A Case Study on Virtual Reality American Football Training
Yazhou Huang, Lloyd Churches and Brendan Reilly
Abstract
We present a study of American football training through the use
of virtual reality. We developed a proprietary training software
SIDEKIQ designed for professional training of student athletes in
an immersive virtual reality environment, where trainees experi-
ence the football gameplays created by their coaches on desktop
PCs, Oculus Rift or even CAVE-like facility. A user evaluation was
conducted to quantify the effectiveness of the VR training over a
3-day training session. The result showed on average 30% overall
improvement in the scores collected from the assessment.
CR Categories: I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and
Techniques—Interaction Techniques I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]:
Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Animation;
Keywords: Virtual reality training, sports training, user evalua-
tion, user study
1 Introduction
In this work we present a case study of American football training
through the use of virtual reality. We have developed a proprietary
football training software SIDEKIQ. It is designed for professional
training of student athletes. The user-friendly interface allows the
football coach to create a play as quickly as 3 minutes. Teh Coach
will then train student athletes in SIDEKIQ either using a normal
computer screen, or inside an immersive display including head-
mounted display (HMD) and CAVE-like facility. The trainee expe-
riences the gameplay in the immersive virtual environment, freely
switching camera views from bird’s-eye mode to 3rd-person mode
following certain player on the field, and even directly be inside the
player’s helmet.
We have conducted a user evaluation in order to quantify the ef-
fectiveness of the VR training specifically for American football
training. 17 football players were involved in a 3-day training eval-
uation. We have observed a very positive learning experience from
all the subjects, also majority of the subjects were more capable of
correctly answering the assessment questions at the end of day 3
session compared to day 1, with the scores measuring on average a
30% overall improvement among all subjects.
2 Background and Related Work
American football as a whole is the most popular sport in the United
States [2], with the National Football League (NFL) and the Na-
tional Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) being the most pop-
ular football leagues in the US. As of 2012 nearly 2 million athletes
at high school or college level play the sport annually in the US.
Being the most popular game in the US, the way most coaches
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train their student athletes are still very primitive. Every football
coach has a playbook. In American football, a play is a close to the
ground “plan of action” or “strategy” used to move the ball down
the field [20]. These plays vary between basic to very complicated.
Football players through training memorize these plays and act ac-
cordingly on the field. As of today, playbooks in most cases are still
physical books filled with illustrations of plays, see Figure 1-left, an
excerpt from an older Arizona Cardinals playbook, to help illustrate
just how crazy and complicated they can be [4]. Many coaches have
also adopted drawing plays superimposed on real game footage
when reviewing the game films with their trainees, see Figure 1-
right. Even though there are computer software digitizing these
playbooks with animated 2D sprites, non-computer savvy coaches
still prefer drawing on paper or whiteboard.
Figure 1: Left: an excerpt from an older Arizona Cardinals play-
book. Right: A training play drawing superimposed on real game
footage.
One of the challenges student athletes face in using playbooks,
whiteboards and overlaid game footage is that looking through
the bird’s-eye view is too abstract. Comments from coaches and
trainees we have worked with addressed the importance of having
trainees really experience those gameplay moments on the football
field. Without thousands of hours on-field practice, student athletes
can sometimes have a really hard time picturing these game mo-
ments in a normal classroom setting, which is especially true for
young students with limited on-field training. By introducing vir-
tual reality into the training process, this issue can be easily solved.
In the past, several attempts had been made to bring virtual reality
into American football training. In 2001, University of Michigan
[6; 5] pioneered in developing a virtual football training system
backed by the legendary head football coach Lloyd Carr. The sys-
tem ran in a 4-wall CAVE platform equipped with SGI hardware,
which was way too expensive at the time for even the top football
teams to afford. A web-embedded viewer was also developed but
it failed to deliver the immersive feeling for the trainees, and the
project came to a stop after they were not able to commercialize it,
see Figure 2 Left.
Years later XOS technologies [7] used motion capture technolo-
gies to record football athlete training sessions and analyze the
key movement including stepping and passing the ball. Reflective
markers were placed on the athlete to precisely capture joint tra-
jectories and other biomechanical data. A large projection screen
displays the captured data on the training field. The large amount
of data was overwhelming and was meant more for biomechanics
analysis and injury prevention instead of virtual reality training.
More recently a quarterback simulator was released [3] in a game-
like setting. The player throws a real football onto a back-projected
screen showing the virtual game content, and gets scored on bench-
marks including ball passing location, throwing distance and speed.
While the game content itself is fun and ideal for amusement park
attractions, the limitation is also obvious: mixing reality (throw-
ing the physical football) with virtual reality game content on 2D
screen, without an accurate representation of the throw motion, the
user focuses too much on throwing the physical ball, and gets dis-
