In beach volleyball, where each side has only two players to block and dig across the entire sandy court, the athletes must be well-rounded and wouldn’t seem to have such defined roles as in the indoor game.
During the beach volleyball Major Series world championship last August in Vienna, however, players for the first time wore small tracking devices that cataloged their every move and jump — and the results were striking. Maximillian Schmidt, cofounder and CEO of tracking provider Kinexon, noted the divide on the Austrian team where Clemens Doppler outpaced all tournament players in average total jumps (132), attack jumps (45) and block jumps (53) each game while his teammate, Alexander Horst, accrued far more distance around the back of the court.
Following that successful trial, Kinexon will now be providing its ultra-wideband radio at all four beach majors in 2018, including the Fort Lauderdale event whose men’s and women’s draws were both fully underway on Friday.
“This is really something that was striking to me, how specific the skill set is but also how specific the physical demands are for those players,” Schmidt said, before adding:
“For the first time ever in beach volleyball, you have the chance, really, to understand the performance of the players from a quantitative perspective — like how much they do run, how much distance covered, how much kilocalories they consume, how many jumps there are — to get a better understanding and perspective of the game.”
Kinexon’s client list primarily includes soccer and basketball teams (including six NBA organizations and a couple programs including Stanford), but the Munich-based company also works with the NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins and now beach volleyball. Kinexon was founded in 2012 by Alexander Hüttenbrink, Oliver Trinchera and Schmidt after they toured Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena and saw the massive infrastructure dedicated to its optical tracking system and wanted to create a scalable alternative.
The uniforms of beach volleyball players have little spare fabric, but Schmidt said the tracking device placed on each player is the size of a small matchbox, less than three inches long and weighing about half an ounce. That tracker transmits radio signals to a perimeter installation. While the system can accommodate tripod-mounted trackers communicating wirelessly, the latency can be up to 500 milliseconds — inconsequential for most uses but a little too much lag time for live TV — so Kinexon uses ethernet cables to reduce the delay to less than 50 milliseconds for overlay on the international television feed.
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The international beach volleyball federation, FIVB, wanted to introduce analytics to beach volleyball and hired Kinexon, who attended a tour event last summer in Poreč, Croatia, where they demonstrated the system and answered questions. Schmidt said steps were taken to avoid interfering with each player’s routine, and Kinexon offers all of the athletes their own individualized post-match report. Among the beach volleyball metrics tracked are number and height of jumps, distance covered and energy exertion.
“That’s something they were really curious about because they hadn’t had that before,” Schmidt said.
The data currently focuses primarily on each player’s workload but soon could delve much deeper into tactical analysis, as Kinexon is working with volleyball manufacturers on embedding a tracking chip into the balls themselves.