but in a video one can see the visual as often as one wants — in slow motion, frame-by-frame, and also compare the old and the new.

>Cricketmentor.tv allows the user to, besides uploading the video, use applications that include tagging, search facility, query and analytical tools. Once the person has established his strengths and weaknesses, he/she can go to a coach for further guidance, stresses Ramakrishnan.

Talent waiting to be tapped

India has nearly 400 million youngsters under the age of 15. Assuming that about half of this number has the potential to become sportspersons, there is no federation that can cater to such a huge population. “We are talking about cricket killing other sports but the fact is that there is a huge market available to tap the 200 million..,” says Ramakrishnan

The infrastructure that is required, including coaching, is huge. Online coaching is a solution that can cover the length and breadth of the country. However, for this, a strong network is required, he points out.

SportsMechanics, which is a 30-member team, started in 2001 as a video analytics company and then moved to performance analytics. It now has nearly 40,000 hours of extracting competitive intelligence out of videos. For instance, the platform can analyse how a bowler bowls; his technique; understand his mental strength; how well he bowls to a right-hand batsman or a left -hander. One can get all this information from the videos to establish a pattern, says Ramakrishnan.

Indian cricket team

From 2003 onwards, the company has been a part of the Indian cricket team, doing performance analysis of players. Earlier, the team meetings used to be like “we have to play seriously — dil se kelo” kinds. “We changed it to visual-based meetings by analysing opponents' videos and establishing patterns. About 25 per cent of the effort goes into preparations and another 25 per cent in how it is served,” he says.

The results are there for everybody to see. From 2003 onwards the Indian cricket team has been on a high — first winning the Twenty20 world championship in 2007 and later the 50-over limited world championship early this year. “We played a small but significant role in the team's performance,” says Ramakrishan.

> raja@thehindu.co.in

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