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One clip per athlete: what to look at first

With forty athletes and one practice, the order you look in matters more than how closely you look.

It is Tuesday. You finally filmed everybody, which felt like a win for about an hour, and now there are forty clips and one of you and practice is in twenty-three hours.

Look for the fault that causes the other faults

Most form problems in a squad are downstream of two or three real ones. Arms crossing the midline is genuinely worth fixing, but it is rarely what is costing an athlete a second over 200 metres. A foot landing half a metre in front of the hips, every step, is.

So look in this order, and stop when you find something.

• Where the foot lands relative to the hips. Braking is the most expensive thing in the clip and the most fixable.
• The trunk, specifically whether a lean comes from the ankles or is a fold at the waist. They look similar in a photograph and behave nothing alike.
• Knee fold and extension, which is where recovery speed lives.
• The arms, last, because they are the thing everyone notices first and the thing that changes the least.

Two clips beat ten

Ten clips filmed badly (panning, at an angle, half the stride out of frame) are worth less than two filmed properly. And the same athlete filmed twice, six weeks apart, is worth more than ten athletes filmed once, because the second clip is the only one that can tell you whether anything you did worked.

What the app will and will not do for you

The Film Room gives you the numbers for the event you picked, a cue for what to feel, and a named drill for the fault it found. It deliberately does not prescribe sets, reps or loads. Naming a drill is coaching; prescribing volume to an athlete it has never met, sight unseen, through a phone, is not. And most of these athletes are minors. The dose is yours.

It also will not triage your squad. Every clip is analysed on its own, and there is no dashboard that ranks forty athletes by who needs you most. If that is what you were hoping for, it does not exist here yet, and it is better to say so than to let you find out at eleven at night with thirty clips left.

The Film Room itself is free, permanently. What costs money is Film Room Cloud at $12 a month, which is how a clip with your notes on it gets to the athlete instead of staying on your phone.

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