Rocky Mountain Tracking

By Greg Bartlett

Football is a game where tensions can run extremely high. Did he catch that ball before it hit the ground? Was that referee making the right decision there? How many times have you actually stood up during a game and thrown your remote at the television screen? If only there was a way of accurately determining exactly where the ball was and the players were in relation to each other.

As far away as it is possible to be from a football field, orbiting the upper atmosphere about the planet are twenty to thirty satellites. These satellites continuously send signals down to Earth which are accurately time stamped to many hundredths of a second and give a very accurate positional signal. Passive receivers on Earth which can pick up these signals are able to accurately determine where they themselves are in real-time by comparing the signals from at least four of these satellites and triangulating their co-ordinates.

These types of technologies have greatly benefited both football team training and coaching. During games this technology is useful to assist referees in their decision-making. Recently a national team was having big problems with their players’ speeds. Can you believe these guys were actually running too fast? During the match, the players need to achieve a certain proportion of optimal running speeds and save the spurts of speed for the plays. These guys were throwing themselves around so fast that they were tired out in the first half. They were losing every single game!

The coach and the manager had had enough. They invested in some equipment with tiny GPS receivers. The gloves had little receivers and even the ball had a well padded receiver embedded inside. This is unlike cricket, where you can get away with a camera in the stumps. This fast-paced game needs accurate speed tracking. Their gloves can send a signal to a central monitor and player direction and speed can be determined as well as whether they have made contact with the ball.

It was invaluable for the team to see how much time they were wasting and how much energy they could save by slowing themselves down and thinking about what they should be doing to get into position. Well, after a couple of weeks of doing this that team has gone from strength to strength. Live GPS tracking technology at its sporting best!

A professor at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania is trying to improve the accuracy of officiating football according to Wired News.

Dr. Priya Narasimhan believes through GPS and an accelerometer she can electronically measure the position of the football within millimeters of the yard line where the ball is down. If successful, this could eliminate the need to bring out the measurement chains and prevent many reviews under the hood by the referees. It could be one less reason to throw that challenge flag.

The technology may also enable live data on ball handling grips, trajectories, speed, and ball cradling. Special gloves are embedded with 15 wireless touch sensors that can measure correct hand positioning on the ball. A GPS chip inside the football sends data every second which is accurate up to 30 feet.

Dr. Narasimhan’s engineering team is just in the beginning stages of development and they will likely have improvements to make as they go along. They hope to eventually utilize this technology in the NFL.

On the field and off the field, this technology could revolutionize football. It could improve training on the practice field performance on game day. You can only imagine how much time this would save during a game. The fumbles can be a tough decision. With 15 players stacked up, no official can see when the ball came out, if the player was down before the ball came out, and who recovered it.

Some could argue that our current rules of football lack technology to the extent that nearly half of the ref call should be unofficial. On the other hand, it often appears there is some favoritism playing into some of these decisions. If a tracking device can improve accuracy and help enforce the rules, I think the implementation of this technology is in everyone’s best interest.