Hockey Wales use technology to overcome geographical challenges

Working with Coach Logic, Kevin Johnson took the reigns of the women’s national hockey team in 2016 and have continued to go from strength to strength.

Arguably, Hockey Wales have long been ranked below that of where a proud and successful sporting nation like Wales should find themselves. However, since Kevin Johnson took the reigns of the Women’s side in early 2016 and since then they have quickly climbed the rankings ladder.

Kevin set out to increase standards and bring a modern dimension to hockey in Wales. He recognised that utilising innovative technologies could support his vision.

As many of their team were not professionally contracted, most playing in the English National Leagues, being geographically separated was a legacy issue Kevin also needed to overcome.

He approached Coach Logic for support with getting the current video and communications shared throughout, not just limited to those in the match day squad. During this time Kevin still combined coaching at leading English club side Holcombe up until a few months ago where he felt that for Wales to keep progressing he needed to step away from the club coaching.

The popularity shown for Coach Logic by the Women’s squad led to the Men’s Hockey team and U21 squads also been added in 2017. The uptake in Coach Logic also saw training sessions being uploaded to the platform.

The Men’s were successfully promoted to the top tier of European Hockey. Dan Clements, Head of Performance, said that the promotion would be a ‘game changer’ for the sport in Wales and that it would transform the sport.

The Women’s side narrowly missed out on promotion following a 2-1 semi-final defeat by Russia.

The Men’s, Women’s and u21s squads all benefit from additional third-party software analysis that is then imported into Coach Logic. This allows for easy view-able access wherever the squad are and match review to be done before their next training session.

Coach Logic helps to facilitate that time away from the pitch where it can be lost development when you don’t see your athletes or players as much as possible. With our programme we don’t see them as much as some other countries do on the pitch so we find Coach Logic and video especially is a really important want of up-skilling and developing our understanding of certain things that maybe we otherwise would have to wait for pitch time.
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‍Kevin Johnson
‍Head Coach, Hockey Wales