Calgary’s Skillstorm Puts World’s Best In Coaches Pocket
Love for coaching, the world’s leading sports brand, and Apple, all converge at Skillstorm to spawn new benchmarks for interactive learning.
Colin Innes often walks, or perhaps runs, between the practical and the sensational on a daily basis. As the founder of Skillstorm stands in one of the most advanced video editing studios in western Canada, his first thought is to point visitors to a reliable relic that harkens back to the early days of Apple.
“This is the second LaserWriter Plus ever to come into Canada and it still works”, says Innes with the zeal of an archaeologist at a museum dinosaur display.
“It has a production date of September 1986 on it, and whenever I have anyone in from Apple they usually pull out their cameras. I have a bunch of other vintage Apple gear that uses the old AppleTalk connections, and it’s a testament to Apple that I can hook it up to our network and can still exchange files with technology that is close to 20 years old. You see that happen and you realize how ’with it’ Apple really always has been.”
...it’s a testament to Apple that I can hook it up to our network and can still exchange files with technology that is close to 20 years old.
Skillstorm is a leading-edge sports training video production company that very much evolved from Innes’ love for soccer, coaching kids, and Apple. Today, soccer is the biggest participation sport in Canada, and the world’s leading amateur and professional sport. Colin grew up an avid soccer player and played in high school and college. He had a successful career in the printing industry during which he built businesses in Canada and England. While in England, his son Brent was very involved in playing community soccer. When he returned to Calgary in 1992, he realized that there was a wealth of drills and coaching knowledge that had never been available to Canadian soccer associations, that could really benefit Canada’s youth.
Through his involvement as a minor league coach in Calgary, he met Thomas Neindorf, a professional German coach living in Calgary, who began helping Colin coach his son’s team. At the same time, Neindorf was preparing Calgary’s own Owen Hargreaves for his place on one of the world’s most respected sports franchises, FC Bayern Munich. The FC Bayern Munich Youth Academy is the preeminent soccer training facility for youth in the world. They trained Hargreaves and helped launch him to stardom in both Germany and England. Through Owen Hargreaves’ endorsement and Neindorf’s assistance, they negotiated exclusive access to the FC Bayern Munich Youth Academy. Niendorf went to Germany with a video crew to capture terabytes of video showing all the youth training drills employed by the academy across its various age groups.
And so Skillstorm was born, and it is set to establish new international benchmarks for sports training. Innes and his team developed an extensive library of soccer training videos available to view and download on a subscription basis from their website. They have customers worldwide, from major companies sponsoring their countries youth in sports, to most minor soccer federations and associations.
“This is the perfect training tool for players aged 6 to 19,” says Innes. With a couple of mouse-clicks, boys and girls can access top-level drills and skill demonstrations from the world-class FC Bayern Munich Youth Academy. Skillstorm will become the solution to help coaches and players improve their soccer knowledge for both practices and games, so coaches’ technical knowledge matches their enthusiasm. A young player can watch top-class stars like Owen Hargreaves demonstrate the right way to dribble, pass and shoot.
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