St Paul’s Mathematics Department, in partnership with Dundalk Institute of Technology, recently welcomed STATSports to give a presentation to our Year 12 GCSE Higher Level Maths students about their company and the use and benefit of Mathematics and Science within their organisation.

The event was organised as part of St Paul’s annual Careers Week.

STATSports provide an all-encompassing sports science and performance analysis service within the elite sporting industry.

They currently work with sporting organisation across the world from Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal to Juventus, Galatasary and Barcelona, from the IRFU, Harlequins, London Irish, Ulster Rugby to the New Zealand Chiefs.

They are currently expanding into the American market and are working with basketball teams the Chicago Bulls and the Bay Hawks, as well as American football teams.

Jim McEneaney, the Head of Marketing at STATSports, informed students about the technology which is currently being used by sports clubs which allows coaches, pundits and even armchair viewers the chance to analyse the performance of players, including their heart rate, distance travelled, metabolic ratios and player thresholds.

A device known as the Viper is discreetly strapped into a vest which players wear and is now as common as shinpads and boots for sports people.

Kevin Lawless and Shauna Rafferty (a past student of St Paul’s), both of whom are Sport Science Analysts at STATSports, explained to students how the cutting edge technology which STATSports have developed and used for sports such as football, rugby, basketball, American football, horse racing and field hockey to name but a few is mathematically driven and that mathematics is used to analyse the information which the Viper pod gathers.

Viper provides unparalleled analysis capability in an easy to use, intuitive and powerful software analysis package.  It allows for short term (one session), medium term (weekly) and long term (seasonal) analysis.

Coaches use the Viper PSA software to analysis each player so that a player’s workload can be tailored and managed individually, it also allows for players to be compared directly with other team members or groups of players so that sports teams and athletes can be kept at the top of their game all season long.

The managing director and founder of STATSports, Alan Clark, is also a local entreprenuer, hailing from Bessbrook, Co Armagh.  He is a former Mechanical Engineering Student in Dundalk Institute of Technology.