 The Richmond Kickers, the longest-running professional soccer club in the U.S., have once again raised the bar for innovation in player development. Fresh off their 2024 USL Academy Cup finals appearance and South Atlantic Division title win, which secured them an automatic bid to the USL Academy Finals this December, the Kickers have become the first professional club to integrate DarkHorse.AI’s cutting-edge video analysis technology with Beyond Pulse’s Smart Belts for their USL Academy team. This pioneering collaboration is set to redefine how player performance is analyzed and coached, setting a new standard for youth soccer.

Massive Time-Saving Performance Analysis:

 With DarkHorse.AI’s powerful technology, thousands of video clips are analyzed in seconds, rather than hours. When combined with Beyond Pulse’s physiological data, coaches gain a comprehensive view of player performance, unlocking deeper insights that lead to faster player growth and improved competitive readiness. This gives coaches more time to focus on team preparation and strategy instead of spending hours on video analysis.

 Advanced data and video insights are empowering the Kickers to elevate team performance both within the USL Academy and in preparation for future competitions. The integration offers a holistic approach, allowing coaches to make data-driven decisions that fine-tune player and team strategy.

Detailed data from each player enables coaches to design personalized training sessions, optimizing individual athlete development while ensuring health and well-being are prioritized. This tailored approach maximizes performance while minimizing burnout.

By closely tracking key metrics such as heart rate, distance covered, speed, and workload, the coaching staff can make informed decisions about recovery, injury prevention, and long-term player health. This ensures that player wellness is at the heart of the team’s success strategy.

Mika Elovaara, Richmond Kickers' Head Assistant Coach and Director of Player Development and Methodology, expressed his excitement about the partnership: “I’m thrilled to expand our collaboration with Beyond Pulse to our U20 USL Academy team. As we continue to set the standard for player development, trusted partners like Beyond Pulse are critical to our success. Their relentless innovation, coupled with DarkHorse.AI’s cutting-edge video analysis, ensures our players receive the best possible experience on and off the field.”

Billy Brush, CEO and Founder of DarkHorse.AI, shared: “As a former coach, I’ve seen firsthand how every player has a unique story. By combining physiological, technical, and video data, we can tell the whole story, enabling coaches to better support their players. Mika Elovaara’s dedication to player development is unmatched, and this decision cements his role as a leader in youth soccer. We’re excited to partner with the Kickers and Beyond Pulse, and we look forward to watching their success unfold at the USL Academy Finals this December.”

Matt Pell, CEO of Beyond Pulse, echoed this enthusiasm: “This partnership not only redefines how we monitor player performance but also showcases the Richmond Kickers’ commitment to cultivating talent. By joining forces with DarkHorse.AI and the Kickers' coaching staff, we’re pioneering personalized training and optimized player development. Together, we’re pushing the boundaries of sports technology and helping players excel on and off the field.”

The integration of Beyond Pulse and DarkHorse.AI marks a major milestone in sports technology, transforming the way teams approach performance analysis and player development. The Richmond Kickers remain dedicated to staying at the forefront of innovation, ensuring their players have the best tools available for success and growth.

To learn more about this revolutionary integration, contact Billy Brush at billy@thedarkhorse.ai.

The Richmond Kickers are the longest continuously-operating professional soccer club in the U.S., committed to strengthening community connections by offering an authentic, joyful American soccer experience. For more information, visit 

DarkHorse.AI is the world’s largest patented AI sports network, transforming the way athletes create highlight reels, gain exposure, and leverage predictive analytics. Learn more at 

Beyond Pulse is a leader in wearable technology designed for athletes of all ages. Their mission is to inspire a lifelong love of activity while empowering coaches to improve training sessions with actionable data. Discover more at 

DarkHorse AI Collaboration with Richmond Kickers and Beyond Pulse

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Richmond Kickers USL Academy Team First to Implement DarkHorse.AI and Beyond Pulse Technical & Physiological Data Integration

 DarkHorse AI Launches v3.0, Revolutionizing the Coaches’ Experience for Youth Soccer Clubs DarkHorse AI is proud to announce the release of its new v3.0 club DNA user experience, designed specifically for youth soccer clubs. This latest update was developed with extensive input from the market, including direct feedback from coaches and club directors, to tackle the most pressing challenges in youth soccer today. With v3.0, coaches will have the ability to measure both team and individual player performance more effectively, paving the way for a data-driven, revolutionary approach to player development.

Through close partnerships with top clubs like Mustang, Lonestar, and Richmond United, DarkHorse AI has created solutions focused on real-world issues faced by youth soccer coaches. v3.0 addresses these problems through innovative technology and user experience feedback. Here’s how:

Automated Video for Individual Player Development Planning (IDP)

Youth soccer coaches often struggle to balance their time between analyzing videos and giving personalized attention to player development. v3.0 changes that. By automating video analysis, coaches can now focus on evidence-based discussions rather than manually clipping videos. This process not only becomes more efficient but also ensures that player development plans stick. Coaches can better engage players by reviewing key moments with the data they need to support their recommendations. 

