Stephen VanderPeet is looking for interns to help him with performance analysis for Hawke's Bay rugby. Photo / Warren Buckland
Stephen VanderPeet is looking for interns to help him with performance analysis for Hawke's Bay rugby. Photo / Warren Buckland
It's a dream job for those who just love watching sport.
The Hawke's Bay Rugby Football Union is offering a role working as a performance analysis intern for the club rugby and National Provincial Championship seasons.
Head analyst Stephen VanderPeet wants help sifting through and categorising hours of footage frompremier club rugby, and Hawke's Bay Magpies and Tui matches.
He uses Hudl's Sportscode software to ''code'' all the footage according to where possessions start from (a scrum or lineout for example), and which players made positive or negative actions in that span.
"It's pretty full on, a lot of hours treading through it," VanderPeet said.
"I'll go through the footage four or five times, and clip it from the start of the scrum to the end of the possession."
This allows the Magpies coaches to look at all the team's lineout attacks in a season easily, because they are all grouped in one place.
Each clip is also tagged with which individual players had a carry, made or missed a tackle, were involved in a lineout, scrum, or maul, made a line break or handling error and more.
As head performance analyst, Stephen VanderPeet records hundreds of hours of game and training footage, then sorts it to deliver analysis to players, coaches and clubs. Photo / Warren Buckland
"It simplifies it for the coaches and anyone in the club - instead of having to go through an hour of footage they can just click a button and get it instantly," VanderPeet said.
He codes every premier club game for the clubs to review through a central portal, and during the Magpies and Tui campaigns does the job live so the coaches can look back at things and give immediate feedback down to players on the field.
VanderPeet said it can be a little hard to keep up with the action at times, particularly during an exciting game when the crowd is into it.
The Magpies use a drone to record their training sessions, and this year Stephen VanderPeet wants a TV on the sideline for live analysis and review. Photo / Warren Buckland
The 24-year-old Hawke's Bay native thinks he is the youngest head analyst at the 14 major provincial rugby unions by three or four years.
He got the job just before the 2019 Magpies season, having had internships at the Highlanders and Hawke's Bay after completing a postgraduate diploma in performance analysis.
"In 2019, I was sort of thrown in the deep end a bit, had to get running straight away," VanderPeet said.
"When I was first here, I used to have the laptops out and there were no players on them. Now there's players on them after training, before training ... before games they're pre-watching other teams and everything. It's a cool little environment and it feels like the work is not going unnoticed."
An innovation for this year will be having a TV at training so the players and coaches can review drone footage live on the go.
VanderPeet said Magpies head coach Mark Ozich and assistant Josh Syms see the value in his work, although it's important not to overwhelm them with noise and just deliver key, actionable messages.
"The coaches, they don't want everything, because if they get too much information they can get lost in it all," he said.
VanderPeet said there isn't an ideal type of candidate for the internship roles as such, because no matter their age, experience level, or even the sport they are primarily interested in, they should come have a crack at some analysis and get some experience.
