Review: Footy Skills Lab (made by Google)

Abbey Martin lives and breathes footy. She’s a top age ruck/centre half forward for U19 GIANTS Academy, superstar for the East Coast Eagles in AFL Sydney’s Premier Division, and an employee at AFL NSW/ACT, spreading all that’s good about football across our region.

Abbey stumbled across a new footy program, Footy Skills Lab, which is a great way to keep up skills at home during the COVID-affected footy season. Here’s what she thought of it.

 

Introduction: Fun for everyone

The Footy Skills Lab, made by Google, is an incredible creation that uses in-built phone technology to track your footy skills.

It focuses on three key areas: ball handling, reaction time and power.

The technology encourages all Aussies to improve their skills without discriminating against age, gender, location or ability.

Having the three different levels of activities (self-selected and based on AFL proficiency) ensures this technology can be used by anyone.

 

Activities

The activities are fun and challenging and suit all abilities. I tried each of the three levels but ultimately settled on level three. All activities are accompanied by a video demonstration from AFLW stars Maddy Prespakis and Tayla Harris and are clearly explained.

These activities are also suitable for people that use wheelchairs as the football is the object that gets picked up by the technology, not the participant.

At the moment, there is just one activity per focus area (ball handling, reaction time, power). In the future, I think it would be good to expand on this and create more categories, such as handpassing and kicking as focus areas and even incorporate group or pair drills to test yourself even further.

Abbey Martin in action with her East Coast Eagles side

 

Possible improvements for the user

Although using the web is a good idea, it would be great to see this turned into an app. This would make it easier to follow and could save your scores to track your progress rather than having to manually save your scores after each activity.

Another thing to take note of is that you need to be in good lighting for the activities to pick up the football. For example, if the sun is behind you the technology doesn’t work.

 

Final thought

Overall, I think this technology is incredible as it’s easy to use. I would recommend it for all people because it’s a great tool to improve or start your footy career.

Have a go yourself using this link.