Reading Selection #6

"It's In The Game." Irish Sports Daily.Com. 2010. Irish Sports Daily. 4 March. 2010
 http://www.irishsportsdaily.com/football/2045-its-in-the-game

I decided to use this article, because it had a direct correlation with me as a football coach. This article discusses XOS PlayAction Simulator, a product of XOS Digital, Inc. This simulator is a virtual training tool for football players. It plays just like a video game, such as Madden or NCAA Football. The thing that makes this simulator unique is that it has been modified from the game to a more realistic version of football. The main reason it is a good simulator is because a team can load their offense onto the game and a player can run his own offense and help him not only learn the plays, but how they are supposed to look and what he should be looking for when he runs those plays. The simulator can also allow the coaches t create a list of the plays they would like to run and the types of defenses he wants them to run against. It really is the best thing for learning outside of actual practice. A couple of paragraphs really stuck out with how much this program can do:
“We go so far as to give coaches, when they’re scripting the session, to specify who can and cannot catch a ball,” Tsai said. “For example, on a given play against a certain defense, if my read is to the X receiver, and I throw to the Z, we can actually force an incompletion, interception or whatever, to ensure that wrong receiver doesn’t get the ball. That’s just another mechanism to provide feedback for the player.”

 “The main benefit there is, your starting quarterback, he’s going to get most of the reps on the practice field,” Tsai said. “But your second-stringers and the younger guys, that can just sit and observe and watch film, they’ve got a way now, where they can train and go through that decision-making process in a virtual environment.”

This coaching tool is a really impressive piece of technology. I knew that you could play a video game and put in your own playbook to help your players learn the offense, but the aspect of it that I did not know and that is so impressive is the fact that you can script the plays and defenses and have a certain look to a certain offensive play. It is also amazing that the technology can understand when a player made the wrong read and throw and force the negative outcome to occur as a result.

If this technology isn't efficient, effective, and engaging I don't know what is. This allows coaches to virtually get in extra practice time. This is the next closest thing to actually physically running plays. It allows players who may not get as much work on the field to stay prepared. It can also allow players who are hurt to still get in practice. It can also prepare a player for an upcoming game, because they can run their plays and put in the opponents defenses to work against. It is efficient, because it won't take as much time as a normal practice would and you do not have to get all pads on and what not. It is effective, because it simulates almost exactly what a player will see on the field. This simulator is probably more engaging then it is anything else, because the players like to play it. To them is seems just like they are playing a video game.

Overall, this simulator would be ideal to have as a couch. I would definitely love to have it for my players, the only problem is I am sure it costs a boatload of money. This is probably why only a handful of schools have it, and those schools are the major division one Universities.