National Performance Register – Secure access and on-the-go convenience

Case Study Overview

• Background: eta College wanted a mobile app for the National Performance Register (NPR) to give athletes and coaches access to performance benchmarks and results on the go.
• Challenge: The app needed to securely connect to an existing database while ensuring users could only access authorised performance data.
• Solution:Netgen developed a secure mobile app that integrates with the NPR database and uses user profiles to control access to athlete performance information.
• Outcome: Athletes and coaches can now securely view performance benchmarks and test results anytime, improving training insights and accessibility.

Something that we love at Netgen is when we get a project that is more than just one thing. When eta College – a longstanding client – came to us with the concept for the National Performance Register mobile app, we knew this would be an interesting project. The app would need to link up to the much larger database already hosted online, and access would need to be restricted or granted based on user profiles.

The National Performance Register (NPR) is a South African first and is powered by eta College. It’s a database for athletes that compares their performance stats to those of both local and international benchmarks for their sport and competitive level. Coaches and athletes use it to judge where they are in their training process for competitions.

The NPR was already an existing online database when Brad Searle of eta College came to us with the idea for the mobile app. Searle said they wanted a way for coaches and athletes to view the benchmarks and the results of their own tests while in training sessions or while on the go.

Athletes are tested by NPR representatives on areas such as endurance, flexibility, strength and agility. These results are then put into the database under the athlete’s unique identifier, and the stats are added to the benchmark equations. Each athlete tested is then given access to their own results and how they compare to the general stats. Athletes can nominate specific people – coaches, etc. – to also gain access to this information.

Our mobile app developers were tasked with creating a secure, mobile-friendly way to access this information. Users needed to be able to use their login credentials to access only the information that they were allowed to see. The stored data also needed to be tamper-proof to ensure the stats remained unchanged.

The initial phase of the NPR mobile app was rolled out in 2020, and we are looking forward to expanding on its capabilities in the future.