CAIS – A Brief Overview

Developed by Professor Chris Cushion and a team at Loughborough University, the Coach Analysis Intervention System (CAIS) is an instrument and process that helps coaches analyse and better understand their own coaching behaviour.

This unique and powerful tool is recognized as the standard across the world of sport for coaches who are looking to analyse, develop and improve their own coaching practice in a systematic way.

The Role and Value of CAIS

The role of analysis (and analysis technology) in aiding development and in gaining those small margins and advantages that often separate winning from losing has long been widely recognized and athlete and team analysis is now utilized across sport at all levels.

Coaches clearly play a crucial role in the development of individual athlete and team performance. However, despite understanding the benefits of analysis in enhancing performance, what is far less common is for coaches to "turn the camera" around and analyse their own coaching behaviour.

As a result, we often do not know what our own coaching behaviour looks like and research has shown that coaches are notoriously poor at describing their own coaching behaviour.

CAIS offers coaches an insightful and flexible solution to this problem. Its multi-dimensional and multi-level framework provides meaningful and useful feedback in a coach-friendly manner, giving detailed data about specific coaching behaviours during training and competition. The fusion with the online iSportsAnalysis analysis platform gives coaches powerful, interactive analysis capability in a flexible and user-friendly design.

• It enables coaches to upload video of their coaching quickly and seamlessly to the iSportsAnalysis online analysis platform from any device.
• The coach can then select the aspects of their coaching behaviour they want to view and analyse from the CAIS framework.
• They then use the CAIS interface to view their video and ‘tag’ key moments - providing as much or as little detail/context as they want.

• The interactive CAIS viewer then enables the coach instantly access and view any aspect of their coaching behaviour.
• The coaching behaviour data is generated automatically in the online platform and displayed visually for the coach to view and understand
• Bookmarks (Compilation Videos) of any key moments can be automatically generated.

Choosing the Coaching Behaviours to analyse

• Once a coaching video has been uploaded the user can select those aspects of coaching behaviour that they want to analyse using the intuitive CAIS Template dashboard.
• The CAIS methodology comprises 23 Primary Coaching Behaviours that the coach can choose from. There are also a number of Secondary behaviours that can be selected and these provide additional layers of context and a more nuanced understanding of performance (E.g. content, timing, stage of practice/performance, recipient). A full list of the coaching behaviours that comprise the CAIS instrument can be downloaded here.

Choosing the Coaching Behaviours to analyse

• Using this functionality, the CAIS instrument facilitates an examination of the microstructure of coach behaviour and discernible patterns of ‘coaching’ to be identified.
• The CAIS online solution has been designed in such a way as to enable the user to add their own individualised coaching behaviours.

Entering Your Key Coaching Moments

• The intuitive iSportsAnalysis video ‘tagging’ system enables any moments of interest to be quickly added using the CAIS Template data entry facility.
• Events can be added either ‘live’ or post-event.

Create Bookmarks and Highlight movies

• The Event filter facility enables groups of events to be bookmarked, automatically creating a compilation movie of those events that is available for sharing (if required)..

Reviewing Your Key Coaching Behaviours

• The interactive review facility allows the user to instantly access and view any events that have been added during the ‘tagging’ process
• The event-filter feature provides the ability to select specific ‘types’ of behaviour to be selected - and then individual examples of those behaviours to be instantly viewed. The video moves to that exact point in the session.

Viewing Your Coaching Behaviour Data

• When events are added the CAIS instrument automatically generates your coaching behaviour data.
• This information is then displayed on the iSportsAnalysis platform, providing a detailed breakdown of coaching behaviour in a coach-friendly manner and discernible patterns of "coaching" to be identified.
• Coaching behaviour data can be exported from the iSportsAnalysis platform.
• Benchmarking of coaching behaviour over time facilitating comparisons to be made and providing the basis

"Systematic observation permits a trained observer to use a set of guidelines and procedures to observe, record and analyse observable events and behaviours, with the assumption that other observers using the same observation instrument, and viewing the same sequence of events, would agree with the recorded data."

Ian Franks (1979)