Fenerbahçe choose Hudl Sportscode

Turkish Super League bas­ket­ball team Fenerbahçe Beko are now look­ing for the com­pet­i­tive advan­tage which will take them to the next lev­el in both domes­tic and European competitions.

When speak­ing to Fenerbahçe Beko assis­tant coach Erdem Can, he was clear in the motives of his team — ​“our orga­ni­za­tion wants to be the best”. Success has nev­er been a prob­lem for Fenerbahçe, who have nine nation­al cham­pi­onships and one EuroLeague title in the last decade, the chal­lenge is now to opti­mize play­er and team per­for­mance and plan for the future.

“If you have a big man, you need to show him his foot­work or his defen­sive mis­takes, or if you’re talk­ing to your guard you need to show him how to use the shot clock defen­sive­ly like his body posi­tion­ing, angles or again, foot­work,” said Can. ​“There are three things that are vital in the game of bas­ket­ball: one is spac­ing, sec­ond is tim­ing, the third is exe­cu­tion and if you don’t make your play­ers digest these details, you can­not improve. So what we try to do is basi­cal­ly try to teach all our play­ers visu­al­ly to mas­ter these fundamentals.”

Strong team per­for­mances begin out on the train­ing court and tech­nol­o­gy is key for Fenerbahçe as they work through a demand­ing domes­tic and con­ti­nen­tal season.

“There’s mil­lions of details that you need to show the play­ers to improve their flaws,” said Can. ​“One of the basic prin­ci­ples is game time reac­tions. We record some of our prac­tices and scrim­mages to break down and show our play­ers, because show­ing things such as accu­rate floor spac­ing is real­ly impor­tant in bas­ket­ball games. Technology is one of the most impor­tant parts right now to pre­pare our play­ers, judge their indi­vid­ual effec­tive­ness, and cru­cial­ly to pro­vide visu­al mem­o­ry, there are the most impor­tant assets.”

Coach Can see’s how feed­back plays such a crit­i­cal role in coach­ing and per­for­mance and how tech­nol­o­gy can help engage his play­ers through video analy­sis and objec­tive sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis using data. Hudl Sportscode is the soft­ware that Fenerbahçe Beko have recent­ly added to their pro­gram and it is already hav­ing a strong effect on gen­er­at­ing quick and accu­rate sta­tis­ti­cal insights.

“Sportscode gives us the lux­u­ry of ana­lyz­ing oppo­nent teams and gen­er­at­ing sta­tis­tics that we can use and make our play­ers digest,” said Can. ​“From there, we can cre­ate our own strat­e­gy plus make our play­ers watch them­selves and give them a library of clips to study around their indi­vid­ual per­for­mance — this is pre­cious. Sportscode is help­ing us a lot because tech­nol­o­gy is one thing, but there’s also being prac­ti­cal, which means we must be as quick as pos­si­ble in our analy­sis. With the tech­nol­o­gy, every­thing is right at our hands and reach­able, be it reports or libraries of clips.”

The club has plans to extend the use of analy­sis soft­ware to oper­ate beyond train­ing envi­ron­ments and into live match sce­nar­ios — a key func­tion­al­i­ty of Sportscode.

“Eventually we will use it for all these parts like match­es for sure,” said Can. ​“We will use it to pre­pare game reports and also the abil­i­ty to live edit dur­ing games is real­ly impor­tant. One of our two video coach­es will make the live cuts dur­ing the game and pro­vide half time analy­sis to the play­ers. Players need to under­stand visu­al­ly, it’s very dif­fi­cult to con­vince oth­er­wise if you com­pare with say, ver­bal terms. You need to give them some­thing visu­al that they need to see and the quick­er you make this you get a quick­er reac­tion and bet­ter reac­tion. It’s price­less again for us, and Sportscode is mak­ing this.”

Installing a whole new set of analy­sis soft­ware into a club can seem daunt­ing, espe­cial­ly in a club the size of Fenerbahçe, but Can and his staff found both the instal­la­tion and onboard­ing edu­ca­tion process rel­a­tive­ly easy.

“To be hon­est, in the begin­ning, it seems pret­ty com­plex,” said Can. ​“It seems like a lot of but­tons to push and labels to add to the code win­dow, but once you get inside, you real­ize that this is real­ly effec­tive and easy. As an assis­tant coach right now I’m not cut­ting the games, but I talk with our video coach­es and they agree with me, this soft­ware is much eas­i­er to use than the oth­ers. The reac­tion time is fast and total­ly dif­fer­ent because we used to take more than an hour to pre­pare our game analy­sis — oppo­nent analy­sis even longer — but now dur­ing the game one of the video coach­es is watch­ing the game and at the same time cut­ting that and then it’s ready in a few minutes.”

It was also real­ly impor­tant for Hudl staff to be present and at hand dur­ing the onboard­ing process explained Coach Can. ​“This was real­ly very impor­tant as we only have myself and two oth­ers remain­ing from the pre­vi­ous coach­ing regime — the rest of the staff are new mem­bers and some of them have no expe­ri­ence about video edit­ing and all of us had no idea about Sportscode. After two weeks of your sup­port we were well orga­nized and right now we can do all of it: pre­pare ses­sions and every­thing. So with­out your sup­port this was impos­si­ble and the sur­pris­ing thing is I didn’t expect that. That’s a quick adap­ta­tion from us, So the soft­ware is so prac­ti­cal, but also your sup­port was a real­ly impor­tant thing.”

Looking for­ward to their next cam­paign, Can and Fenerbahçe are excit­ed for what their new analy­sis offer­ing can bring to their already strong and suc­cess­ful club.

“I always say the same thing: In order to be the best, you have to fol­low the best,” said Can. ​“All but one of the NBA teams are using Sportscode for a rea­son and hav­ing this now is very log­i­cal. We’ve already been late to have Hudl Sportscode, but for me it’s the stan­dard, it’s need­ed. So at the end of the day we pick this, as the best part of the bas­ket­ball world is using this and we want to fol­low this.”