The Need for Better Scorekeeping
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Loading ...While writing the last post about energy demands in ultimate1, it struck me that there is a LOT of potential data to be mined just looking at scoring trends, play durations, etc, but the data isn’t there currently–nobody really tracks that sort of thing (at least, not publicly).
We need more descriptive score keeping than the simple “X-X” final total. In much the same way that baseball scores by innings, or tennis has set-by-set counts (or really any sport has at least some temporal division), ultimate needs something more robust to help keep the fan clued in. I’ve broken it down below into a few phases based on ease of incorporation:
Phase 1, (I hope) obviously, is reporting scores at halftime. You get this all the time in written-up recaps; why not on score reporter or tournament result sites?
I’m not saying it has to be done all the time–hell, at plenty of tournaments even final scores go unreported–but at bigger tournaments that have a fan following, it’s the bare minimum to be done to build something of a “box score” and give an at-a-glance view of how the game went. Did team X cruise out to a big halftime lead before blowing it at the end? Did team A stay neck and neck with the #1 seed through the first half and fall back to earth in the second? These are stories that are out there, but often go un(der)reported.
I’m thinking a parenthetical–i.e., Team A 15(8) – Team B 12(2)–would be pretty simple and easy to incorporate into the current SRT structure.
Phase 2 is generating a score report that can really capture the flow of scoring throughout a full game, and I have just the method in mind:
Enter The Hardball Times’ sparklines (I’m amending to scorelines for ultimate’s use).
So much of what makes games into exciting stories is the string of breaks, rises and falls in momentum, or the hard-fought back-and-forth matches, and this metric would capture it perfectly–long gaps in the scoreline denote a string of breaks, whereas the back-and-forth games would have a, dare I say it, beautiful symmetry to their scorelines. Could you imagine how ridiculous the scoreline would’ve looked for Fury’s massive comeback from 10-1 against Riot in the UPA finals last year?2
Even if the scoreline doesn’t make it into mainstream use anytime soon, I imagine it’d be very useful for teams that keep any kind of stats to track their scores (if it isn’t done already)–rather than wonder “did we start off with a 2-0 or 3-0 lead before their zone shut us down?” you can look at the evidence conclusively, and with a few short notes during the game, see concretely what impact your adjustments had on the flow of the game. You could write in the score at set intervals (every 5 ticks for instance) to make it a little easier to track at a glance while still keeping the flow-tracking intact.
The other component I’d like to see go along with this is game time.
Even without shifting to a stopped-time dynamic it’d be possible to track active game duration from pull to last goal caught (or hard cap horn), using a designated scorekeeper with a stopwatch. This would give some indication of, for instance, team A’s offensive dominance with 20-second points while team B struggles to the tune of a minute per score, a prelude to team A’s eventual string of breaks (or team B’s unlikely upset despite the lower efficiency). You might see a break at 10 seconds of play, which would suggest a callahan off the pull or a short turn and quick strike. Even a simple notation of, say, 5-minute play intervals on the scoreline would help to give some idea of how rapid or drawn-out the points were.
Phase 3 moves beyond scorekeeping itself and incorporates stats. This is my baseball bias coming in to play of course, but similar to how at bats are tracked along with hits/runs/RBIs/HRs etc, you could similarly chart points played along with goals caught/assists thrown/Ds (and maybe at a high level, things like hucks and completion % and touches as well). A hockey-like +/-, if refined to account for starting on O or D, would also be a cool stat to see.
Why it’s worth it
Each level takes a greater amount of work to pull off, but each brings with it a greater amount of clarity on “what-happened” syndrome that plagues ultimate today. Outside of following real-time updates, we’re left to get the story secondhand, reading sparse/biased RSD and blog coverage, and unless we know people involved, are generally left unsatisfied. Web coverage is awesome–video feeds, etc–but when you compare the logistics of setting all that up to simply putting a little more effort into score keeping, this is a pretty simple/easy way to boost the profile of tournaments and teams to the casual (and passionate) observer.
What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
1I wrote this post the same time I finished the last one; I’m posting this earlier than scheduled due to a false-start posting that put this in some RSS readers on Sunday.
2I had to dig to find the UPA championship site and then the recap to get that information. Score reporter? Could’ve been a tight game that Fury pulled away at the end of, for all we know. Certainly doesn’t suggest the spectacular roller coaster. Even the halftime score of 8-1 would have said a LOT more than simply the final score.
Hey Matt. I'm about 95% done an iphone app that will do a lot of what you said. The first release will not have net access though, so there won't be reporting going on, but all of those stats are tracked. The only reason I haven't included that feature yet is that the upa is overhauling their IT backend. After they're done, I hope to work with them to get the phones submitting scores and stats dynamically. Displaying the stats on a website will be up to them or some other website that I could collaborate with. I've been talking with ffindr.com about this. It's a lot of work though.
Say hi to Iku for me and my wife Kumi.
-Chad
if you want to contact me it's bullale at gmail.
-Chad
Matt, when I saw the title of this post on my feed I immediately thought of the number of times I've spent a minute between points with the opposition captain trying to remember the score!
