England Rugby
NeuroSlam’s cloud-based platform enables the identification and development of sporting talent through neurocognitive and ocular perimetry assessments and individualized brain-training programs to attain and maintain peak performance on the field of play.World Cup England National Rugby Team
Sir Clive Woodward
“If we can learn to beat them between the ears, we can beat them on the pitch as well ... England have employed a company called MatchPower whose job it is to create specialized programmes for the players to test intelligence and to improve decision-making under pressure.”
- Sir Clive Woodward, from his 2005 book Winning!
With a particular focus on performance under pressure, Dr. Lenny Kristal founded and created MatchPower, a web-based program designed to identify winning cognitive attributes and create templates of excellence. In preparation for the 2003 World Cup, Sir Clive Woodward enlisted Kristal and Matchpower to profile, identify and benchmark winning neurocognitive attributes of players called up to the national squad, to be harnessed for future recruitment and succession planning. An online platform was also established to help players develop needed cognitive skills.
Working with Woodward and his team of coaches and players, Kristal customized cognitive assessments to highlight players’ cognitive performance under pressure. As technology has developed so too has Matchpower, emerging in 2015 as NeuroSlam, our state-of-the-art, cloud based interactive platform.
“Think Clearly Under Pressure” was Woodward’s catchall mantra to sum up a player’s ability to “stay cool”, think smart and act decisively. Put simply, knowing how to win. Kristal’s interactive assessments were used to profile the squad and identify strengths and weaknesses of each player and groups of players, such as backs and forwards. He also tested the entire coaching staff.
General Findings
The assessment and profiling process proved to be discriminatory and predictive regarding the measurement of certain parameters. Individual player and trainer cognitive strengths and/or weaknesses were identified. There were statistically significant differences* between many individual players, positional groupings and even groups of players from different clubs; suggesting the existence of club cultures.
Sample report feedback segments based on combined test findings relative to certain positional players:
- All these attributes when combined, suggests that the players in these positions, are capable of playing individualistic, anticipatory, innovative, rugby.
They should be able to rapidly and accurately connect things, anticipate and respond to changing plays, by making quick decisions based on lightning reactions. This combination is especially effective.
- When it comes to controlling the flow of the game, 75% of ‘x’ positional players quite clearly demonstrated excellent anticipatory skills. They also displayed a superior ability to recognize and interpret advance information. They also showed rapid decision-making capabilities coupled with relatively quick simple reaction times. Moreover, their spatial awareness and the ability to identify the changing environment are good.
- When all the players were researched in terms of their club/team origins, the majority of ‘x’ and ‘x’ club players seemed to display “under average” mean scores for their logical processing skills.
These players may share a fundamentally responsive “rugby instinct” on the field of play, rather than the more cool or calculating logical cognitive style.
Overall, the results of the assignment helped the England Rugby Football Union better understand some of the key cognitive attributes of senior players and foreshadowed guidelines for the profiling, identification and benchmarking of key psycho–cognitive attributes and performance measures for England Rugby going forward.
Summary
The establishment of key benchmark criteria as a means of screening and matching individuals to empirical templates found in the testing process will help provide a long-term framework for the recruiting of new and young players and staff so as to ensure consistency, reliability and flow of top class players.
Client Brief
Winning they say … it’s all in the mind!
During 2003, with a specially designed battery of online psychocognitive tests, Dr. Kristal assessed and analyzed 43 pre-world cup England rugby training camp players and 10 coaching and management staff. Assessments covered broad psycho-cognitive areas associated with peak performance including; cognitive attributes, emotionality, attention and awareness, information processing and flexibility.
The brief set by Sir Clive Woodward, England’s Head Coach, and senior coaching staff, was to:
• Determine whether there might be significant differentiating psycho-cognitive attributes relating to particular players or positional players.
• Create benchmark templates going forward for screening, matching and succession planning intended to benefit the England Rugby Football Union.
It was understood by the coaching staff that the more of the cognitive performance we can measure, the better our ability to predict, coach and improve future potential. For England Rugby, NeuroSlam Sport provided cognitive assessment on the following areas:
Key Points
- Concentration: Measures how well you are able to centre your thoughts and concentrate on a task at hand without your mind wandering.
- Orderliness: Looks at how ordered and systemized you are in the way you think about things, which can have an effect on how you tend to structure your life.
- Planning: Tests your ability to detect information by developing a logical and strategic search for solutions rapidly, accurately and effectively.
- Creativity: Examines your tendency towards being original, imaginative and resourceful in the way you think about things and how you plan responses and solutions to situations.
- Focus: Measures your basic capacity to concentrate, to focus and sustain your attentional abilities.
- Sensitivity to Trends: Measures how fast you can accurately respond to information illustrating an identifiable (developing) trend.
- Stress Reactivity: Measures how fast you can respond to information that is presented to you while retaining your accuracy which looks at your performance under pressure i.e. your ability to process information rapidly and accurately under stress.
- Attentional Style: This looks at how you adapt to different situations and your ability to shift between different ways of attending to things around you.
- Short Term Memory: This measures your capacity to perceive and remember information, which is briefly displayed. It measures your capacity for the amount of information you can store and retrieve in short-term memory.
- Distractibility: Depicts the degree to which you can resist or ignore different stimuli when you are focusing on a task. Your ability to resist distractions is crucial to concentration and paying attention. Generally this measure is a good predictor of performance in a wide variety of jobs or tasks requiring concentration and focus of attention.
- Vigilance: Looks at how well you can maintain an accurate level of alertness, observation, and watchfulness in a sustained and concerted way.
- Recognition & Adaptation: Assesses your capacity to rapidly and accurately identify information and your cognitive flexibility i.e. the degree to which you can shift your ability to identify information when that information begins to change.
- See the Larger Picture: Provides an index of how well you can see the bigger picture and how well you are able to connect patterns of information in order to achieve this.
- Thinking Style: Checks your capacity to think globally and in a constructive and adaptable way that adjusts easily to a variety of circumstances.
- Visual Sensitivity: Analyzes your capacity to extract relevant data from a complex field of extraneous information quickly and accurately, which generally acts as a good index on how well you are likely to process information