Aalborg University visits Catapult

Making use of A4SEE fellowships, Professor Pascal Madeleine and Associate Professor Mark de Zee visited Catapult Sports from December 5 until December 9 last year. Travelling from the Department of Health Science and Technology, Aalborg University in Denmark, Mark and Pascal visited both Leeds and London in the UK. Chris Barnes organised the visit and made a fantastic programme for the two visitors .

The first part of the visit was at the beautiful new office facilities of Catapult in Leeds. The focus here was on wearable products. Pascal and Mark learnt a lot about the technical side, support side and the commercial side of Catapult’s products. Many of the Catapult employees had a sports science background and many had done internships at companies or clubs using similar (or the same) technology as Catapult, which played a big role before they landed a job at Catapult! Pascal and Mark presented their research done in Aalborg using wearables and other measurement technology as tools. One of the outcomes of this part of the visit was to organize a workshop in Denmark about wearables and data in football.

The second part of the visit was at the Catapult office in London. The focus here was on the products RaceWatch (used in Formule 1) and MatchTracker (used in football). Both Pascal and Mark were impressed by the enormous amount of data, which are tracked and visualized. This also started thoughts of the necessity of including more data science in the curriculum for the sports science students in Aalborg.

In conclusion the visit was very fruitful, where the gap between Catapult and university, definitely became smaller.