API and playback engineering for a coaching platform trusted by national teams

Performa Sports gives coaches a way to tag, analyse and share match video without a production team behind them. The people using it are not technologists. They are coaches with twenty minutes between a final whistle and a team meeting, so everything has to be quick to reach and hard to get wrong. The platform’s users include the Irish Football Association, the Ladies Gaelic Football Association, Ulster University, Derry City FC and Panathinaikos.

Our work sits behind the marketing site, not on it. The performasports.com website is the client’s own; what we engineer is the machinery its product and its newer surfaces run on.

The first thread is the API. We improved the platform’s API so more can be built on top of it, and so the new surfaces below have something solid to consume.

The second thread is what we build with it. We have created new sites and solutions powered by that API, taking the platform’s data and video into places the core product does not reach on its own. Offaly GAA Performance is one of them: a whole performance site for a county board, running on the API at offalygaaperformance.com. Another is a Google Sheets connection tool that lets a coach pull a single game, several games or a whole season from the platform straight into their own spreadsheet.

The third thread is video itself. We updated the platform’s Vimeo API integration, the layer that powers every video on performasports.com, and shipped playback updates across the video experience, the part of the product a coach touches most.