Video Transcript:
Hi guys, Greg Choat here at the Las Vegas Sports Performance in sunny and hot Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s our summer program running right now; we have lots of athletes running through. One of the great new things we’ve introduced into our system is the Freelap timing system.
I started off talking to Christopher at Freelap and went through the system and it seemed pretty interesting to us. We were looking for a system that would allow us to give some quantitative timing on our athletes over a couple of different distances. The first one we were interested in was the 10 yard dash. We wanted to see what their acceleration was over ten yards.
The second one we were interested in was a 5-10-5 effectively. We call it a change of direction drill. After taking a closer look at the Freelap and some great discussions with Christopher we decided the product was going to do the job for us, so we went ahead and invested in the system.
The system we ended up going with was three of the Tx Juniors which is the timing beacons and we combined that with two watches from the system. This allows us to do a couple of things. We have a start and stop beacon for our ten yard sprint. And then we can use actually a single beacon to time our five-ten-five. In another video we are just putting together now we are going to show you actually how we do that five-ten-five.
But today we are going to look at our setup here and how we are running our ten yards. It’s a really simple system. We have the athlete come up to the line. We’ve put some marks down on the turf, one for the start and one for where each beacon goes. The interesting thing about the beacon is there is a proximity on the beacon and it works out at about thirty-three inches. So you bring the watch within thirty-three inches of the beacon and that will trigger the timing system.
What we opted to do was put the start line down on the ground and then we measured thirty-six inches forward of that start line and put a sport for the beacon. Now this gives us about three inches of leeway. So it’s really simple. The athlete comes to the line and they position themselves and we opt for either a two-point, three-point, or a four-point start depending on the type of athlete we are working with.
Then on our starting tone the athlete accelerates off the mark and they run the ten yards. As they go through the ten yard mark there is a second beacon placed thirty-six inches beyond the second finish line and that’s what stops the watch. We are very consistent with our markings and the start lines are ten yards apart and the beacons are ten yards apart. So we can be confident that every time we run the test we are going to get a similar result.
Christopher at Freelap has been pretty helpful to us. He’s answered a lot of our questions and even had some great ideas for us in different ways for us to use the system. If you’re looking for a good timing system it’s probably worth checking out the Freelap timing system. It’s cost effective, it’s simple to use and I think you’ll really like it if you give it a chance.
Thanks very much and see you again at Las Vegas Sports Performance.
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