From standalone Beams to a player profile

Our innovation project, made possible in part by the Province of Noord-Holland and the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Why we started this

Training sessions often look the same as they did twenty years ago, and more and more children drop out because of it. There are too few certified coaches, which puts the quality of what is on offer under pressure. Children move too little, with motor-skill delays as a result. And talent development almost always focuses on the few kids who already stand out — while everyone deserves the chance to get the most out of themselves.

Our mission is exactly that: getting the best out of every athlete, not just out of the best athlete.

Where we got stuck

We had Beams. You set them up, a child plays a drill, the screen shows a time. Nice — but that was it. That time stood on its own. No profile, no history, no way to see whether you were improving.

And 24.3 seconds means nothing to an eleven-year-old. Is that good? Better than last month? Better than others your age? As long as you cannot answer those questions, measuring is a trick. Not training.

Where we wanted to go

A player profile in which every child trains at their own level and sees their own progress. Not comparing for the sake of comparing, but giving children ownership of their own development.

That meant connecting the offline world on the pitch to an online profile that grows with you. Every ball you touch counts — at home, at the club, during a tournament. And it meant a child becomes less dependent on whether a good coach happens to be on the pitch that day.

What we built

Skill Tags

A profile only works if the system knows who is playing. So we developed wristbands with a chip: one quick scan and your results land in the right place, even at a tournament with hundreds of children. More than 5,000 are in use by now.

Scores that mean something

We convert every time to a scale of 0 to 100. By benchmarking against other players, every score gets not just a time but a meaning. How do you score on one skill compared to another? Which skills still need work, and which are your strengths?

Tested, not assumed

A score is only worth something if you know it is right. We validated our test battery in three studies: over 200 children at Alphense Boys, Go Ahead Eagles and Sparta, and more than 100 hockey players from amateur level up to KNHB selections. Those studies produced the age-group benchmarks the profile runs on today.

More to play

From a handful of drills to 239. Plus battles in which you take each other on, and home challenges you play without any hardware. So you can keep training even when there is no practice.

Gamification

XP, levels, badges and streaks. Not as a gimmick, but because it works: when you see yourself growing towards something, you keep training.

Leaderboards

Live rankings on a big screen during events.

Gates

New hardware: speed gates. Where the Beam responds to a ball, the Gates measure you moving through them. Sprint time and acceleration, also in your profile.

What the grant made possible

Work like this only pays off once it is finished. Half a player profile motivates nobody: you need the measurement, and the normalisation, and the validation, and the presentation.

For a company of our size, that is hard. You spend two years building something that only has value at the end, while day-to-day business carries on. Without support we would have had to do it in loose chunks, pausing each time to earn money. The coherent whole would probably never have come together.

Where we stand now

Around 10,000 children have played over 30,000 games on our systems — at the Euro Hockey League, the Dutch Hockey5's championship, the European Championship in Mönchengladbach, the NextGen tournament in the Olympic Stadium, and the World Cup in Amsterdam and Brussels, among others.

The foundation is in place: every child their own profile, their own level — and seeing yourself get better.