David Pastrnak of the Boston Bruins flips the puck past Casey Mittelstadt of the Buffalo Sabres. (Photo by Kevin Hoffman/Getty Images)
After a test run earlier this year with the Boston Bruins, a new virtual reality technology attempting to revolutionize ice hockey training has launched, boosted by a minor investment from Bruins’ right winger David Pastrňák.
The Czech Republic-based company, called Sense Arena, launched Wednesday. It has official partnerships with a number of organizations in its home country, including the Czech Ice Hockey Association, the Faculty of Physical Education and Sport of Charles University in Prague, and the professional hockey club White Tigers Liberec.
In addition to Pastrňák, who is also from the Czech Republic and has signed on as a Sense Arena partner, the company has received investment from Aleš Volek, a well-known Czech hockey agent.
Pastrňák said he joined the Sense Arena team because he wanted to support a Czech invention and use his name to help the company win the trust of players, coaches, and clubs. That could include coaches, scouts, players, and franchises in the NHL.
Sense Arena venue seen from a first row seat. (Courtesy of Sense Arena)
“It’s a fantastic training tool, I’ve tried it myself and I was sweating like hell!” Pastrňák said in a statement. “The technology and the reality of the environment are just amazing.”
Sense Arena’s platform provides access to more than 70 training drills that are designed to help players hone their hockey skills, reaction times, cognitive ability, and hockey sense by enabling them to quickly rack up thousands of repetitions even at home.
“Getting on the ice outside training hours is virtually impossible or very expensive,” said Filip Pešán, head coach of the White Tigers. “Using virtual reality, we can simulate game situations, focus on the details, work on reaction speed, decision skills, and multitasking.”
Sense Arena’s initial release is designed for club or school teams. A $1,490 multi-license monthly fee for clubs includes an HTC Vive headset, specially-engineered hockey sticks with small sensors, a mobile computer kiosk, and four other sensors that can be placed in the corners of a room to help the platform align a digital map of a hockey rink to the space.
The company is positioning itself not only as a provider of training tools, but also as an analytics company. By racking up data about players, coaches can compare player performance with others on the team, or even with national or global averages, while scouts can use the platform to seek out up-and-coming talent.
Sense Arena has so far partnered with a few pro teams in the Czech Republic, including the White Tigers, Jihlava Dukla, and the Kladno Knights. Though it debuted the technology with the Bruins earlier this year, it currently only has two official partnerships in the U.S., both with amateur teams: the Colorado Springs Tigers club and the Washington Little Caps.
Sense Arena gym in Prague. (Courtesy of Sense Arena)
But the company’s founder, Bob Tetiva, said he is looking to get the technology into some of the world’s biggest hockey markets, including the NHL, potentially with the help of Pastrňák.
“Apart from succeeding on the domestic market, our goal is to break through especially in the largest hockey realms in the world—in the USA, Canada and Scandinavia,” said Tetiva.
Sense Arena is also looking to release a stripped-down version that could be used by players, or fans, at home. It plans to launch that in early 2019 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
SportTechie Takeaway
The idea of using technology to allow thousands of practice reps outside of official practice times is captivating athletes and coaches across the world of sports. There are various ways to do this, whether via sensors on equipment, augmented or virtual reality, but the idea is the same: changing training the way batting cages changed baseball. VR company STRIVR has been adopted by a significant number of teams in pro and college football. Eddie Lewis, the former U.S. men’s national team soccer player, released a platform called Toca last year that seeks to accelerate training for soccer players using smaller-than-regulation balls, a smart dispensing system and sensors that work with an app to quantify data.
