With the recent boom of Artificial Intelligence, people in sports are among those with big dreams about its use cases. That includes me. But many of those ideas assume something that might prove harder than expected: full buy-in from the staff. People are reluctant to accept change and the risks involved, especially when executives have such a quick trigger firing people. So, AI should be implemented in steps before everyone can get on board with the major changes.
Before making wholesale changes to their processes, a good way to convince someone to use something is to show them how it can make their life a little bit easier. So Artificial Intelligence can start by automating some of the tasks that take up a lot of resources and time. In today's sports industry, all but the top end of team staffs are typically understaffed, overworked, and underpaid. So saving even a few minutes to help them get more work done, go home earlier, and get more sleep is extremely valuable. This post will discuss two options: basic tagging and attendance checks.
It takes a few seconds to identify individual properties of a single video clip. But as the numbers of both plays and variables continue to increase, it takes more and more time to tag everything. But that can be automated. Take, for example, defensive fronts in football. Teams typically have a short list of fronts into which everything can be categorized. That list has a defined set of rules, so a machine could follow them relatively easily. So instead of a few hours, it could take no more than a few minutes to get multiple games worth of fronts tagged.
Attendance checks are another time suck, especially in scholastic or collegiate programs. Coaches or other staff members have to make sure that players are where they are supposed to be, whether that is the dining hall, classes, or meetings. Some types of Artificial Intelligence can be used to quickly and accurately identify the athletes wherever they are supposed to be, and other kinds of software can be used to communicate the attendance out to the staff.
We all want to be as innovative as possible, myself included. But none of the creativity, knowledge, and work is worth anything without someone actually using it. These uses for AI are not flashy, but they serve an important purpose and acclimate stakeholders to more and more technology around them.
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