What does AI actually do for a field hockey coach today? Probably less than the marketing suggests, and more than most coaches use. This free report goes through what a coach does with match data, step by step, and says for each step what AI does now, what I think it will do by 2028, and what nobody is building yet.
Every finding is written twice: as high performance does it, and as a coach without an analyst can do it on Tuesday.
Free, no email needed. 15 pages, October 2026.
What’s in it
Four chapters, one for each job a coach does with match data:
- Collect. Can you trust your tagging? Why the definition matters more than who does the tagging.
- Enrich. Which numbers move the result? Territory, penalty corners, and chasing the anomaly instead of the average.
- Join. Two files, one game. Do they agree? Putting the tactical and the physical data side by side.
- Translate. Will they remember it? Getting a finding from the screen into Tuesday’s session.
Plus ten numbers worth knowing, a one-page AI scorecard that judges every product by the same standard, four free sheets you can print for your staff room, and every source.
Three of the ten numbers
- 6% of all feedback recalled by players a week after a one-to-one video meeting (Mason, Farrow and Hattie 2021).
- 70% of 72 notational analysis papers reported no reliability check at all (Hughes, Cooper and Nevill 2002).
- 0 products that tag a field hockey match tactically with AI, as far as public pages showed on 10 October 2026.
Who it’s for
Field hockey coaches at any level who keep hearing about AI and want to know what’s real. Analysts who want a neutral overview to hand to their head coach. And anyone at a club or federation deciding whether a tool is worth the money.
How it was made
The report condenses a four-part series on data in hockey coaching, published on The Hockey Site in October 2026. It draws on published research, on the experts who shared their work in our live masterclasses, and on what the vendors themselves say on their own pages. Practitioners who do this for a living read the drafts. They remain anonymous, but their feedback shaped this report.
We build two AI tools ourselves, Assistant.Hockey and TheHockeySite.app. The report says so on its own page and holds them to the same yardstick as everyone else.
Get the next edition
AI tools for hockey move fast, so we’ll update this every year. Subscribe for free to get the next edition when it’s out, along with our regular articles for field hockey coaches.
Spotted a mistake or something I missed? Please let me know. And if you want to try AI for field hockey yourself, have a look at what our own tools do, and what they don’t.