Archery training management software: Jang 2008

The paper describes a software system for managing archers' training, developed in Korea over about 12 months. The first author had coached the Korean armed forces archery team for more than twenty years and was coaching a company team; the second was a researcher at the sport science institute of Seoul National University. It is not an experiment: there is no group using the system compared with one that does not, and no effect on performance is measured.

The system has five areas. The first is the log-in, separate for archer and coach. The second is the archer's profile, with personal and sporting details, psychological tests, body measurements and fitness tests. The third records the conditions of each session: weather, the archer's self-rated physical and emotional state, menstrual phase for women, any injury and, above all, where each arrow landed, marked with a click on a target drawn on screen, or from a handheld PDA on the range. The fourth analyses impacts by period, distance and number of arrows; the fifth lets the user look closely at a chosen set and remove stray arrows from the averages. In the example shown, one archer's group sat to the right at every distance.

The authors conclude that the system allows more complete and scientific management of archers, and that it could become the basis of a shared record for Korean athletes.

What went into the system was decided over ten meetings of a panel of five experts: two computing specialists, two archery coaches and a PhD in sport science. The first three meetings set the direction and the fourth and fifth the areas to include; in the sixth to eighth a prototype was built and tried out with data from six national team archers who had competed at the Athens 2004 Games (three men and three women), with field visits and interviews with the athletes. The ninth and tenth meetings fixed the problems found in use.

The software is written in Visual Basic .NET with an Access 2003 database, and a PDA version running Windows CE Mobile is used to record impacts on the range. The target on screen is divided into eight sectors and can be zoomed in to place each arrow accurately; the user chooses the distance (90, 70, 50, 30, 20 or 18 m) and the number of arrows (36, 18, 12, 9 or 6). The psychological tests are two questionnaires: one of 56 items on seven mental skills, including self-confidence, anxiety control and concentration, answered on a seven-point scale, and one of 27 items on anxiety, on a four-point scale. The fitness tests follow the battery of a 1998 Korean national survey, with six qualities graded from A to E. The impact analyses split the target into left and right, top and bottom, four, six or eight sectors, or follow the order in which the arrows were shot.

The paper describes a tool and how it was built, but does not put it to the test. There are no data on how much coaches used it, how reliable the manual entry of arrows is, or any change in scores; the validity the authors refer to is the panel's opinion plus the field trial with six archers, reported without figures. The first author is a coach who developed the tool he describes, there is no outside evaluation, and the system is designed around the Korean national team.

The authors themselves note that benchmarks built on the country's best archers are hard to use as a yardstick for school-age archers. The software, from 2008, runs on systems no longer in use: for a reader today what matters is the choice of what to record, not the programme itself.

For anyone who shoots, the paper offers a list rather than a finding: what a panel of Korean coaches and experts thought worth recording at every session in 2008. Besides impacts, it covers wind direction and speed, temperature, humidity, physical and emotional state on a five-point scale, menstrual phase for women and injuries, which is the information that later helps explain why a day went the way it did.

Two ideas in the system still hold up. One is looking at impacts by sector and by distance over long periods, as in the example of the archer whose group sat to the right at every distance. The other is showing the average both with and without arrows lost to an obvious mistake, so that one figure does not hide the other. Many current apps do similar things; the study does not say whether keeping this kind of record improves scores.