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Anyone who has played football knows how much work is done off the field. Those endless hours of coaches' lectures, the chalkboard diagramming of X's and O's, the sifting through pages and pages of playbooks. Players can and do zone out. Forgetting a play on Sunday can mean the difference between winning and losing. But refreshing memories on the practice field is a time sucker, and when players' salaries are in the millions, time is money.
Carl Banks -- a pretty fair player himself who is now in his second year as director of player development for the New York Jets -- got frustrated trying to teach plays to his proteges.
"Players spend 8 till 1 in the classroom," said Banks. "Then practice is at 2. There's only one stop at the locker room in between. That one stop erased a lot."
About a year ago, Banks -- who has been using computers since the Commodore 64 -- decided it was time to bring tech to the football
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classroom. An All-Pro linebacker with the New York Giants in his playing days, Banks knew a thing or two about hitting the playbook. So he set out to create a multimedia version that would be a bit more entertaining.
Banks put together a system for the Jets with the help of three high-tech companies: database maker Oracle, multimedia-technology maker Macromedia, and Endeavour Software.
The result was a playbook that runs on a PC and connects to the team's network. Macromedia technology provides the multimedia features like animated X's and O's on the front end, and the Oracle Data Server and Oracle Video Server provide the horsepower. Players can call up a streaming-video clip of a play from game footage to illustrate the stuff they're trying to cram into their brains.
