An astrophysicist and a team of university scientists have used big data to help a GAA club win promotion to senior football for the first time in its 135-year history.
Eamon McGleenan plays for Armagh side O'Connell's GAC in Tullysaran, but he's also an astrophysics PHD student at Queen's University in Belfast where he specialises in sports analytics.
He used tracker equipment, more commonly used in the English Premier League and by intercounty GAA squads, to monitor the performances of his teammates.
Over the course of five months, scientists at Queen's analysed 550 million individual measurements from the Tullysaran players using GPS hardware developed by a Newry-based company.
The team's management used the information to tweak squad sessions and develop bespoke training regimes for particular players.
Sometimes players were asked to up their work rate, on other occasions they were told to rest.
Mr McGleenan says the appliance of science quickly started to pay off.
"The sign of a fit team is that they go right to the end, and we saw that with ourselves this year.
"We were pushing on in the last ten minutes of every game. From that you just gain confidence that you are fit enough to see games out and win them."
He said the day the club won promotion to the first division and to senior championship was an emotional one.
Team manager Ciaran O'Riordan said promotion had been a massive achievement assisted by the use of the data harvested from the players.
"Just using these stats has brought a whole new level of competition in training.
"You can see who's the quickest in the team, you can see who's working hardest and it puts a bit of a marker on people's backs to up the ante if they're lagging behind."
He said some of the players needed a little convincing but once they began to see the benefits of the data analysis they quickly all bought in.
And the reward was the historic achievement of senior status for the first time in well over a century.
"It's hard to put into words just how much it means to the parish and the whole community.
"Many great managers and players have toiled away for years doing great work at underage, building the foundations to allow us to be in this position.
"We're just the lucky few who've finally got us to where we wanted to be and where we believe we deserve to be."
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