Behind the Scenes: Technology Plays Vital Role in UO Sports

Joyce Winslow
jwins@oregon.uoregon.edu

Tucked away in a southeast corner of the Casanova Center, Steve Pohl and his assistant John Duncan are busy at their computer keyboards, parsing the data that help the UO's athletic teams refine their skills and strategies in their quest for winning seasons.

Steve, who has been doing this job since 1996, works full-time analyzing football videos, while John devotes the bulk of his days to basketball, track, soccer, and volleyball footage.

The north wall of their office is the main tech wall, which is stacked floor to ceiling with the monitors, patch bays, and recorders that aid in producing multiple copies of the sports videos that coaches and players need to perfect their game.

Game and practice videos are shot simultaneously from the sidelines and the end zone to give game analysts the greatest possible range of perspective. The live action is instantly captured and fed to Steve's office over a high-speed network connection so that Steve can immediately begin breaking down each video into several categories, highlighting defense, offense, and special teams. Assisted by a graduate assistant coach, he then assigns data to each play and uploads the completed files onto the network so the coaches can later access the information at will from their computer screens.

This year, all coaches received PC-based laptops, giving them even more flexibility to study the action anywhere, anytime--whether they're on the road, in the field, or at their desks.

The data is so carefully parsed and sorted that each play can be broken down into microseconds. Coaches can select any play, quickly and easily zooming in and out on a particular segment and pausing or replaying it as often as they like.

The silent partner in this complex enterprise is the Computing Center's Network Services, which has been central in designing and engineering campus communications systems during the past decade. Network Services staff, under the direction of Dale Smith, assisted with the installation of the Casanova Center's first fiberchannel system and hooked up the Autzen Stadium megavision scoreboard in 1998.

Network Services also devised the router system that channels data over fiber network and ethernet to the coaches' offices and to the megavision board at Autzen.