2011 EHF W19 ECh referee guidance supported by FIBA Europe Technology

After a successful introduction of the Observer Programme and the Online Platform of the FETC (FIBA Europe Techno Centre) at the 2011 Women’s 17 European Championships in the Czech Republic, these two features were in use again at the 2011 Women’s 19 European Championships in the Netherlands.

A satisfied Helmut Höritsch, EHF CAN Coordinator says: "So far we have achieved all goals related to the FIBA Europe technology cooperation at both 2011 EHF Younger Age Category European Championships."

Thanks to both a great EHF IT crew – Christoph Gamper/EHF Office Head of IT, Robert Kleiner/EHF video analyst and Tomasz Szydlowski/EHF stats – and the constant support by Antonio Ojeda / General Manager of FETC, another 600 carefully selected video clips in 17 parameter categories could be produced for referee feedback and debriefing sessions during the 2011 Women’s 19 European Championships in the Netherlands. Those were also available on the online platform for the championship referees and EHF officials.

After the W19 final between Denmark and the Netherlands, EHF Observer Edeltraut Berthold (AUT) spoke about her experience of using the Observer System and Online Platform: "Luckily I already had some experience with the system from the Women's EHF Euro 2010 in Denmark and Norway last December when EHF CAN carried out a pilot project with FETC in order to adapt basketball technology to handball. FETC’s Antonio Ojeda introduced the system to us and made all necessary adaptations within only one day. The next day we could already use it at the championship - amazing!"

System advantages

Compared to other systems used in handball, the FETC system with Observer Programme and Online Platform has three advantages:

1) The real time footage is of excellent quality, and involves neither loss of time nor of quality.

2) Tagged clips can already be filtered during the scouting process and thus all clips are prepared and ready at the end of the match. This provides great flexibility when choosing a suitable time for a debriefing session with the refs – usually done the next day. Furthermore, since the video capture is done in real time, scouting and tagging pre-defined actions following parameter categories take place during the match. At the same time a review of previous scenes on your screen for a more careful evaluation is possible.

3) For the referees it is a big advantage to have the selected clips on the Online Platform for self-assessment and evaluation. All of them made use of the feature and benefit a lot from this modern and interactive process of referee guidance and mentoring by EHF. Of course EHF delegates have to contribute much more than in the past, as they apart from their job at the table have to do the scouting job in their "off"-matches. After getting acquainted with the system operation every delegate is ready for that substantial part of his/her job in cooperating with the refs in a team.

For a detailed system description and EHF utilization description click HERE.

EHF Video Analyst Robert Kleiner and EHF Observer Edeltraut Berthold