Technology has affected the sports we love in many different ways over the years. For the majority of the time, it has worked to enhance our enjoyment. Not only that, but technology has also improved the health and well-being of professional athletes over the years. We’re grateful to have it, so let’s look at it in a bit more depth.
Video Replays
The ability to watch something back has been around for years and years, but it wasn’t implemented fully for a long time. The difficulty of stopping the play and reassessing an incident meant that it wasn’t considered practical. Over the years, we’ve now found better ways to do this. Hockey is particularly notable for calling back goals and incidents regularly. Sports like tennis, cricket and American football have also started to do this in recent times. Goal Line Technology was introduced in soccer and has been a great success thus far. Technology will continue to innovate in this fashion, and we’ll see where it takes us in a few years.
Equipment
Technology has given rise to so many equipment features that serve to protect as well as enhance sports stars’ abilities. Runners have benefited from new shoe designs that grip different surfaces with ease. Sports like hockey have introduced new helmets and goalie protection equipment that were absent not so long ago.
For those who struggle with injury, there are so many tools at hand to try and reduce the pain and the extent of the problem. In recent years, we’ve started to learn more about the effect of concussions as well. We’re always learning more and more because of technology. Let’s hope it continues to be such a huge benefit to our health.
Training Tools
There are tools out there that can measure every part of a person’s performance when they’re practicing. Some soccer balls and basketballs are implemented with chips to help people with their game. In other cases, you can buy things like a Table Tennis Robot to help you practice when there aren’t any opponents around.
We’ve also got access to countless online resources that will teach us anything we need to know about a particular sport. One search term on YouTube will provide us with the knowledge we need in seconds. For people that are particularly dedicated to a sport, they can spend countless hours reading up on the internet.
Stats
The rise of technology gave birth to stat tracking. While this was somewhat of a manual process in the early years, it has become incredibly easy to track anything we need. From points tallies to tracking how many passes a player made in one game, we’ve got so many ways to analyse sports these days. While these are useful statistics for someone that’s watching a game, they’re even more beneficial to those who are involved. Coaches can use them to implement new tactics and players are able to have a better understanding of where they might be going wrong.
Technology is a fantastic asset to the sporting world. I’m sure we’ll continue to find new ways to utilize it in the future.