NEW INNOVATORS:Performa Sports
AS A PERFORMANCE analyst with Armagh GAA team for the past seven years, Danny Turley has spent a big chunk of his life watching and rewatching post-match videos.
The whole process of selecting clips and crunching stats took days, and Turley felt the information wasn’t getting to the coaching team quickly enough.
“I would spend hours running through match videos and I thought there had to be a better way,” says Turley, who graduated from the University of Ulster with a degree in interactive multimedia design in 2009.
“What I came up with was Performa Sports, an easy-to-use tool that allows the bulk of the analysis work to be completed during matches. It’s an iPad-based app and it allows coaches and performance analysts to monitor how a team is faring in real time and respond accordingly.
“Analysis can be very time-consuming unless you’re at the very top level of sport and spending thousands on the necessary monitoring equipment. We are offering the app at €59 a month and clubs that want to try it can get a three- match trial for free.”
Turley is not just after small football, rugby and GAA clubs. He also wants to sign up the big boys.
Since hitting the marketing trail with the app in January, he has already had interest from Arsenal, Manchester United, Fulham and Chelsea. Closer to home, the Ulster GAA Council and the Mayo team are early users.
“Small margins make all the difference in sport,” says Turley who co-founded the fledgling company with his brother, Joe, a sports scientist with a master’s degree in marketing.
“Whatever level they are playing at, teams are constantly looking at ways to capitalise on those margins, and this app can help them. We’ve developed Performa Sports to be very intuitive so that saves a lot of time.”
The brothers teamed up with Belfast-based user experience company, Ecliptic Labs, to develop the app for commercial launch.
“This is our flagship iPad app, but we have a lot of other ideas in the pipeline, including a MAC desktop app,” Turley says.
