Player stats
I'm pretty stoked about my new system for keeping track of my team's season stats. This image shows the new system on top, the old on the bottom. My old system was pretty much just all about me: who I played, how the games went, total innings, etc. Whereas my for my teammates, I would just scribble their stats in between rows. For example, if my teammate named John Doe who is a SL5 beat a SL3 with a score of 4-1, it would get written "JD5 W 4-1 vs a 3". This is all fine from week to week, but at the end of the season when I want to figure out how everybody did, it's a total pain going back through all that handwriting, line by line, searching for a given player's initials. I end up having to draw a grid on another sheet of paper and do a lot of extra tallying. So for my new system I started out fresh by giving everybody their own column with 15 boxes, one box for each week. And they're simple to fill in: a W or an L, the score of the match, and the opponent's skill level. It's much less writing and therefore much cleaner. Kudos to anybody who can guess what the X's and dashes are at the bottom of each box.As for mid-season changes in skill level, I've overlooked including a place to make a note of it. Because the ratio of averages of my players' skill levels vs that of their opponents is significant. It's always been important for me to know that if somebody on my team had a bad season I can go in and see how tough their opponents were, and vice versa. Finally, and just as important, will be the total number of games won/lost vs simple match record. Using myself as an example, my match record is 3-0 this season (batting one thousand), but my total games won/lost record during those matches is 11-4 (733).
Sure, with this new system I sacrifice some detail about how I played each of my matches, such as any early 8s, whether I started out weak but rallied to come back for the win, etc. Anyway, I'd be curious to know if any other captains in the league do this end-of-season, highly detailed player stats report. I've heard of captains making photo copies of the scoresheets, or even using carbon paper. But that's mainly just to safeguard against any potential point-keeping errors made by the APA league operator (very rare). There's got to be somebody out there who brings a laptop each week and enters shot-by-shot data into a spreadsheet. Or am I the biggest pool geek in the city?
posted by Cary at 2/26/2009
1 Comments:
Cary,
Interesting post. I highlighted it on Pool Student's Blog at http://www.poolstudent.com, along with posts from several other pool related sites. I've tried to steer some traffic your way, asking them to leave comments, but apparently, so far nothing.
As to your question, I think what data you collect and how you collect it should depend on what you want to do with it after you have it.
If you just want to be able to let your teammates know how they did this season, then noting games won/lost and matches won/lost might do it. If instead you're more interested in data a captain might benefit from, the recording SLs of each player, who won and by how much might be more appropriate. You might be able to learn, for example, which strategy works best over the long run, having matches as equal as possible in SL, having most matches with the SL favoring your side, or where most matches have SLs that favor the opponent.
Lost of captains think they know the best strategy, but how many have data to back it up.
To throw one last wrinkle into it, my experience (limited i admit) with APA and other leagues is that many people sandbag. You might also want to record your views as to the "real" SLs of the people, since it could give you a different result.
I hope you get the answer to this question you're looking for, and I wish you and your blog the very best.
John
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