A wiki for your sports team?

Back after some busy times... This afternoon I had the displeasure to find that my hockey team back home had lost a decisive game and was going down next season. This led me to think about how we could improve our performance, and I ended up thinking a wiki could fit the bill. Now I'm surprised I did not start thinking about it before...

The Problem

As a sports team made of people with day jobs, we can only meet for training so many times a week (usually twice for skills and tactic and once to run) notwithstanding a game on Sundays. Since a training session usually lasts about 2 hours, we hardly ever have enough time to study fancy diagrams about our positioning. This also means that we are not spending enough time reflecting about our past performances and how they could be improved. There is a communication problem here, and wiki are really good at solving that kind of problems.

The Needs

If I were to write a requirements specification, I'd say that I would need the following:

• A place where our coach could put diagrams showing how we played during our game compared with how we ought to have played + a page to explain his choices and talk about them.
  
• Personal pages for every player where they could write about their own game and get feedback from others through comments
• The ability to embed video shot during games or coming from the internet showing specific skills and situations

Generally speaking, we would need a place where to add all kinds of relevant information and organize it. This place would also need to be available to every player easily (through internet).

The Wiki Way

All of the components I talked about are common features of most wikis (though I did not talk about the search engine, the tags or RSS notification feeds, all of which are quite useful too). The main advantages would be to make lots of useful resources contributed by the coach and the players available to the rest of their team easily. No need to take a 45 minutes strategy talk in the cold on a Thursday night when you can discuss it at length on a wiki page (during a break at work for instance). What's more, most people can't be bothered to listen to tactical points when they are not involved in the situation described. The wiki would remove this inconvenient too.

Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC