Project Overview
Awardee: Mike Morgan, Associate Professor of Physical Education and Head Women’s Tennis Coach
Title: Pauley Tennis Courts Video Streaming and Video Education
Goal: To implement the use of Track Tennis, a live streaming video recording system, to help improve tennis coaching and aid students in training smarter and performing better
View: Pomona-Pitzer Track Tennis Livestream
Project Description
This project focused on installing Track Tennis, a live-streaming video breakdown and teaching tool specifically for tennis. With Track Tennis, both physical education classes and the Varsity Tennis PE Class now have reliable and efficient access to match play, technique analysis, conditioning components, mapped out statistics like first-serve percentages and number of forehands hit, heart rate monitoring, distance covered during a match, and more. The technology also has the ability to make automatic, precise in and out line calls during a match.
Project Outcomes
Mike Morgan has already seen great benefits to implementing Track Tennis from a teaching standpoint. Before this project, most Pomona students in tennis classes of all levels had rarely, if ever, seen video of themselves playing. Showing students technical changes to consider in their games has proven invaluable and also helped retain students currently playing at the lower levels. Students at the higher levels have taken advantage of the video, too, by analyzing technical changes and reviewing themselves in slow motion. But perhaps one of the greatest benefits of implementing Track Tennis is getting students to watch their complete matches.
Track Tennis has an automatic editing feature that significantly reduces watch time. Thus, coaches and athletes alike can now view full matches without missing any details or having to fast-forward.
Short clip from a Track Tennis recording
It has been a challenge to get varsity tennis players to watch match videos in the past because it can take hours to watch a match with the time included between points. With Track Tennis, this same process will take 20 minutes because the time is taken out between points.
-Mike Morgan
Morgan has also noticed a positive impact on students taking the community tennis class. This class is comprised of beginner to intermediate tennis players who have never taught the sport before. In class, they learn how to teach the basic fundamentals of the game to each other first. Then they put those same skills into practice within the local grade schools. Being able to slow down, examine, and rewatch themselves teaching a group and communicating drills has led to better outcomes and increased student coaching confidence.
Having visual video review made it so much easier to review with students how they were learning the game, and many answers are right in front of them without having to explain it.
-Mike Morgan
Moreover, Track Tennis has made it possible for parents, alumni, and family to live stream and cheer on their favorite tennis players from afar.