There are thousands of ways available to take stats; laptops, iPads, iPhones, flow charts, etc.
The best, without doubt in my opinion, are the Ribbon Stats we developed for use at Heathfield High School. They’re designed to be easy to use for everyone from the coach to the parents.
The Ribbon Stats sheets can be downloaded free here. You need the front page, optional rotation sheets and the back notes page.
I always kept the back notes page from each match for the next year’s planning.
These back pages were like gold to me.
Why bother with stats at all? Simple: after any match there are three conflicting opinions on how a player went:
- The player’s view
- The coach’s view
- The stats
I seemed to find that the boys often had (in my opinion) an inflated view on their performance, while girls often had a negative view on their performance.
It is also very important to realise that your view as a coach is often coloured by the importance of when things happened. Often I looked at the Ribbon stats and thought, “wow, they played better than I thought”, or “wow, why did we keep setting Smithy?”
The match reality is somewhere in the middle of these three views, like somewhere in the middle of the triangle. This is why stats are important.
Perhaps the most important factor in using Ribbon stats is that they are a great tool to show Mary that her serving is getting better, and “hey Paul, look at your hitting stats, you had your best game ever”.