tracted from the mental preparation of the training scenarios.
In academic research on VR training, we have found several works
related to sports training but all limited to either using gaming-like
sports settings [9; 14; 11], or only focusing on athletes’ psychology
[17; 21] and biomechanics [12; 18; 22; 19]; While the effective-
ness for virtual training in general are well studied [24; 23; 13],
little attention has been given to the user evaluation of VR training
specifically for real-world sports training scenarios.
Figure 2: Left: An early football simulator developed by Univer-
sity of Michigan. Right: a motion capture and analysis platform by
XOS.
3 System Overview
Our American football VR training tool SIDEKIQ delivers realistic
training experience through the following aspects: high-fidelity mo-
tions, immersive rendering with head tracking, and carefully cre-
ated gameplays. With the friendly user interface and pre-loaded
play templates, coaches can easily and quickly create training plays
in SIDEKIQ as an authoring tool.
3.1 Player motions
We have put in a lot of effort in getting high-fidelity motions for
the virtual football players. A total of 50 motion clips, including 8
stances, 12 passes, 6 running and 7 blocks to list a few, were seg-
mented from an extensive post-processed football motion capture
database. Certain clips such as running and block were processed
for seamless loop playback. In a typically gameplay, player starts
with a stance motion then switches to one of the locomotions when
ball snaps. For our current version, this transition is done without
blending. The skinning for 22 players is computed on the hardware
level, which allows the application to be able to run on medium-
level and even some entry-level computer configurations.
3.2 Immersive rendering
SIDEKIQ was developed using our proprietary 3D engine with
multi-layer shader materials, real-time lighting, shadow and SSAO,
while maintaining the efficiency required for interactive VR appli-
cations. Native support for various 3D stereoscopic displays and
projectors makes it simple to switch to stereo rendering. SIDEKIQ
was among the very early adopters of Oculus Rift Developer Kit
(DK-1) that has brought low-cost head-tracking enabled immersive
rendering to high school and college football teams. Figure 4, 3,
9 and 5 show SIDEKIQ running on Oculus DK-1 and our 4-wall
CAVE platform EON Icube .
Figure 3: SIDEKIQ running on our 4-wall CAVE platform EON
Icube for immersive training sessions.
3.3 UI and gameplay creation
Our user interface (UI) design style was to focus on simplicity. As
an authoring tool to create plays, SIDEKIQ is mainly used by non-
computer savvy football coaches. Having the minimalistic UI ele-
ments visible to the user was the key for user friendliness: play list,
player info, player routes and ball routes. See Figure 4-top for our
GUI design. All UI elements can be easily hidden when the ren-
der viewport switches to full-screen for immersive rendering. With
pre-loaded play templates, the coach can instantly choose common
formations as a starting point, and drag the players around in the
top-down view to create new plays or modify existing ones. Once
familiarized with the interface and shortcut keys, a basic play can
be created in less than 3 minutes.
The support of untethered controllers such as wireless Xbox con-
troller was a huge plus to the keyboard and mouse in playing back
the gameplays during training session, as the coach can hold the
controller and stand behind the student trainee, watching every
move he makes. Newly introduced recording function helps the
coaches to record simulations with voice-overs, which easily be-
come training material for repetitive one-on-one training.
4 User Evaluation
We have conducted user evaluations in order to quantify the ef-
fectiveness of the VR training specifically for American football
training. 17 football players, who all play the quarterback position
ranging from 7th grade to collegiate juniors, were recruited for this
evaluation. The goal was to focus on each subject’s ability to make
pre-snap reads, and to correctly identify the best receiver to throw
the ball at, which describes in a nutshell what quarterbacks do on a
passing play.
10 trial plays were designed by a professional football coach for the
assessment. Each subject wears Oculus DK-1 HMD with SIDEKIQ
helmet view enabled, so that he virtually sees what the quarterback
sees on the field. The assessment requires each subject watch all
trial plays in a randomized order. The coach is seated next to the
subject and controls the game playback using a Xbox controller
while watching the cloned view of the HMD. This allows the coach
to observe where the subject was looking when he makes the pass-
ing decision.
The coach starts the gameplay at the very beginning with the forma-
tion of 22 players (or a subset of the players relevant to the assess-
 of trials in a randomized order, followed by brief lectures from the
coach after each trial. The lecture is to help each subject understand
the answer, for example explaining why pass to receiver A not re-
ceiver B, accompanied by rewinding the gameplay to the moment of
ball passing. We have observed a very positive learning experience
from all the subjects, and were able to get good retention rate (88%
on day 2, 76% on day 3) for the assessment. Subjects have all given
feedback after the trial describing the study super cool, very realis-
tic and extremely interesting, which was very well received given
the fact that virtual reality technology is highly popular particularly
among young kids.
The user evaluation shows that the majority of the subjects were
more capable or correctly answering the assessment questions at
the end of day 3 compared to day 1, with scores measuring on aver-
age 30% overall improvement among all subjects. Certain subjects
have improved their decision making by as much as 60%, includ-
ing improvement in pre-snap reads and in-game decision making.
Figure 6 illustrates how each subject’s score has changes on each
day. Figure 7 is the box-and-whisker diagram from the collected
assessment scores, overlaid with a green line showing the standard
deviation of the scores on each day.

