Hudl Solutions for Shimizu S-Pulse

This sea­son, Shimizu S-Pulse of the Japanese J-League have added Sportscode Elite and Hudl Replay to their analy­sis work­flow to trans­form the way they ana­lyze footage and pro­vide feed­back to coach­es and players.

For S-Pulse per­for­mance ana­lyst Mizuki Moriwaki, a reg­u­lar day will begin with analyz­ing train­ing ground sce­nar­ios using a range of video tools.

“For train­ing, we film with up to five cam­eras, every group ses­sion, team ses­sion, from the warm up to the cool down,” said Moriwaki.​“ Afterwards I code the train­ing then can pro­vide the pack­aged files to the coach­es, straight away. All coach­es have Sportscode so can receive a cod­ed pack­age after the game.”

The hard work done on the train­ing ground trans­lates to match day, an area where instant replay tech­nol­o­gy can be com­bined with analy­sis soft­ware to gen­er­ate data dri­ven deci­sions quick­ly dur­ing gameplay.

Hudl Replay allows in-game footage to be sent live to a dig­i­tal device on the side­line to allow coach­es to make deci­sions in real time. The S-Pulse ana­lyst is able to code instances in Sportscode Elite and send them direct­ly to Hudl Replay.

“Replay makes it easy to share insights in real time, because it’s pos­si­ble to send clips to the bench imme­di­ate­ly,” said Moriwaki.​“It also enables us to com­mu­ni­cate clips to show play­ers at halftime.”

During the match, Moriwaki codes the match live, and is able to imme­di­ate­ly pro­vide valu­able half­time analysis.

“During the match I’m cod­ing live and at half time I can go to the coach­es and dis­cuss match analy­sis,” said Moriwaki.​“Then we can show 2 – 3 key moments to the play­ers at half time.

This improved analy­sis set­up is com­plete­ly new to S-Pulse, as pre­vi­ous solu­tions were lim­it­ed to league fix­tures. Now S-Pulse can use Hudl Replay in train­ing and cup games in addi­tion to league fix­tures. Training and match day analy­sis work­flows are now the same under this new analy­sis sys­tem and the abil­i­ty to code direct­ly to the bench is anoth­er key asset. Now there is an added flex­i­bil­i­ty to work in an increased amount of situations.

“The play­ers and coach­es had nev­er had an expe­ri­ence with analy­sis like this before this sea­son,” explains Moriwaki. It’s now very help­ful to increase our under­stand­ing of when a coach is explain­ing some­thing.​“Even dur­ing train­ing, we can check straight away using Hudl Replay.”

When asked what the key com­pet­i­tive advan­tage of using their new analy­sis tools, the S-Pulse ana­lyst is quick to out­line the increased speed and accu­ra­cy that had been added to his work­flow. Especially using the find­er tool in Sportscode.

“The best thing is that it’s super quick,” said Moriwaki.​ “It’s easy to man­age a moment and I can use the find­er tool to very sim­ply see all of the shots or goals from this sea­son. Another point is that it’s very easy to find a moment. For one of our goals, the coach asked me to find a spe­cif­ic clip, which I can pick out very eas­i­ly. Also when I code, I can cus­tomise but­tons and labels to code the way I want.