When Mitch Baker was an assistant hockey coach at Bethel College in St. Paul, he went through highs and lows on the job.
One of the lowest of the low: Having to spend hours editing video footage of goalies in action for later analysis. Using video-editing software on a desktop computer, he had to painstakingly look for key plays in order to mark and organize them for team viewing.
There has to be a better way, he thought. Today, there is.
Step one: He points a GoPro video camera at a goalie.
Step two: He watches the live game action on an Apple iPad tablet, which is linked to the camera via Wi-Fi.
Step three: When a certain kind of play occurs — a goal, a save, a rebound, a puck handle — he taps a corresponding button on the tablet screen to “tag” that game sequence.
Step four: The GoPro video is transferred to the iPad and matched up with the tagging data to create a video archive of the game. Every tagged play is ready for watching with just a few taps.
Baker, who now owns a Shoreview hockey-training company called Premier Goaltender Development, has harnessed the latest in sports-video tech to automate what once used to be dreaded drudgery.
The GoPro-and-iPad system, developed by Maine-based Double Blue Sports Analytics, is a bit like playing a video game.
“You just get four big buttons.” said Baker, who works with hockey goalies of all ages, ranging from 9-year-old boys and girls to college athletes and pros. “You do not even have to know a lot about the game. If the puck goes in, you click ‘goal.’ “
Afterward, with a game’s important moments easy to pull up courtesy of all that in-game tagging, coaches can spend more time conferring with their goaltenders instead of holing up in video-editing rooms.
The goalies “finally have a chance to come back and see what the coaches saw” during a game, he said. “They can see, ‘Oh, yeah, I was out of position.’ That is how development happens.”
Double Blue’s product, called 360 Save Review System, is the brainchild of Dan Kerluke, a former University of Maine player and assistant coach.
“We have developed technology that crafts meaningful stories for coaches and athletes,” Kerluke said.
AN APP FOR THAT
He remembers the moment of inspiration that, after tons of hard work, led to 360 Save Review System.
He was at the University of Maine in 2011, during a game against Merrimack College, as a fellow coach and future Double Blue business partner went about the complicated task of documenting the goalie’s movements.
The coach, Dave Alexander, “was in the stands behind the goalie with a camera and the goalie-stat papers scattered all over the place,” Kerluke said. “The place was an absolute mess.”
Then the duo heard a shouted remark from a fan in the stands: “There has to be an app for that!”
Kerluke, Alexander and Tim Westbaker, now Double Blue’s chief technical officer and then a student, kicked off work on their fledgling hockey-analysis product as part of a tech-startup incubator at the school. Later, this project was spun off into the company Double Blue Sports Analytics.
The hockey system, though little more than a year old, has gained some traction. The NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins has been putting the system through its paces, Kerluke said. He notes that it pretty much matches the capabilities of pricey National Hockey League video-tracking equipment, but at a fraction of the cost.
Double Blue charges hockey teams $30 a month for the first player, and $15 per month for each additional player.
360 Save Review System has the virtue of being entirely iPad-based, which helps keep it simple. It is so simple, Kerluke said, that anyone can understand and use it. Even a mom or dad can suction-cup a GoPro onto the rink glass to document a kid goalie’s every play.
Similar products created by other companies are, in some cases, used on laptops with a reliance on spreadsheet-like data organizing. This, Kerluke argues, creates complexity. So do those products’ sometimes-convoluted interfaces, compared to what Double Blue claims is the most attractive and user-friendly software in this space.
The iPad is everything for Kerluke and his company.
“We would not exist at all without the iPad,” he stresses.
BEYOND GOALIES
As Double Blue works on a version 2.0 of its goalie-tracking system, it is also coming up with new products that use the original as inspiration.
Another hockey-related product in development, called 360 Team Review System, goes beyond goalies to allow tagging of all players’ movements on the rink for later analysis.
And now Double Blue is entering the consumer sphere with a product called CampCast.
The new shooting-and-tagging product, being released in the coming weeks, is intended primarily for summer camps and sports clinics for children — but is potentially useful in other settings, such as weddings, daycare centers and retirement homes.
A staffer using CampCast at any of the locales would shoot video while tagging — during or after the filming — every person who was captured in a particular segment of footage.
Video segments get organized accordingly for sharing. Parents wanting to know what is happening with their kids at daycare will get CampCast-created clips every day to watch on their work computers, for instance.
“Parents don’t need more than four or five minutes of video a day,” Kerluke said. “That’s meaningful enough to craft an emotional connection.”
Likewise, a coach at a hockey camp would organize kids into groups within CampCast by dragging and dropping their pictures. Later, children who are shown in particular videos would be identified by dragging their head shots onto those clips.
Double Blue is charging CampCast users a $20 monthly fee per photo subject at a camp or other facility.
‘REMOTE COACHING’
For Shoreview’s Mitch Baker, meanwhile, the hockey season has wound down and he has less physical access to players he tends to see on a daily basis during the winter.
Many players will head off to hockey-themed summer camps, most of which Baker will never see.
But even during the warm months, Double Blue’s goalie-monitoring system remains an essential tool for Baker’s hockey-training company.
His clients are using the technology in their far-off places and reporting back to Baker for virtual instruction. He sees everything they do since it’s documented electronically. He calls this “remote coaching.”
Goaltenders, “even if they are in Texas, can use the app, upload it and send it right to me,” he said. “I can edit and annotate it. It is almost in real time,” as if he were there.
“Goaltenders love it,” he said.
