An astrophysics PhD student from Armagh has blended his passion for science and love for Gaelic football to help lead his club to a historic win.
Eamon McGleenan is based at Queen’s University Belfast, where he is a member of the Predictive Sports Analytics (PSA) research team.
The 25-year-old also plays football for O’Connell’s GAA club in Tullysaran, Co Armagh. Earlier this year McGleenan asked the club if they wanted to take part in his research and, in doing so, potentially gain an advantage over their rivals.
McGleenan used wearable trackers to measure the players’ speed, accelerations, directional changes and heart rates.
RM Block
Across five months, the PSA team at Queen’s University analysed more than 550 million individual data measurements from the squad.
The coaches then used this information to tailor the training sessions to each individual player’s needs, as well as for match tactics.
“We want to make sure that we’re not overcomplicating things, we want to feed back stuff that’s quite actionable, so things like your total distance and high speed running [and] number of sprints,” McGleenan explained.
The trackers, which players wore between their shoulder blades, also measured how close a person was to achieving their maximum speed.
“We looked at how often they were reaching 85, 90 and 95 per cent of their maximum speeds. That was something the strength and conditioning staff had called for in the past,” said McGleenan.
“It makes the training a bit more individualised as well. You’re expecting people to do 85 per cent of their own maximum, not everybody to do the same runs.”
Tullysaran manager Pauric McGlone said the statistical insights were invaluable and helped him “get the balance of training right, especially in the run-up to match day”.
McGleenan said everyone involved in the project was “absolutely blown away when Tullysaran won their league by just two points in July”.
The team was crowned winners of the Armagh Intermediate Football League 2A and have now been promoted for the first time in 135 years to the top-flight senior football league.
“They will move into senior football in March, a fantastic achievement for a rural club with less than 500 members,” said McGleenan.
The day the team won the league was marked by a “huge outpouring of emotion”, he added.
“Seeing how much it meant to different lads on the team and their families and members of the community, it’s something that’s probably going to live long in the memory. I don’t think I’m going to forget that for a long, long time.”
The PSA team at Queen’s includes Prof David Jess, Dr Samuel Grant, Dr Lisa McFetridge and Jack Brown.
