Team sport is a group activity where members perform at a specific physical or mental task to achieve a common goal. Teams may be organized in formal or informal ways.
Unlike traditional groups, sport teams have clear norms of effort and performance. Members of a sport team are expected to report to practice sessions, work hard during every session, and coordinate their activities for competitions in order to achieve success.
Sports teach students discipline, mental toughness, cooperation with others and the satisfaction of achieving personal goals. They also improve agility, endurance, hand-eye coordination and fine and gross motor skills.
Most schools offer individual sports, which cost less than team sports. They also give competitors plenty of opportunities to use their skills, but they are not as popular as team sports.
Individual sports have the benefit of giving athletes more options for competing and more time to focus on training and improving their skill sets. However, they also have disadvantages such as limited participation and a lower quality of competition.
A growing number of professional team sports are investing in tracking systems that quantify training and competition characteristics, such as physical outputs and collision frequency. Such metrics are hoped to support objective decision-making for the prescription and manipulation of training load.
The selection of tracking systems and their use in the context of team sports requires careful consideration by practitioners. This narrative review aims to summarise and critically evaluate different tracking systems and their use within team sport, presenting evidence-based applications of their data in applied settings.