Yvonne Comer, former rugby international and chief executive of RugbySmarts: ‘If you do analytics right, rather than just producing numbers and data, you can actually pull out real in-depth insights that could change a game.’ Picture: Andrew Downes
The Enterprise Ireland-backed firm, which is based in Galway, is already running a number of trials with amateur clubs around Ireland, and has also begun working with an underage squad at Connacht Rugby. Johnstone worked out that by automating the process of categorising events during matches, he could vastly reduce the amount of time analysts spent on their work. He then approached Comer with the idea, and RugbySmarts was born.
Initially, RugbySmarts is targeting amateur teams playing at grassroots level. “At a professional level, they have the resources and the funding to do the manual part of the analysis, but that doesn’t exist at the amateur level,” Comer said. “We want to give those teams the ability to do that professional level of analysis.”