sprongo

Video Analysis is an Awesome Idea

Video Analysis has been around for a long time and it’s an awesome idea.  You watch your videos and notice things that you haven’t previously noticed.  

However, sometimes the naked eye cannot easily notice what needs to be noticed.  For those cases you have video analysis tools at your disposal.  For instance you can slow the video down, you can compare your video to someone else’s …etc. 

But…

Existing solutions concentrate heavily on these tools, but not the overall package.  They are overloaded with difficult to use advanced features that add minimal value but cause maximum frustration.

The others provide rarely used advanced features but they do not provide a great experience!

Most importantly they are not built with athletes in mind.  With existing solutions the athletes only see what their coaches show them and only when their coaches show it to them. 

Athletes are the ones that need to learn and to learn they need to be able access their videos from anywhere and at anytime.  

We are Different

We decided to approach video analysis from a different angle. We want to

• Decrease the coach’s work to an absolute minimum. 
• Give athletes 24/7 access to their videos.
• Get athletes excited about watching their videos.
• Give them easy to use, value adding video analysis features.
• Encourage them to think for themselves and come to the coach with questions.

We believe our approach gets athletes more engaged and helps them have more breakthroughs.Check out a testimonial that Mark Engel wrote about SkiClubZ (the first version of our site, which was built for skiers): 

Athletes can compare themselves to each other online.

Let’s Build it Together

We are in Private Beta, which is geek speak for saying we are giving early access to a select group of people who we believe can give us great feedback.  If you are one of the people passionate about sports and the role of video in sports, we’d love for you to try out Sprongo.  

Let me give a quick recap for those who don’t know our story. About 9 months ago we started off as SkiClubZ.com, an online video analysis solution for competitive skiers. Our users loved us and the and word spread quickly.  Within months about 10% of the US competitive market became paying members.  

Mark Engel was one of the athletes using us.  He had an amazing season which was capped off by his selection to the US Ski Team.  Mark took the time to write us a thank you letter.  

Receiving this letter was the proudest moment of our lives.  Thank you, Mark!

Dear Skiclubz Staff,

I just wanted to send you guys a letter of appreciation for skiclubz.com’s influence on my successful season this year. At the end of this season, I made USST C Team criteria and was nominated to the U.S. Ski Team! I wanted to thank you for the part that Skiculbz had to
play in that success.

Without Skiclubz.com, I don’t think I would have made the U.S. Ski Team! Being able to compare videos head to head with Skiclubz, either against a competitor or against myself, helped me to shave valuable tenths of a second off of my times this year. This is a small but crucial difference. If I had been just half a second slower all year long, my slalom ranking would not have been good enough to make the U.S. Ski Team. And without Skiclubz, I would definitely have stayed a half second slower.

One day of training this year, I was able to watch head to head video of two of my runs in a slalom course, and found that just by skiing a tighter line in the hairpins in one run was a half second difference from the other run. Experiences like this are the reason that Skiclubz made the big difference in my season, helping me to achieve my dreams!

Another benefit of Skiclubz, is being able to view the videos online at any time. Very often at races, I don’t have time to watch video until 10 at night. By that time all of the coaches are already asleep. With Skiclubz, I can view my videos as many times as I want without having to wake a coach up. This can sometimes be the difference between scoring points, and not scoring points on your next day of racing!

To sum this all up, thank you  Skiclubz staff for making such an amazing product. Skiclubz helped me achieve my goal of making the U.S. Ski Team this year! You guys are awesome and I hope all the national teams decide to use your product so I can keep using it!

Sincerely,
Mark Engel

We were at the Track and Field Championships @ Eugene, Oregon and we got to pick the minds of some of the best coaches Track & Field coaches in the US.  

Track and Field is all about instant visual feedback.  As one of the coaches put it:

“…we have a 30 second time window for a coach to upload a video, then give feedback to the athlete before his event begins.  This can be the difference between winning the gold medal.”

We can’t wait to get the Track & Field Community on sprongo.  These guys are really into “instant visual feedback” and that is what we do.