Watching game film and breaking down the actions of teams and individual players has been a major part of the coaching profession almost since people began filming games. Right away it was obvious that the ability to watch and analyze games after the fact could be a huge tool in avoiding repeating mistakes and capitalizing on the mistakes of others.
At first it was all done on bulky VCR’s and the only tool the coaches had were the fast forward and the pause button… some even had a slow motion feature. It was a pretty basic set up compared to what we have to work with today and the job of reviewing game film often took hours out of the coach’s lives. Hours that could have been spent with families were passed in a dank locker room office going through the process of isolating valuable material from the day’s films.
But the special effects department came through again. Thanks to the enlightened efforts of the former video coordinator for the Phoenix Suns, Garrick Barr, a new company… and a new concept… has made available a much more practical way to extract pertinent information from game film. It is called Synergy Sports Technology and the company has changed forever the process of evaluating opponents using film.
Back in the early 1990’s major sporting franchises began hiring on staff video coordinators to help keep control of the masses of filmed material coming into the system each day and making some useful sense out of it.
As it turned out, the position of video coordinator has been used as a stepping stone to coaching in the NBA by such as Erick Spoelstra of the Miami Heat, Cleveland Cavaliers head coach Mike Brown and Frank Vogel of the Indiana Pacers… all got their starts in the league as video coordinators.
When Barr was working for the Suns one of his first tasks was to keep track of how players challenged shots on defense. He had to log all challenged shots and then rate the challenge. Barr soon earned the respect of the coaching staff that came to rely on his reports while preparing for the next game.
Barr teamed up with former colleague Scott Mossman and formed Quantified Scouting in 1998 then broke off on his own in 2004 and formed Synergy Sports Technology. Nowadays most NBA and college basketball coaches wonder how they ever got along without Barr’s new service.
