Purpose
To capture, analyse and visualise performance data. Think Deeply. Question Assumptions. Help players achieve their full potential.
Deams & Objectives
Bring Elite class tools and analytics to everyone without breaking the bank
SystemV was born in 2006 as an IT company selling backup systyems. The technology use whilst clever was niche and in the end over run by cloud based backup systems. SystemV did successfully sell backup solutions until closing down this part of the business in 2018. Over the 12 years in the backup business SystemV sold solutions to the NHS, TUI and two premiership football clubs to name just a few.
In 2009 SystemV started to design and sell ice hockey equipment. Mainly sticks, but we did do a range of gloves and pucks which were quite successful. The company got into ice hockey sticks through one of the owners' sons playing ice hockey. Back then buying sticks in the UK was expensive and you could only choose from the limited range imported from the major manufacturers, picking from what remained from a limited supply.
So, SystemV spent some time finding and building a relationship with a Chinese stick manufacturer. Let us build our own ice hockey stick, how hard could that be. Well as it turns out quite hard. There is an awful lot to designing and manufacturing ice hockey sticks. We persevered battling our way through prototype after prototype, design flaws and failures in manufacturing positive atmospheric containment to finally launching our new stick to the world. Well just the UK.
Through the dedicated help of people like David Clarke of Nottingham Panthers at the time, we successfully sold the sticks into the Elite league. We even managed to have a player use our sticks in the NHL and by Michael Buble as he demonstrated his ice hockey moves on the Johnathan Ross TV show.
In the end, the major ice hockey manufacturers started to pay attention to the UK market and whilst we had developed a loyal customer base, thank you to those people, the UK market proved too small to sustain a UK based stick manufacturer. Breaking into other markets was not an option so we stopped producing sticks finally in 2019.
However, by now ice hockey was an obsession, it was in our blood. What we needed was a unique product where we didn't have to compete with the Bauer's of this world. As it turns out back in 2016, SystemV was looking into technologies to track, well things, it's not important what. This did get us thinking. During our time working with the premier football teams, we had seen how they were tracking players on the pitch and analysing game play. So why not create a system for ice hockey to do a similar thing. SO we tried, and we tried and we tried again. Putting together the technology to track an indoor fast-moving game is not trivial. The go-to technology, GPS, does not work well, or at all, inside an ice rick. What's more, the more we thought about what we were trying to achieve the more we realised that we needed more than just a player tracking system. We needed also to capture events, video and create an analysis system to analyse all the data bringing it together in a single tightly integrated system.
The product that SystemV is bringing to the market is a player tracking, analysis and development system. A system designed from the ground up for Ice Hockey. An inclusive system that brings NHL level analytics to grassroots hockey at an affordable price.
So here we are with our first release of the system. It has taken longer than we thought and would have liked, but our 1st release includes the EIHA leagues along with the Swedish men's and women's leagues. In the next few months, we will be adding capabilities to the system. More player and team analytics. Hardware modules to automate the taking and categorisation of video clips attaching them to games events. Best of all let us not forget the reason we started this journey in the first place, player tracking, which will bring a whole new dimension to player and team analytics.
For the next few months, the analytics are available for all to see and use. As we move forward we will introduce a small charge to access some of the more advanced player and team analytics. However, a lot of stats will remain open to the general public to view free of charge.
