If you want to improve cricketers you need practice regularly and monitor your performance.

That’s been the challenge of Millfield School and Mark Garaway the school’s Director of Cricket Coaching: even for a top English independent school, that has produced some fine first class players Simon Jones, Craig Kieswetter, Ben Hollioake and David Graveney.

The facilities are excellent, but there are still challenges to further boost the boy’s performances at the school.

First, despite a lot of indoor facilities being available, they are all multi-purpose and heavily used for lots of sports. Second, there was no way to objectively track improvements.

The solution was the unique cricket “bubble”

The bubble changed outdoor artificial nets into an indoor centre. Kept afloat by two airlocks the roof protects players from the elements and allows for high temperature training ideal for fitness and players going to play on the sub-continent.

Cricketers at the school can now get in quality deliberate practice year round.

The bubble also contains the school’s PitchVision ball-tracking system, which solves problem number two at a stroke.

Over to Mark Garaway for more information:

Having a tool like PitchVision adds huge value to the players; we can be more concise and build valuable plans for each player.

Garaway is a big advocate of using technology to enable players to gain more knowledge about their performance.

A lot of what we do is about getting players to understand what they can and can’t do. PitchVision helps illustrate that very nicely; ball by ball

The system is located in the bubble but can easily be taken outside to the grass nets or even a centre wicket practice which is also important for Garaway.

Having a system as versatile as PitchVision is a massive positive the guys love training on grass and the system can come with us.

The experiences at the school show that it is now affordable for organisations to solve their issues with creative use of technology.

Find out more here:

As tech becomes more widespread and affordable, other schools like Millfield, alongside clubs and acadamies will realise that training quality is improved when it's combined with excellent coaching.

How is your coaching being influenced by technology?