LUTZ, Fla. — Artificial intelligence is becoming more mainstream by the day. Now, one local soccer club is using AI technology to help analyze player performance and help parents capture their kid's highlights without the need to use their own devices.
FC Tampa Rangers utilizes technology developed by a company called Trace, which allows coaches, players, and parents get personalized highlight reels after games. All they need is a special camera that records every player throughout the course of an entire game. The user can pick and choose almost any statistic related to any player on the field, and the AI program will edit and create a custom video clip that's simply sent to an email inbox.
"It was so out of the norm, that kind of stuff, that you’d say would never come," joked Mike Connell, a Rangers coach who starred for the Tampa Bay Rowdies from 1974-'85. "Now, we have the chip in the ball. We have players being tracked."
Connell, whose #6 jersey was retired by the Rowdies in 2013, has been coaching with FC Tampa Rangers for 15 years. So he's seen just about everything in the game, but he says this technology is by far the biggest step in collecting data in the most efficient way possible.
"We are able to see the distance, the speed, the moments of their game," Connell added. "In fact, as a coach, I can look at one player and watch his entire game just by his minutes."
David Lokshin co-founded Trace, a company that provides AI services for users to capture and keep their most important video moments. He said his product is used for sports, concerts, plays, and any other activity parents and coaches want to record.
"As a parent, we have a fear of missing out. Either you’re at the game, and you want to come back to that emotion when you saw something happen, or you weren’t at the game, and you want to relive it," Lokshin explained via video chat. "Trace makes it super-simple just to get highlights of your kid. Without having to film, without having to edit. You just get delivered a playlist to your email inbox and you can binge on your son or daughter."
12-year-old Rangers player Sasha Scites is part of a generation of kids who are just as tech-savvy as most adults, so he sees the merging of soccer and AI as a match made in sports heaven.
"Our coach would point and be like, 'You were over here. In the game, you were supposed to be over here, in this space.' He could just say that," Scites explained. "When to dribble, if someone’s coming, we can do a move if passing options are better. And it just helps out a lot to make us be better."
Parents and coaches can use the individualized video reels to send to college coaches for evaluation, or they can simply send them to a family member who can't make it to the game.
"Now, you can actually find the minute, go through and say, 'This is what you did well. This is what you should continue to do.' It’s nice to be able to pull a 90-minute game down into ten seconds," Sasha's father, Chris, said before his son's practice. "Find a great moment that he did well, and show it. He can send it to relatives across the country, things like that. It’s really a great tool."
Teammates share the video links with each other, and Chris says that a much better way to share playing experiences than previous generations.
"Driving home, we would talk about it in the car. That’s really all you got. You could never look back on it," he added. "Now, having the opportunity to look back on a game last year- I think it helps moving forward to be a better team, and they join each other together in building each other up."
Connell hopes this new technology adds to the players' desire to make soccer a bigger part of their lives as they grow older.
"We want them to really feel the game, and to really become emotionally attached to the game so they can drive themselves to the next level," he said.
The future of artificial intelligence is still uncertain, but Lokshin said he can't wait to see what that future holds with regard to creating custom videos.
"To me, it’s really exciting," he said. "Now you have computers that will do these things for you and give you content that’s just really high-quality and something that you love. And something that you want to share and consume."
