The Hayne Plane lands at NSWIS for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Academy

NRL Superstar Jarryd Hayne and Australia’s leading professional Call of Duty eSports team, MindFreak have pushed eSports to the next level at the NSW Institute of Sport designed ‘Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Academy’.

One of the fastest growing industries in the world, eSports is also quickly gaining momentum in Australia. Ahead of the launch of the Call of Duty®: Infinite Warefare on November 4, NSWIS was given the challenge to create a specialised training academy for Hayne and the MindFreak team to help them push the limit through a series of physical and mental challenges.

Developed in order to enhance the skills of eSports professionals, the participants endured a series of intense trials that included:

• The performance stressor test used a light board to measure the participants’ reaction times and hand-eye co-ordination, an exercise that was repeated after a physical drill, to demonstrate the effects of fatigue.
• To combat the negative impact of stress, participants were placed in an extreme stress environment underwater, allowing NSWIS’s performance psychologist to teach them stress management strategies to quieten the mind and optimise performance.
• In the Mindroom they were taught them how to improve attentional skills by tracking multiple moving objects in a 3D field.

CHECK THIS: We were given a challenge to create the ‘Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Academy’, here's what happened: https://t.co/4zoQCfjw1v pic.twitter.com/D2YfeluSQH

— NSW Institute of Sport (@NSWIS) November 1, 2016

While the Infinite Warfare Academy was an undertaking out of the ordinary for the Institute, Lead Performance Psychologist Dr Mike Martin highlighted the importance of undertaking the best possible training and preparation, no matter what the competition.

“With any elite level performance, comes the need for top tier training and preparation, no matter the discipline,” Martin said.

“Our team of leading experts in physiology, psychology and high performance developed a training program that targeted tactical awareness, superior mental performance under pressure and improved decision making and targeting accuracy.

“We look forward to seeing how MindFreak benefit from what we’ve taught them. Hopefully it gives them a competitive edge in major competitions.”

Similar to the traditional sports that NSWIS specialises in, eGaming has major world competitions annually and for MindFreak the big dance each year is the Call of Duty World League Championships. Captain of the team Mitchell Mader said that the work done at NSWIS would assist the team take on the world’s best in gruelling battles of skill and endurance.

“When we compete in the Call of Duty World League Championships, we come head-to-head with fierce international teams who we play for up to twelve hours at a time,” Mader said.

“The skills we learnt at the Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Academy will be extremely beneficial in these moments of high pressure.”

However, perhaps the true litmus test for the Infinite Warfare Academy was the reaction from Hayne, who takes a keen interest in eGaming.

Prior to his time at NSWIS, Hayne visited Australia’s first astronaut test centre, an ode to the story set of the new game that extends beyond earth’s atmosphere, before saying that he was eager to sample how his own training would stack up against the requirements of the Academy.

“It was unreal to witness the amount of preparation that is needed to go into space at the Spaceflight Academy and to see how my own sports training applies within the eSports environment at NSWIS,” Hayne enthused.
“The highlight was definitely hanging out with Australia’s best Call of Duty players and picking their brains on the game to improve mine.”