By Adam Collins
Have you ever considered visiting a therapist to share your tendency of falling over your front pad, causing you to frequently get out leg before? Maybe you’re a spinner who loses their nerve every now and then? To deny that the game of cricket is a major part of the broader blancmange above my shoulders that keeps my psychologist busy is to deny that oxygen keeps us alive.
Well, time to cut out the middle man! Or woman, as it is in my case. For the very same price as my sessions – 150 of your best United States Dollars – you can now send a video of yourself to one of the most reputable cricketers in the game for a bit of one-on-one advice on what is going right with your cricket – or what is going very wrong.
Welcome to Proastar, a new project badging itself as a “revolutionary new sports coaching and mentoring app platform which helps passionate amateurs to get more out of their game through insights and inspirations from the elites of the game.”
In practice, in addition to a decent wedge of cash, all you need is a mobile phone to be part of it. After you have filmed up to ten minutes of yourself in the nets batting, bowling or ‘keeping – from various angles – you upload the video and decide which of the ‘elite mentors’ will be yours.
The preview event held at Lord’s last week featured three ex-pros: Michael Holding, James Foster and Peter Moores. The supporting cast is a superb one, including Charlotte Edwards, Courtney Walsh, Jason Gillespie, Kumar Sangakkara, Mickey Arthur, Tom Moody, Mahela Jayawardene, Rohit Sharma and Mike Hussey. They have recruited well.
After submitting your recording, it could be 14 days until your player of choice gets back to you.
But when they do, it will be with an interactive video that includes not only visual feedback but the ability to take the virtual red pen to the vision that you send with markers on the page to help bring the advice to life.
The thesis is that this tailor-made coaching is a lot better than generic tips. In 2018-speak, it’s all about the unique user experience.
“It is not just talking to them,” Holding told The Cricket Paper at the launch. “It is illustrating with the videos they have sent. For instance, your front knee might be bent.
So, you can freeze the app and show them where and try to get them to straighten it if they are in that bad position. Or if your head is tilting, same thing. That’s the great thing about this. You get the video and send it back to them with your voice talking back at them with the illustrations on it and they can go and work on that then send back their feedback.”
The Proastar app will be available to download in the usual places from September 15 but initially by invitation only before going global in the coming months.
This, combined with the hefty price point, suggests a degree of elitism about the product, which is fair criticism. But the creators plan to off-set this by developing a philanthropic arm that enables players from less privileged backgrounds to gain access to the technology as well.
All told, it will be something to keep an eye on over coming summers. With ambition to branch into tennis and golf after bedding down their cricket app, this could turn into an interesting part of how future professional athletes are taught their sports from the get-go. And over a lifetime, a lot cheaper than a shrink.
