Diving Australia
About Diving Australia
Diving Australia manages a National Squad program based on domestic and international results. The athletes on the Diving Australia National Squad make up the very best Australia has to offer in the pool. The Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) leads and enables a united and collaborative high performance sport system that supports Australian athletes to achieve international podium success. Adrian “Ady” Hinchliffe is a national coach with Diving Australia.
Key Takeaways
The Opportunity
As one of the premier national programs in its sport, Diving Australia is always on the lookout for opportunities to improve its coaching and athlete preparation. Working with the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), the national coaching staff decided that gathering certain data points about its elite divers’ training could help improve load management and injury monitoring, facilitate more informed decision-making about each athlete’s daily and weekly programming, and improve the way coaches plan, execute, and review practice sessions. They soon realized that such enhanced athlete data management could also be applied to Diving Australia’s talented junior athletes who are part of a sophisticated development system.
The Challenge
With diving centers serving its international-level athletes in four geographically dispersed cities, it was difficult for Diving Australia to collect athlete data. National team coaches discovered that every coach had a different method of recording athlete data, making standardization difficult. The organization was also starting from scratch with its athlete management system project, meaning that gathering the information and getting coach and athlete buy-in was and still is challenging. The coaching staff also needed to find a way to collate data from different dry land and water-based training modalities and present this in a user-friendly way.
The Solution
Using Smartabase, data for divers in the national program is at the coaches’ fingertips, allowing them to better organize training sessions, communicate session details to their athletes during practice, and review the outcomes afterward. They’re combining performance data from the pool and dry-land training to manage loads and are sharing detailed yet intuitive summaries with each athlete via visually compelling monthly reports. Smartabase is also helping staff to investigate injuries and create datainformed return-to-play plans.
The Impact
Smartabase is helping make Diving Australia’s coaches and medical staff better. Armed with relevant data and meaningful reports, coaches can plan and deliver practices with more precision to help optimize their divers’ performance. Medical staff now has a history of accurate data to help them more proactively mitigate injury risk and speed an athlete’s return to the pool. Divers can see how their training in and out of the pool impacts their performance. Diving Australia is looking to use Smartabase more widely in its youth development program to better support the next generation of talented divers.