With focus on cricket, Australian tech firm to start operations in Pakistan

Athlete tracking company will help teams to get more out of their sportsmen

LAHORE: Catapult Sports, an Australia-based athlete tracking technology company, has announced that it will start its operations in Pakistan in a bid to help different types of sports, especially cricket.

The company is engaged in the development and sale of elite athlete wearable tracking solutions and sale of analytics for athlete tracking.

As cricket becomes a more and more tech-savvy business due to its expansion covering different formats and yearly leagues, especially in four Asian cricketing nations, the company, which previously provided its services to other sports like soccer and hockey, has developed cricket-specific metrics over the years to serve national and domestic teams.



“Cricket is one of our fastest growing sports …. so Pakistan is a logical market for us to get involved in,” said Boden Westover, Director Marketing of Catapult Sports, in an interview to The Express Tribune via Skype.

He boasted that they had a quickly-growing team all around Asia with success in India over the past six months. Now, they look forward to helping Pakistani teams get more out of their elite athletes.

The company opened its office in India in early 2017 and, according to Westover, they had a great success with Indian Super League teams and in Kabaddi.

“We showcased our data during live broadcasts to show how hard athletes are working during physically-demanding sports,” he said, adding “we are not making any assumptions about similarities between Pakistan and India, but we are excited about the opportunity to present our technologies to the most innovative teams in Pakistan.”

Catapult, which started its journey as a start-up in 2006, has now grown into a global company in sports performance analytics, serving over 1,500 elite teams across 35 sports worldwide.

Its parent company, Catapult Group International Limited, is listed on the Australian stock exchange. The group has total assets of $127.3 million and it earned $48 million in revenues in 2017.

The core component of Catapult’s technology is a wearable device that is worn on an athlete’s back to measure all movements over 1,000 times a second.

The device uses GPS technology to track athlete speed and distance on the field, in a way similar to a car’s dashboard, and utilises sensors inside the device to precisely capture every change of direction, jump, acceleration and deceleration.

“This information is used by coaches to better understand how hard athletes are working so they know when to back off training or push them a little harder,” Westover said.

Additionally, Catapult’s data science team has developed cricket-specific metrics that quantify the speed and physical strain of a bowler on every ball, which the company recently showcased during live broadcast of the Ashes series in Australia.

The technology is being used in 58 countries, but in the past five years, its adoption in different sports has increased manifold.

Catapult is used by over 1,500 elite sports teams and the number has grown from 200 in less than five years, so the adoption of this technology has been very fast, Westover said, adding “because so many teams are relying on the data obtained from our technologies, it is becoming more and more important to utilise technology so you are not left behind in your training.”

The company will hold its first workshop in Pakistan in the first half of 2018 where it will be sharing the use of technology by some of the best teams in the world and will most likely have one of its Premier League clients present.



“We will not have anyone based in Pakistan initially, but as we start to grow the market, we will look at opening a local office to better serve the teams that utilise our technology,” he said.

“We have a large team of sports scientists that work closely with the best sports teams in the world and we will utilise this team to connect with Pakistani teams that want to improve the performance of their players.”

the writer is a staff correspondent

 

 

Published in The Express Tribune, January 15^th, 2018.

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