Figure 4: Top: design of the interface with minimalistic UI el-

ements, which makes it easier for non-computer savvy football
coaches to create plays. Bottom: helmet view mode enabled for
Oculus, simulating exactly what the player sees on the field.

ment), and playback continues until a few seconds into post-snap

when the perfect moment comes up for passing the ball. The sub-
ject must immediately identify the best receiver to throw the ball at,
within a 3-second window after the question was asked, and earns 1 Figure 6: Result of our user evaluation over a 3-day study of 17
point if answered correctly. Failure to identify the correct receiver, student athletes. The lines indicate how each subject’s score has
or failure to answer the question within the 3-second window, in changed on each day, with blue bars showing the mean score on
both cases no point is earned. The 3-second limit is because de- each day.
laying a pass too long can give defenders time to block off space
and the passing angle, and miss the passing window. Each trial was

Standard deviation (green line)

designed that the subject must select the best possible answer (or  
answers) from a list of 4 choices. 6 trials out of 10 are single-choice

questions. The remaining 4 trials each has two correct answers, and
Assessment scores

an answer is considered correct if the subject picks either one from 

the two correct choices. 


The subjects were invited to participate the assessment over a 3-
 
day training session. Each day the subjects go through the same set


 
  
GD\ GD\ GD\

Figure 7: Analysis of the scores collected. Box-and-whisker di-

agram shows the assessment scores for each day, with an overlaid
green line showing the standard deviation of the scores on each day.

It is worth mentioning that both the standard deviation (SD) of

scores and the inter-quartile range (IQR) from box plot went up
from day 1 to day 2, but dropped to lowest on day 3. IQR is a
Figure 5: Two trainees being evaluated using Oculus Dk1 during measure that indicates the extent to which the central 50% of val-
our user study. ues within the dataset are dispersed (vertical height of each box in
Figure 7). Considering the relatively small sample size, IQR in this
case could be a more effective indicator than SD in measuring how
tightly the subject scores are bunched around the average score.
We believe the spike measured in day 2 is a result of the transition
period from traditional football training to VRtraining through the
3-day assessment, subjects may simply need time to fully adjust to
the immersive VR training experience.
One of our most successful stories is KJ Costello, a long-term quar-
terback trainee coached by Nate Longshore. KJ recently completed
25 out of 44 passes for 417 yards and 4 touchdowns within one
game and made himself one of the hottest recruits in the US. As a
pioneer in VR training, coach Longshore firmly believes SIDEKIQ
has substantially contributed to KJ’s success in getting the men-
tal preparations and repetitions. “Playing quarterback, experience
is everything.” says Costello, “In the seconds before the ball snaps,
there are hundreds of variables the quarterback must handle and an-
alyze. The more defenses you read, the faster you get.” VR training
effectively bridges the gap between game film/whiteboard excises
and the actual perspective view experience the player expects on
the field.
5 Media Coverage
As more and more schools started to adopt SIDEKIQ VR training,
we have attracted coverages from major media channels such as
CBS Thursday Night Football 8, one of the two highest viewed
football prime-time shows in the US, “Le Tube” on Canal Plus in
France, and technology blogs including Engadget [8] and such [10]
[15]. Figure 9 shows a one-on-one training session led by coach
Longshore in our CAVE-like platform EON Icube during the CBS
interview.
Figure 8: SIDEKIQ attracted media coverages from major TV
channels: CBS Thursday Night Football (left) and “Le Tube” on
Canal+ (right).
Figure 9: A one-on-one training session led by coach Longshore
in our CAVE-like setup EON Icube during the CBS interview.
6 Overcome training time limits and injuries
There are regulations regarding the maximum on-field training time
allowed per week for each team. For example according to NCAA
[1], players may not participate on-field training that exceeds 4
hours per day, 20 hours per week in-season and 8 hours per week
off-season. Compared to the traditional method of using playbooks,
VR training simply allows the students to be trained more effi-
ciently within the same amount of time. NFL recently announced
each team is limited to a total of 14 full-contact padded practices
during regular season, in an attempt to lower brain trauma expo-
sure. A significant benefit of VR training is to provide trainees the
ability to keep practicing the mental preparation without the need
of gathering a number of players for on-field practice. Another
huge benefit from VR training is the prevention of injuries from on-
field training, and to effectively and proactively reduce the repeated
physical impacts especially to the player’s head. SIDEKIQ was in-
vited to attend President Obama’s White House Healthy Kids and
Safe Sports Concussion Summit 2014, an attempt to raise aware-
ness on preventions of sports-related concussions. VR training is
one of the most practical and cost-effective means to achieve the
goal.
6.1 Conclusion and Future Work
In this work we have presented our American football virtual train-
ing application and showed the effectiveness of the VR training
through a 3-day user evaluation with student athletes.
As future work, we are conducting the second phase study in
partnership with major college football teams in the US such as
Duke University, to evaluate SIDEKIQ through a large quantity of
trainees with control groups. Figure 10 shows SIDEKIQ running at
Duke DiVE, a 6-wall CAVE system. We are also integrating more
effective scoring mechanism [16] to allows better assessment of the
trainees in various training scenarios. These studies will involve
control groups to evaluate skill improvement from the use of VR
verses traditional training methods.
Figure 10: SIDEKIQ running in the 6-wall Duke DiVE.
Acknowledgments: the authors would like to thank all participants
in the user evaluation.
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