Phase 1 · Root Concept
Components:
- Football players and coaches are switching over to the use of digital play making tools to visualize plays.
- Online activities allow players to interact with plays in a more dynamic and spontaneous way than with paper binders and chalk boards.
- Digital technology can enhance the way player visualize plays and interact with each other and coaches
Stake Holders:
For a football app there are the obvious stake holders, players and coaches, who would be able to better interact with each other when learning plays. There are also less obvious stake holders, including the communities, franchises, and sponsors of teams who for reasons of pride or profit care about the teams ability to win games and perform better.
Starting assumptions:
- Teams are willing to change to a new system for football play diagramming if it offers improvements over the old system.
- Football teams or players have access to some type of budget to pay for new technologies, or already own technologies that can be used.
- Coaches have access to digital files, stats movies etc that are used to help teach players football.
How we reached our root concept:
At first when considering the project we thought about how an app could help football players by digitizing the playbook, making it more portable, and adding animation to make the plays easier to visualize. After a short Google search we discovered that such apps already exits, and are not widely utilized by football programs. This made us consider what ways we could improve and change our idea to make an app that was useful enough that teams would switch to it.
Through our field studies, including questions and passive observation of football teams we began to see an emerging trend in the use of game films to help players understand their opponents and their own mistakes before the game was ever played. This was a theme that we saw all the way from high school football up though college and the NFL.
From this idea we asked what ways we could help coaches share video, how players could interact with their plays, and how coaches could diagram plays for their players in a way that would exploit the strength and weaknesses observed by the coach.