Canada may be well known for its prowess on the ice, but, courtesy of a partnership between Kinduct Technologies and Football Canada, the country’s future stardom on the gridiron may be reason to keep a watchful eye on America’s neighbor to the north.
For roughly eight months, both sides have worked together to create an application platform that allows back-and-forth communication between strength and conditioning coaches and their athletes even when both sides are miles apart.
“What we’ve done is we’ve worked together with (Football Canada) and their strength and conditioning coach to build out templates for delivering these types of high performance training programs to athletes across the country regardless of their geographic area in the country and regardless of their socioeconomic status,” Kevin Rimmer, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer for Kinduct told us in a phone interview.
With 8,000 plus workout routines at their fingertips, complete with video instructions and proper form guidelines, coaches can send these routines to their athletes in mass email-like manner. Once the athlete completes a power lifting session or a taxing conditioning workout, they can report back to their coach via the application and document the ins and outs of how the workout panned out; such as how much they thought they exerted themselves, how sore they might be or how beneficial they believed the workout to be as a whole.
“It makes things a lot easier for us being such a big country,” said Shannon Donovan, the Executive Director for Football Canada. “We’re not able to have as much one-on-one with the athletes so this allows us to keep an eye on how things are going from a distance but still be very hands on.”
Building upon that one-on-one ability, coaches can also tweak an assigned workout to adhere to a specific athlete’s situation, whether that includes making adjustments for progressive or regressive performance, scheduling conflicts, or injuries.
“It allows for the standardization of a structured protocol that you are going to send to a large group of people and then from there to really drill in and personalize it down to the individual needs of that athlete,” said Rimmer.
With the entire process already underway, Rimmer is astounded by the overflowing database of individual player performance data that has blossomed. Not only does this database build a talent pool completely stocked with athletes and their personal performance reports that can be viewed by coaches across the country, it also provides insights into player injuries by allowing coaches to go back into the archives and determine what activities or workout routines typically led to certain serious setbacks.
“So far it’s been good,” said Donovan. “It was a slow start but now as we’re moving in to the football season, things are picking up and the guys are getting more comfortable with it and us as staff at Football Canada are also becoming more familiar with the program to make it a lot easier to answer the athletes’ questions.”
This technology grants new tools for the people underneath the pads and the helmets to benefit, but they won’t be the only ones gaining an edge moving forward.
“We see ourselves as leaders in the industry and we want to equip our country with this,” said Rimmer. “We’re working very hard with a number of groups to try and get this into the hands of all of the different sporting organizations across the country and their provincial entities as well to get it into the hands of the grassroot levels so that we can get more people that information.”
It’s been a busy week for Kinduct Technologies after they also were named one of the ten companies to land a sport in the Dodgers Accelerator with R/GA, and now they look to be streamlining the way football is being played in Canada. SportTechie will continue to report on future developments between this partnership.