Netball Statistics

Statistics in junior sport have a bad reputation, and some of that reputation is deserved.

Used badly, numbers become a stick. They turn a twelve-year-old into a shooting percentage, they reward the players who already get the ball, and they hand parents a spreadsheet to argue with you about on a Sunday morning.

Used well, they do something much more interesting. They show a quiet player that she made more interceptions than anyone on court. They show a coach that the problem is not the shooters, it is that the ball never arrives in the circle in a usable position. They turn "I think we're improving" into something you can actually see across a season.

The difference is entirely in what gets measured and how it gets presented.

Every design decision on this comes back to one constraint.

Whoever is capturing the data is also doing something else.

They are coaching, or scoring, or managing a bench, or shouting encouragement, or dealing with a child who has just realised her shoelace is undone at the worst possible moment. They have one hand, poor light, occasionally rain, and about two seconds of attention per event.

That rules out most of what a normal sports app would do. No dropdowns. No modal dialogues. No "select player, select action, select outcome, confirm". No typing.

What is left is a very short list of enormous, unambiguous, thumb-sized taps, and a ruthless attitude to how much is worth capturing at all.

If a statistic cannot survive that, it does not go in.

The temptation is to record everything. Every pass, every position, every touch.

That is how you end up with a system nobody uses after week three.

The more useful exercise is working backwards from the questions a coach actually asks at a quarter break:

Who is getting the ball, and who is not? Where are we losing it? Are the shots we are taking the shots we want to be taking? Is the centre pass working? Did that positional change do anything?

You can answer most of that with a surprisingly small number of tracked events. And a small number of events is the only kind anybody will ever manage to record while also coaching.

The second half of the problem is presentation.

A table of numbers is not insight. It is homework.

What a coach needs at a quarter break is one screen, three things, and no interpretation required. What a coach needs on a Tuesday evening is a sense of direction across the season. What a player needs is her own progress, framed as something she is building rather than something she is being marked on.

Those are three different views of the same data, and none of them is a spreadsheet.

That was written before any of it existed. It exists now.

Match Stats is built into the Grappenhall & Widnes club platform, which is where it gets used, argued with and cut back. Everything below is working today rather than planned:

On match day. A live game sheet with quarter-by-quarter scoring and a match timer. A position grid for who played where in each quarter, including players borrowed from another team. Interceptions and touches, centre passes, a shot chart you tap on the court, umpire calls and errors, and captain and player of the match.

The bit I am most pleased with. A share link. You cannot coach a match and record every interception, so the game sheet can be handed to a parent standing pitch-side on their own phone, with no login and no account. It expires by itself after six hours and can be revoked sooner. What it will not let them do is pick the captain, write the coach's comments or mark the game complete, because those are the coach's judgement.

Afterwards. Marking a game complete publishes the score to the club's results and to every parent's dashboard. Season totals build up per player — games, goals, attempts, shooting percentage, interceptions, touches, rebounds, captaincies — and a match report drafts itself from the game sheet.

Across the club. An analysis centre that joins fixtures and game sheets into one dataset: form, head-to-head, quarter breakdowns, shooting, centre passes, opponent analysis, match and team comparison, and a match prep pack. Reports export to spreadsheet or CSV.

The design constraint held up. The whole thing still works if all you ever touch is the score.

Built and running at one club, which is exactly the right number to have learned anything from.

The next questions are about what happens to the data once the season ends, and whether the parts that make sense for one club make sense for another. Automatic match graphics, a private player record, end-of-season keepsakes and a tournament mode are all ideas on the workbench rather than features — they are written up honestly as ideas further down this page.

None of this was designed in the abstract.

Grappenhall & Widnes is where it gets tested, because I coach there and I am one of the people who has to use it on a Saturday. That is the only reason it is any good.

Real use answers questions a specification never will. What do coaches actually open? What did I build that nobody has touched since the week it shipped? What is too fiddly with cold hands? What did a parent work out instantly without being shown?

The club is not a customer. It is the workshop floor.

It already has, in the sense that it exists and it works.

Whether it becomes something for other clubs is a different question, and the honest answer is that I am about to find out. Every club I have been near has the same problem and none of them has a budget for the tools that already exist.

So it is now open to other clubs, personalised to their badge and colours rather than handed over as a generic app with someone else's name on it. What that costs, what it includes today and what is still an idea is all set out further down this page.

What I am not going to do is pretend the roadmap is the product.