Data-Driven Functional Group Analysis and Ranking System

The new intelligent ranking system leverages position-specific predictive analytics to measure each player’s contributions during a game. Coaches can now analyze players within functional groups and easily assess individual performance through a ranking system that evaluates their impact on the field. This data offers a clearer picture of how players contribute to team success, making it easier to tailor coaching efforts and prioritize development goals. 

The v3.0 release introduces the innovative “AI Coaching Board,” an interactive tool that helps coaches visualize and strategize using real-time player data. This tool allows coaches to quickly analyze tactical formations, such as 4-3-3, 4-4-2, or 3-5-2, and generate an optimized lineup based on available players and game-day conditions. By integrating data-driven insights with a coach’s preferences, the AI Coaching Board streamlines decision-making, saving time while ensuring the best tactical approach for success. This board will be a crucial asset for game preparation, review, and in-game adjustments, helping coaches elevate their teams’ performance. 

Club directors often juggle multiple teams and age groups but can’t be everywhere at once. v3.0 introduces a top 10 video summary feature that showcases 2.5 minutes of highlights from how your teams performed offensively and 2.5 minutes of lowlights on how opponents exposed your weaknesses. Paired with the most relevant KPIs, this well-designed algorithm makes it easy for directors to stay informed and make informed decisions without needing to watch full matches. 

New Breakthrough Stats – Exclusive to DarkHorse AI  

As part of this release, DarkHorse AI introduces two new performance metrics never before seen in the soccer analytics marketplace: 

 – Measuring a player’s ability to check their shoulder before receiving the ball, a critical skill for vision and decision-making on the pitch. 

 – Tracking key runs that unbalance the opposition, such as diagonal and overlapping runs, which create space and opportunities for the ball carrier to attack or pass effectively. 

These metrics provide deeper insight into a player’s tactical awareness and ability to influence the game, offering coaches a new level of detail for developing their players. 

The Journey to v3.0: Nine Months of Dedication 

The development of v3.0 was a labor of love and innovation, shaped by months of user experience feedback, design wireframes, and testing. This effort culminated in a 23-day trip to India, where DarkHorse AI’s team of gritty engineers—many of whom have been with the company since its founding in 2019—worked tirelessly to bring this vision to life. 

At DarkHorse AI, we believe that v3.0 is just the beginning of a new era in youth soccer performance and development. We are committed to building a community and platform that empowers coaches, clubs, and players to grow and achieve their full potential. We hope that our innovations will inspire the rest of the market to strive for excellence, ensuring the betterment of football for all. 

 as we continue to evolve and shape the future of youth soccer.

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DarkHorse Launches Coach UX v3.0

In the fast-evolving world of digital media, the need for scalable and efficient video processing solutions is paramount. Whether it's content delivery platforms, media companies, or any service dealing with large volumes of video data, managing and processing video workloads can be both challenging and resource-intensive. This solution has a profound impact on the Darkhorse platform, helping athletes and their parents access videos regardless of their location. Whether they’re sitting on a small island like San Juan Island off the coast of the U.S. or in the heart of New York City, they can seamlessly fetch and analyze video content, empowering their journey in sports development with reliable, high-performance media access.To meet these demands, we’ve architected a dynamic, pull-based video processing system leveraging Google Cloud's robust suite of services, including Google Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Cloud Scheduler, and Cloud Functions. This blog post dives into the technical details of how we built this system, the challenges we addressed, and the innovations we implemented to achieve scalability, efficiency, and cost optimization.

The Core Challenge: Managing High-Volume Video Processing

Video processing involves multiple computationally heavy tasks such as encoding, transcoding, thumbnail generation, and more. These tasks need to be handled efficiently to meet user expectations for timely content delivery. Our key challenges were:

Scalability: The system must handle spikes in video processing requests during peak times without degradation in performance.

Cost-Efficiency: The infrastructure must scale down during periods of low demand to minimize operational costs.

Task Management: We needed an efficient mechanism to distribute video processing tasks and ensure they were processed promptly.

Designing the Solution: A Pull-Based Architecture

To address these challenges, we designed a pull-based architecture that integrates several Google Cloud services to create a highly scalable and flexible video processing pipeline. Here's a detailed breakdown of our solution:

 1. Google Pub/Sub: Asynchronous Task Distribution

Google Pub/Sub is the messaging backbone of our system. Whenever a new video needs processing, a message containing all necessary metadata (e.g., video URL, processing parameters, priority levels) is published to a specific Pub/Sub topic. This decouples the process of task creation from task execution, allowing our system to handle varying loads more gracefully.

