Analysing Team Sport Performance

Heat maps are useful for analysing team performance. They provide a clear picture of player distribution, highlighting zones in which players lingered for longer periods. The maps also show major ranges – the extent of an ellipse centered on the locus of a player. The maps also contain a semi-axes representing the standard deviations of players in the x and y directions. The heat map is useful for analysing inter-team coordination, Player-player-environment interactions, and energy distributions.

Inter-team coordination

Teamwork is often easier if everyone in the same building knows the other team members. The seniority of team members has been found to be one of the key factors in inter-team communication. This is because senior members of a team have extensive networks and might have attended joint events. In the same way, the Hardware and Camera 3 teams have a lot of senior engineers on their rosters. As such, many people on these teams know each other well.

Player-player-environment interactions

There is evidence that player-player-environment interactions influence skill efficiency and disposal frequency. Using a constraints-led approach to sports practice, we manipulated task and environmental constraints and identified factors that influence skill involvement and disposal frequency. We found that manipulated activities were negatively related to disposal frequency, while activities with specific scoring objectives were positively related to disposal frequency. This study further suggests that player-environment interactions may influence team sport performance in many ways.

Energy distributions

The energy distributions around an organism are full of action-relevant information. Low energy distributions are a type of specificational information, which is governed by interactions between individuals and the environment. This information facilitates inter-player coordination in team sports. For example, the team may need to coordinate on defense to prevent an opposing team from executing their performance strategy. This requires the team to carefully sample and adjust training tasks to match the context of the competition.

Hypernetworks

Teams often exhibit a wide range of characteristics, and the analysis of team dynamics has proven to be useful in identifying and predicting team performance. A combination of social network analysis and sports sciences theorization has led to many useful insights into team behavior. Nevertheless, conventional social network representations typically represent team behavior as a collection of dyadic interactions, with a single cumulative snapshot. Consequently, hypernetworks provide a more flexible methodological framework that accounts for both competitive and cooperative interactions.

Voronoi cells

In the world of mathematics, Voronoi cells are often used as mathematical models. These diagrams, or Voronoi tessellation, are used to calculate rainfall, and have other applications in hydrology. They may also be useful for studying growth patterns of forests and their canopies. For example, they may be used to develop predictive models of forest fires. But, how do these diagrams apply to team sports?

Environmental constraints

Environmental constraints refer to the limitations of the playing field, whether physical or social. These constraints are external, such as weather, field dimensions, or lighting. When defining the rules and procedures, consider how the performers will react to environmental constraints. They may be different for individuals compared to others. This article outlines the factors that must be considered to design an environment conducive to team sport. Here are some examples of environmental constraints in team sports: