Former Cavan star plays key role in groundbreaking GAA study

First-ever player proximity study in GAA assists with return-to-play protocols

A former Cavan footballer played an important role in assisting the GAA as they sought to put in place return-to-play protocols as the lockdown eased.

Barry Watters, head of sports science at Newry-based company StatSports, was heavily involved in a groundbreaking proximity study, which drew on data from GPS devices worn by players, and found that Gaelic footballers spend an average of just 2.5 seconds within two metres of other players during matches.

StatSports had previously completed a similar white paper for Premier League clubs in England and their research proved extremely useful to the GAA’s decision-makers.

“The way it started out first was that we had done this for the Premier League. A number of our Premier League clients had asked us could we do this for training, just to give them an insight into what training looks like without any restrictions or taking into account social distancing,” Watters told The Anglo-Celt this week.

“That went down really well and the clubs bought into their return-to-play protocols and worked with the Premier League from a performance point of view on the drills and everything they should be doing when they went back and how much risk was there.

“From that we had a number of our inter-county teams reach out to us as well to see could we do something similar for them. We did that and also spoke to the GPA because that advisory panel had been put together around that time, looking at a return to play.

“We fired ahead with it then to see could we provide some insight for discussion because when you think about it, without having any figures behind it, people might say ‘oh, it’s not safe, you can’t do that, there are too many contacts’.

“People automatically think that the GAA is a a very heavy contact sport but the way the game has evolved over the years, it’s all about athleticism and you try to avoid contact at all costs if you can.”

Watters, formerly of Drung and now lining out with Dundalk Gaels in Louth, explained that the study was completed relatively quickly.

“Every player is wearing the GPS unit and we are able to see their exact location at all times on the pitch. We essentially drew a two-metre radius around each player through a data analysis tool that we knew and every time the two circles intersect, we call that an incursion.

“What we do is we count the number of those and we also count the duration of each of those two-metre incursions as well. Over the whole training session or gamer we are able to see how many you had and for how long you were in contact.

“It’s all based on the raw data. If you imagine, over a session, you have 10 readings every second so in a 90-minute session you have thousands of data points per player. We just run all that through and we are able to get our reports out and format them into a way that’s easily digestible for the end user.

“For this particular study it was relatively quick, we had done it for the Premier League so we had found any issues that we might have had with getting it turned around. Really it was just about contacting inter-county teams to ask them to share their data to allow us to do the analysis because obviously they own all the rights to the data.

“Once they agreed to share, we took the raw data from every player for every session they shared and run it through a data analysis tool and from that we get an excel spit-out that gives us details on the entire session itself. We get a player matrix so we are able to see how many times I come into contact with you or another player and then we also give a breakdown on the specific drills that they do in a session.

“For example, we found that the warm-up had a very high rate of incursions and the durations as well were also high. When you think about it, GAA teams warming up do it in a small area where there are 20 to 30 guys and a lot of it is about getting into contact and tackling on the ball as you progress the warm-up.

“We found on average there were 539 incursions in a game and the average duration was 2.5 seconds. So I think when we first published the data, some of the corner-backs were a little bit insulted by the 2.5 seconds! But again, that was an average, max duration was 58 seconds.”

For a full interview with Barry in which he discusses the groundbreaking study with StatSports, his career with Cavan and his time in Louth, see this Wednesday’s print edition.