Each video processing request is encapsulated in a Pub/Sub message, enabling us to queue, distribute, and manage these tasks asynchronously. By utilizing Pub/Sub's push and pull subscription models, we opted for a pull-based approach where processing tasks are pulled from the queue as resources become available, preventing system overload.

2. Google Cloud Scheduler: Regular Polling and Task Triggering

Our pull-based mechanism is powered by Google Cloud Scheduler, a fully managed cron-like service that triggers jobs at regular intervals. We configured Cloud Scheduler to run every few minutes to poll our Pub/Sub subscription for new messages.

The scheduler executes a custom script or API that pulls a batch of messages from the Pub/Sub subscription. This controlled polling mechanism allows us to dictate how frequently our system checks for new tasks and helps in distributing workloads evenly across available processing resources.

3. Google Cloud Run Jobs: Containerized Video Processing

At the heart of our video processing pipeline are Google Cloud Run jobs. Cloud Run allows us to deploy containerized applications that automatically scale based on incoming requests. For video processing, each task is handled by an instance of a Cloud Run job, which processes the video as specified in the Pub/Sub message.

The benefits of using Cloud Run jobs include:

: Each video processing task runs in its own container, ensuring that tasks are isolated from each other, reducing the risk of cross-task interference.

: Cloud Run automatically scales the number of container instances based on demand, ensuring that we have enough processing power during peak times.

: By containerizing our processing logic, we can use any programming language, framework, or library that suits our needs, making the development and deployment process more agile.

4. Autoscaling with Google Cloud Functions: Dynamic Resource Management

To further optimize our system's performance, we implemented an autoscaler using Google Cloud Functions. This Cloud Function is also triggered by Cloud Scheduler, running every few minutes to assess the current system load.

The autoscaler function queries the Pub/Sub subscription to determine the number of pending messages (i.e., unprocessed video tasks). Based on the load, the autoscaler dynamically adjusts the number of active Cloud Run jobs:

: If the number of pending tasks exceeds a predefined threshold, the autoscaler increases the number of Cloud Run job instances, allowing more tasks to be processed concurrently.

: Conversely, if the load decreases, the autoscaler reduces the number of active instances to conserve resources and minimize costs.

The autoscaler function is a critical component of our system, ensuring that we always have the right amount of processing power available to meet demand without over-provisioning resources.

5. System Workflow: From Task Creation to Completion

To provide a comprehensive overview, let's walk through a typical workflow from task creation to completion in our video processing system:

1. Task Creation: When a new video processing request is generated (e.g., a user uploads a video that needs encoding), a message is published to the relevant Google Pub/Sub topic.

2. Task Polling: Cloud Scheduler triggers a polling process every few minutes, pulling new messages from the Pub/Sub subscription. Each message represents a video processing task.

3. Task Execution: Pulled messages are passed to Google Cloud Run jobs, which are automatically instantiated to process the videos. Each job reads the metadata from the Pub/Sub message, downloads the video from the provided URL, processes it according to the specified parameters, and uploads the processed video back to the designated storage.

4. Dynamic Scaling: The autoscaler function, triggered by another Cloud Scheduler job, checks the load by querying the number of unprocessed messages in Pub/Sub. If the load is high, it scales up the number of Cloud Run job instances. If the load decreases, it scales down the instances, ensuring efficient use of resources.

5. Task Completion: Once a video is processed, the Cloud Run job completes, and the processed video is made available for download or further use.

Our system was designed with the understanding that video processing requests might not arrive at a steady rate. We used the pull-based model to prevent the system from being overwhelmed during sudden spikes. The Cloud Run autoscaler and dynamic job scaling were essential in managing these bursts effectively.

By integrating the autoscaler function, we ensured that resources were only scaled up when absolutely necessary and scaled down during low-traffic periods. This approach minimized our operational costs, as we avoided the overhead associated with running idle instances.

We integrated Stackdriver Logging and Monitoring to keep track of job execution times, resource usage, and system health. This allowed us to quickly identify and resolve bottlenecks or issues in the processing pipeline.

Our architecture leverages the power of Google Cloud's managed services to create a dynamic, scalable, and cost-effective video processing system. By combining Google Cloud Run jobs with Pub/Sub, Cloud Scheduler, and a custom autoscaler function, we built a robust pipeline capable of handling fluctuating workloads while optimizing resource usage.

This pull-based mechanism not only meets our current video processing needs but also provides a flexible foundation for future enhancements. Whether we need to support new video formats, integrate additional processing steps, or scale to even higher volumes, our system is designed to adapt and grow with our requirements.

For organizations facing similar challenges in video processing or any other resource-intensive workloads, our approach demonstrates how Google Cloud's serverless and containerized offerings can be harnessed to build scalable, efficient, and cost-effective solutions.

13 October 2024 | 10 min read

13 October 2024 | 10 min read

10 October 2024 | 10 min read

09 September 2024 | 10 min read