A cross-platform application (mobile/web) to train "Scanning and Perception". I have never used Flutter/Dart before and solely relied on a conversation with ChatGPT from OpenAI.
Features
scan_pass_features.mov
The features of this app are heavily inspired by Lee Jones, a former professional football (⚽️) player who shares his wisdom on his YouTube channel @JonerFootball.
⚠️ Don't judge the code quality as the challenge was to not do more than ChatGPT's AI suggested! 😊
In football (⚽️), you often hear coaches telling their players to "check their shoulder" before receiving the pass. What they do here is reminding their players to do "Scanning".
Scanning is when a player looks away from the ball for a moment to gather information before interacting with it.
Only a high degree of awareness about what's happening around the player enables her to utilize her technical abilities to effectively impact the match.
While most people recognize the abilities of first-touch, passing, and 1v1 attacking and defending to be the most important core skills of a football player, a number of professional trainers argue to also include scanning into this list.
While the first three abilities mentioned can be easily trained alone or as a pair of two, it is much harder to replicate setups that help players improve their scanning cabilities.
Conventially, trainers ask their players to lift their eyes up when they do an exercise to encourage not focusing solely on the ball on their feet. But this has at least two short-commings:
- The player only refocuses her eyes but does not necessarly comprehend where they now look because "nothing relevant is happening" where the eyes now focus
- This only applies to exercises when having the ball, while in a match, most of "scanning" needs to happen while not having the ball - often just before receiving it.
As a result, scanning is primarily taught in match-like group plays. While this is very effective training it can be very inefficient because ...
- it requires many players in a single exercise,
- and every interaction is only ever training a single individual of that group.
On his YouTube channel @JonerFootball, Lee Jones puts up a tripod with a phone or tablet attached in most of the exercises. In single-player exercises they are being tasked to read what's on screen out loud.
This way, training the core abilities first-touch, passing, and 1v1 attacking and defending can be combined with exercising scanning.
This application is built using Flutter and is ready to be deployed on any device. At this point, I didn't find the time & energy to bring it to the app stores of Google and Apple (ChatGPT was no great help here).
This repo has a Github action attached that deploys every new commit to https://hupka.github.io/scan-pass/.