Establishing Connection with Tracking Providers

One of the aims of macro planning is to ensure that certain training targets are achieved, in particular the individual development of a player. For this, it is crucial to know what performance data a player provides and how the performance has developed over time. Tracking data must be gathered at every training session. This forms the basis for analyzing how a player has developed during training sessions and over the season.

The tracking data is provided by various tracking providers that determine and analyze a player's performance data for a training session. In SAP Sports One, it is possible to integrate this performance data and establish a connection with the tracking provider.

If you have the required permissions, you can configure tracking parameter configuration in SAP Sports One at Provider - Tracking Provider Configuration in the admin section.

After entering the account credentials such as URL, user name, and password provided by your tracking provider, choose Test Connection. If the data entered is correct, a green mark appears at the status message and the setup of the tracking provider configuration was successful.

Simply establishing a connection between SAP Sports One and the tracking provider does not completely provide the basis for integrating the tracking data into SAP Sports One.

In SAP Sports One, all master data from Heimspiel, including that for players, teams and competitions, are integrated into the system. The next step is to map the players imported from the master data provider with the tracking provider players and thus with the data of the tracking provider. This ensures that performance data can be integrated and assigned to a player even if the players have slightly different names.

In SAP Sports One, provider player management is therefore available to map both players.

If you have the required permissions, you can manage the player mapping in SAP Sports One at Provider - Provider-Player Management in the admin section.

Mapping the players is very simple and intuitive in SAP Sports One. In edit mode, expand the dropdown list of provider players and assign the correct player to the SAP Sports One player displayed on the left-hand side.

Now that a mapping between the players has taken place, the same mapping must also be carried out for the parameters. To be more precise, this involves the SAP Sports One parameters that were previously created in the performance catalog and the parameters that are made available to you by your provider. Here, the parameter mapping makes it possible to transfer all performance data into the SAP Sports One system.

If you have the required permissions, you can manage the parameter mapping in SAP Sports One at Provider - Provider-Parameter Management in the admin section.

Once you are in edit mode, you will see the provider parameters on the left-hand side. Depending on which tracking provider you are using, it could be that there are many parameters on many pages. For this reason, we advise that you use the search function on the top right to search for a specific parameter directly.

Once you have found a parameter, you can map the provider parameter with the parameter from the SAP Sports One performance parameter catalog.

A configuration of, for example, heart rate parameters could look like the following.

Besides the automated integration of performance data of tracking providers, you might want to use a manual interface to upload performance data. Sometimes, for various reasons, the tracking parameters are not integrable via an automatic interface. This may be due to agreements with the tracking provider or the failure of the tracking provider to provide account credentials to your club.

Therefore, depending on the tracking provider, you may be able to download the tracking data directly from the provider's platform. To get the data into your SAP Sports One system, you can create an individual tracking configuration.

The manual integration of tracking data is often used for load planning and thus for the load control of the players. Here you have the option of importing a target value and an actual value for a player parameter. More details and information on load management is provided in the Planning Training Management: Micro Planning unit when describing the micro planning phase.

If you have the required permissions, you can manage the tracking configuration in SAP Sports One at Tracking Configuration in the admin section.

To illustrate the function of creating a manual upload, we assume the following data, which we have received from one of the tracking providers.

When navigating to the tracking configurations, you are able to add a new configuration to the SAP Sports One system. In a first step, enter a clear and understandable name and add a version number. In the text field for the header rows, enter the number of header rows in the upload file. It will be omitted in the upload. In this example, enter 1.

Afterwards, we can start to map the columns of the upload file to the person mapping of the configuration. Enter the column or columns containing the identifying data, such as $A or $A, $B. Therefore, in this example, the display name of the player is in column A, we put $A in the text field for person mapping.

Last but not least, you need to map the performance parameter from the performance catalog to the column of your upload file. Determine the column in the upload file for each performance parameter, such as $C. You can also use simple formulas with arithmetic operators, such as +, -, *, / or brackets ().

A tracking configuration used for manual performance data upload could look like this.