How Bristol Bears Accelerate Performance With Forceteck SprintAI

"Forceteck really is a simple, easy-to-use product that makes my life as a coach much easier." - Jonathan Ward, Athletics Performance Coach @ Bristol Bears

Challenges

• Manual, time-intensive sprint analysis: Creating and analyzing home-made sprint videos took at least 30 minutes per player, making full-squad analysis unrealistic

• Inconsistent and subjective feedback: Different coaches produced different kinograms and interpretations, reducing reliability

• Slow turnaround on insights: Coaches had to wait hours or days to provide actionable feedback to athletes

Solutions

• Full squad analysis in 30 minutes:  Instant data saves coaches over 20 hours per week while enabling rapid, same-day coaching interventions

• Deep biomechanical insights with consistent outputs: Metrics such as ground contact time, step length, frequency, and center-of-mass data support objective decision-making

• Measurable player improvements: Visual data accelerates player understanding, resulting in clear improvements in sprint performance

The Challenge: Manual, Inconsistent Sprint Analysis

Bristol Bears, one of England’s top professional rugby clubs, needed a more efficient, objective way to assess athletes across the entire squad, but their existing tools and workflows couldn’t keep pace with the level of insight and turnaround time required. Sprint analysis involved filming each player individually, manually trimming footage, and creating visuals by hand.

Manual sprint analysis:

• Required 30 minutes per player

• Resulted in inconsistent analysis between coaches

• Forced staff to pick and choose which players to analyze due to time constraints

• Added unnecessary time on the field setting up equipment

• Created hours of editing work later, often eating into personal time

Traditional video analysis also created room for subjectivity, with different coaches producing different kinograms, interpretations, and player feedback. Meaningful interventions couldn't be delivered until hours or days later, reducing impact on training adaptation.

"Before Forceteck, sprint analysis was a laborious challenge. It was too time-consuming to analyse every player, we couldn’t do the entire squad. So we had to just pick and choose which players to work with." - Jonathan Ward, Athletics Performance Coach @ Bristol Bears

The Solution: Forceteck’s SprintAI Technology

Forceteck provided Bristol Bears with a fast, intuitive, and highly accurate way to assess sprint performance across the entire squad. What once was an entirely manual and subjective interpretation was replaced by an automated system that delivers full-squad data in under 30 minutes.

"We can now literally get our data back for the entire squad in a half hour, which means we can put actionable changes in place that same afternoon." - Jonathan Ward, Athletics Performance Coach @ Bristol Bears

Coaches can immediately access metrics such as ground contact time, step length, and step frequency alongside more advanced kinematic and kinetic metrics and kinograms that offer players instant visual feedback.

The result? A streamlined, objective, and data-driven workflow that supports faster decision-making, clearer communication with players, and measurable performance improvements.

"For us, data is important because it allows us to be objective... any metric you can imagine, Forceteck has it. We can take that data back to a player and track the changes over time." -Jonathan Ward, Athletics Performance Coach @ Bristol Bears

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