I like Phase 2, but if you remember the score reporting system they had for Worlds last year they basically kept track of the order of goals, and also with timestamps (not sure how reliable they were as far as accuracy goes). Combine that with Chad's iPhone app and that would be a sweet setup. One improvement I would have made on the World's site is a real-time feed of goals scored across all games.
With regards to Phase 3, I posted my thoughts on effective stats to keep a while ago – http://ballaratultimate.blogspot.com/2008/12/keeping-in-game-statistics.html
Like Chad, I've been thinking about making an iphone app for stats. Ultistats for the palm was great, and with the power on mobile devices these days… we could very quickly build up an immense amount of data and share it. These ideas should be easy to implement when you have the data.
There are a lot of great ideas in there! I think in the curent state of elite Ultimate, the main innovations would be the benefit to team coaches derived from score sparklines whereas for the fans, the completion % stats, scores and assists would be great to see who to watch out for and who are the star players besides those who are already well known by name. I'm personally most interested in what this will do for raising the profile of tournements. I play Ultimate in the UK and would love to see any of what you have written about implemented!
I really like the scorelines graphic. Really shows the flow of the game well. We'll be using it for all our scrimmages here in Hawaii to see if it is useful.
-Mark
Simon,
I wasn't able to follow worlds as it was going on (or at least, wasn't checking their score reporter system)–do you have a link to the site where they kept scores like that? I'd be interested to give it a look.
As a follow-up for stats talkers,
Gwen Ambler pointed me in the direction of an old UPA stats-keeping committee's Yahoo group.
Some interesting commentary there, but so short-lived! At any rate, it might save aspiring statisticians from re-inventing the wheel. Definitely worth a look.
I'm midway through The Game by Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin. It's a must read for anyone interested in baseball statistics, and imformative for anyone interested in general sports statistics.
Anyway. The authors make clear the importance of context. There are two parts to context, how you group what you're measuring, and the conditions at that moment. To keep with the baseball example they measure by at bats and the conditions they take account of are what position runners are in and number of outs (base/out state).
The point of this is, before any effective statistics measure can be developed we have to determine how to break Ultimate down into individual 'moments'. Do we divide by minutes? throws? what is one unit of Ultimate? And we have to figure out how to establish context. The easy one is stall count. More difficult is disc location. How do we break down the field into recordable chunks?
Food for thought.
JIm,
I'd argue that we need any statistics before we get into any effective statistics.
You raise good points…but I think we're a long long ways from being able to take that kind of information down. Baseball is easier to track because the sport is inherently discrete (and even then, they have dedicated, trained scorekeepers, to say nothing of people who track ball flight vectors and more advanced data). If you look at a basketball or soccer, free-flowing sports that are more similar to ultimate, it becomes a lot more difficult to annotate everything that happens.
Not to say that this sort of stat-keeping and analysis isn't possible–I think, perhaps with review of game tape, you could do the sort of stuff you suggest. However, the time investment make this a little tough. It's important not to get too caught up in the statistics–you look at things like W's for a pitcher in baseball, which have something to do with the pitcher himself but also a lot to do with things beyond his control, and we don't want to fall into the same trap of ascribing value to what is oftentimes an arbitrary statistic.
Perhaps the key is not acquiring as much information about the context as possible (which is time-consuming), but identifying what the most important parts of the context are–this happens already to some extent, when people choose to make distinctions between hucks and short passes and break passes when they track throwing, for instance. Getting the most "bang for the buck" is key to balancing the desire to keep effective stats with the fact that none of us do this sport professionally.
For the fan though, I don't know that stats need to be "effective." You'll note I didn't throw out OBP or OPS as examples for baseball–they're informative statistics, but in the context of a single game we really want to know who hit the ball and how hard and how often. Derived statistics, I think, come into a larger role when we look at stats over the course of a season or perhaps tournament, but seeing as we rarely take stats for a single game (again, publicly), it's a bit premature to look beyond that.
Matt,
Scoreline from Worlds final…
http://www.wugc2008.com/game/O802
Score keepers at College Nationals this year were supposed to keep track of some of the things you mention in Phase 3- goals, assists, Ds, and turns. Who knows what the tournament officials actually did with these sheets though…
Simon,
Thanks for the link to the Worlds final. The layout seems geared more towards real-time followers–I find myself really wishing the score was displayed in the columns as the game was ongoing (e.g., 0-0, 1-0, 1-1, and so on) for somebody either jumping in midway or watching after the fact. Even just some coloring of the table–maybe USA scores blue and CAN scores red–would make for a cool effect and an easy(easier) at-a-glance indication of who's been in control.
Anon,
They kept stats at '08 Nationals too if I remember correctly…come to think of it, I wonder what happened to them too. I'm thinking I threw at least a few goals against 'Zona in pre-quarters, it'd be nice to see that concretely. I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to give the stats a look either…
nokia were a sponsor of worlds in finland and the volunteer scorekeepers at every field had a phone to post score updates to frisbee central as they happened. i'm not exactly sure what system they used, but i am suspicious it was my manual text message.