Case Study
An interview with Shrewsbury School
Shrewsbury School
Shrewsbury School, one of the leading cricketing schools in the country, has won many national titles at all levels, alumni include James Taylor, Joe Leach and Ed Barnard. They currently have over 300 13-19 year old pupils playing cricket making up 16 teams, both boys and girls, over 5 academic years.
Adam Shaftsbury is in first year as Cricket Professional at the school having taught cricket there for the past 5 years. An ex-county cricketer himself with a career at Glamorgan, Warwickshire and Worcestershire he also runs youth academies.
What did you want to achieve by using CricHQ and My Action Replay
We’d previously used CricHQ for festivals and separately been looking for video analysis and a way to livestream so that parents could watch matches. When CricHQ added video integration it was the perfect solution for us. In fact, if I could have dreamt up a product this would have been it! So we chose to move completely to scoring on CricHQ this season and within the first 4 weeks it proved to be an essential part of our game and training.
What MAR system are you using?
We use the mobile unit with the camera fixed on the tripod which means we can move it to behind the bowlers arm on any wicket we’re playing on and we get it set up within 20 minutes. The scorer scores on an ipad and we hope to integrate the live scoring and replays with the scoreboard soon too.
How do you view/use the replays?
The players all get their own replays after the match for their own review. We share all the replays online and put together highlight packages in the online Studio. Loads of our parents watch the livestream now and we notify them when it’s starting. They have really engaged with it and been really complimentary. We’ve even been sent pictures of them setting it up on their own TVs and big screens to watch. From a performance perspective it’s really helped to enhance our training and highlight any areas that can be addressed after a match – and that really works for all the players individually. For example, one of our students who plays for the Lancs County academy was able to work from his replays, share them with his coach there, and then adapt his training in the nets. He’s had a brilliant season ever since! We also have a screen in the locker room showing the replays so our players can view the bowling footage as they’re padding up, it’s a real advantage for us. Having everything indexed and archived automatically is a great feature for our students and their future careers.
What results have you seen from using the My Action Replay hub within CricHQ?
We’ve jumped up to well over 1000 followers on twitter and had over 10,000 views of our highlights in the first four weeks which is amazing. We’ve had over 3,000 views on Youtube so it really is part of our school communications now. We had an old boys’ match here a week ago and someone that productivity in the City went down that day as so many people were watching the livestream! It all has a really 1st class feel to it. All the scoring, video and stats combined is really professional and its equivalent to anything I’ve seen at county level. It’s really aspirational. It’s really ticked all the boxes of what we wanted. We’ve been delighted with it this season.
