Denver, CO – December 28, 2015 – Sports Authority Field at Mile High: Referees during a regular season Monday Night Football game
(Photo by Scott Clarke / ESPN Images)
STRIVR, a virtual reality training and content company founded by Stanford football kicker Derek Belch, has been training NFL officials ahead of the 2017 season as part of the league’s efforts to better prepare refs for live-game scenarios.
The company has been working with officials for the past nine months, mostly through the NFL’s Officiating Development Programs, an NFL program targeted at collegiate officials looking to move up into the professional ranks and identified as high potential by the NFL and start the transition process, according to STRIVR founder Derek Belch. This follows the NFL’s acknowledgment in January that it was testing virtual reality simulators and point-of-view cameras to train officials.
For the first few months starting near the end of the 2016 season, STRIVR, which received investment from the NFL’s equity arm in June, was testing the platform and working with the NFL and officials to conceptually figure out how to enable such a program, using their feedback to tweak the experience to meet training needs. In February after the Super Bowl, it began to put a more full-scale plan into place for offseason training.
“Refs are under a huge microscope and with replay, if they get something wrong, it’s seen,” Belch said in an interview with SportTechie. “This is how we take officiating to the next level and addressing some of the same issues players have.”
Those issues, according to Belch, include limited time spent on the field getting actual practice reps. Virtual reality provides officials with life-like situations that put them into a game scenario so that they can react to plays much as they would on the field. Previously, the NFL relied on video to train officials during Officiating Development Programs.
When officials put on headsets with the STRIVR platform, they’re given a 360-degree first-person view of what they would see as it they were standing in their assigned position on the field. The experience provides live, full-speed play, as if they’re actually there during the game making high-pressure calls.
Knowing how to communicate among officials and knowing the roles and responsibilities of each official slot on the field is part of the training, just as much as is knowing when and how to identify a penalty, according to Belch.
“The goal is to get mental reps on the mental mechanics associated with officiating — pre-snap assignments, procedural things, penalties, etc.,” he said. “Not every play has a penalty in VR, just like not every play has a penalty in the game.”
So far the feedback from officials has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly from the younger crop of officials who have been imagining, alongside STRIVR, the various ways this technology might improve their officiating in years to come, Belch said.
This officiating deal with the NFL follows STRIVR’s partnerships with seven NFL teams — among them the Dallas Cowboys, Chicago Bears, Arizona Cardinals, Minnesota Vikings, New York Jets and San Francisco 49ers — to provide off-field training for players. Belch said the company is in works to add an eighth team soon, but he wouldn’t elaborate beyond that.
STRIVR is also talking to “a couple of the other big leagues” about potentially expanding its virtual reality training programs to their players and officials, though he wouldn’t say which leagues or elaborate on how far into those discussions the company has gotten. Belch said he’s pushing to have STRIVR rolled out across “all the professional leagues” in the coming years.
STRIVR has been expanding rapidly, and that includes pushing outside of the sports world. It inked a partnership with Walmart in June to train and educate 150,000 of its employees with virtual reality. STRIVR says corporations can use its platform to educate and train employees in areas such as sales, operations, customer service, safety and human resources.
Belch told SportTechie earlier this year, however, that the company has no plans to slow down its sports business even as it expands into other industries.
Players training with STRIVR have logged thousands of hours in virtual reality and reviewed more than 50,000 different plays and scenarios. STRIVR claims its software has helped to improve reaction time, pattern recognition and the decision-making process of athletes when performing in high-stress situations.
