SAS becomes Analytics Partner of British Rowing

SAS UK & Ireland is to become the Official Analytics Partner of British Rowing and its high performance arm – the GB Rowing Team.

The sponsorship deal, announced today, will be in place for three years and will support both the wider development for the sport as well as the GB Rowing Team’s continual pursuit of performance gains.

SAS technology will enable the coaches, sport scientists and the rowers to make better decisions from all the available data, enhancing training and preparation for major events.  It will also assist in the development of new talent through data modelling.

Sir David Tanner, Performance Director of the GB Rowing Team, said: “Performance is absolutely key to everything we do with the GB Rowing Team because on the international stage, small improvements are the difference between winning and losing. By partnering with SAS, we now have the capacity for much more in-depth and speedy analysis of the rowers, allowing us and them to optimise every session.  We are a leading rowing nation in the world, and topped the medal table in 2012, but we know that others are not standing still.”

Alongside performance, SAS technology can also help to manage training programmes, and predict and prevent injury. When Greg Searle, Great Britain triple Olympic medalist and a speaker at SAS’s Analytics 2013 Conference, saw SAS Visual Analytics – the data visualisation solution for rapid decision-making – he realised its potential in analysing strength and conditioning data to help prevent injuries. Data from his personal conditioning programme was analysed using SAS Visual Analytics, revealing a weakness in his left side core strength. Had Greg and his coaches seen the pattern in the data at the time, they could have modified his training regime limiting the chance of the injury occurring in the first place.

Mark Wilkinson, Managing Director, SAS UK & Ireland, said: “As the Official Analytics Partner of British Rowing and the GB Rowing Team, we are committed to helping the rowers improve their performance. British Rowing has an amazing history and through our partnership we aim to help Great Britain maintain its position as one of the dominant rowing nations of the world. Not only does that mean great rowing performances at the elite level, but supporting grassroots membership through improved marketing and engagement.“

SAS is also supporting British Rowing’s aim to get more young people interested in the sport, especially in areas not usually exposed to it, through its programmes in schools and use of indoor rowing facilities. Some of the young people involved may go on to take part in junior championships or even make it all the way through to the GB Rowing Team. British Rowing is implementing a SAS marketing optimisation solution to improve outbound marketing campaigns and help the organisation make the most of every member interaction. Insights revealed by the SAS solutions will help British Rowing better understand its members and target audiences, improving loyalty and community engagement. 

Neil Chugani, Interim Chief Executive Officer at British Rowing, said: “This multi-faceted Analytics Partnership will be of significant value in the next three years for British Rowing. It will help us grow and develop our sport as well as making a difference at the cutting edge. 

“Rowing is a great sport for people of all ages to get involved in. We have celebrated many achievements in recent years and it is essential that we continue to nurture our next generation of rowers to build on the success to date in British Rowing. The partnership with SAS will help us continue to build on current participation levels as well as develop great rowers of the future.”

SAS solutions to be deployed by British Rowing:

• SAS® Visual Analytics is part of SAS’ suite of high-performance analytics solutions, and enables organisations to easily map out and understand analytic insights and share those with employees and customers across an organisation. It delivers rapid in-memory analysis for quicker analysis, and interactive dashboards for reporting in-depth data visualisation. 
• ANSWERS from SAS is an analytics-as-a-service solution that enables organisations to leverage SAS’ powerful analytic software to identify previously unknown patterns and trends in data. It provides a foundation for definition and discovery of critical information that will help organisations know their customers better, especially where they do not have the time, resource or expertise to do this in-house.