Raider fans, especially parents, know just how much running is required each week of the sports season. They understand that on a personal level, so, when they recognize just how much running this local reporter has to do each week to cover seven fall sports, it is not only appreciated on my end but gives them some additional empathy toward my request for help.
The coaches, players and managers see it as well. They know I cannot be at every event each week because the schedule just does not allow it. Take a look at the weekly Raider Sports Schedule graphic I create every week, and you will see why. Tuesdays and Thursdays are the busiest days of the week. Most sporting events fall on those two days. Sometimes there can be five different sports playing between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. with game locations of Hastings, Mahtomedi, and New Prague. Clearly, I won’t make that circuit to be at all five of those events, so, I rely on others to help me.
The issue was, some sports do not have a clear path of how someone like a parent or fan can help.
The fall sports each have their own unique series of important stats along with game flow. Stats without game flow is a very boring read for you, game flow without stats does not always tell the complete story.
Looking at football as an example. The majority of sports fans understand football. Thankfully, the Hastings Raiders and the community of Hastings have Dick Cragg. Mr. Cragg has been a large part of Raider sports for several decades. Personally, he was a huge mentor to me for both guidance on how to announce sports as the in house announcer and later, on how to tell a sports story in the paper. I look up to Mr. Cragg in ways I am not sure he fully understands.
Thanks to him, we have football stats on lockdown. This man has the game recap and full stats calculated before the KDWA and or HCTV broadcasts go to the half time break. He is our official statistician, and he is great at it. Often times, before I go to bed after a football game, the initial stats are in my inbox, and by the time I wake up the next day, the full stats are waiting for me.
From his reports, I can write a very strong, factual story with basic game flow. This is where I can refer back to the earlier statement, stats without game flow is a boring read for the reader, and thanks to Cragg’s reports, I can make those stats a lot less boring even if I cannot be at the game or watch it back before writing the story. For game flow and the nuances of that flow, being there in person is obviously the best option, but a very good to great story can be told thanks to the commitment of Mr. Dick Cragg.
Let’s look at the contrast of a sport like Tennis. Tennis has a lot of things going on at once, with a minimum of seven matches, four individual and three doubles matches make up the score. At the end of the day, Either the coaches or managers enter the results from each match and that data automatically comes to my inbox. Add to that some quotes from the coach and observances of the event, and we have a good tennis story.
Swimming has software that tracks time and results, but those results go only to the teams, there is no reliable public results sharing location yet. One has been developed and is catching on in popularity in Minnesota, but that relies on coaches uploading the data voluntarily, it is not a requirement, yet. That means; to write a swimming story, I must rely on the coach to send me the results sheets. They are easy to translate into a good story both with flow and times and when the coach sends her notes from the meet, it makes for a good swimming story.
The caveat in many of these situations is understanding these coaches have lives outside coaching our amazing student athletes. Some weeks they just cannot get to sending the data, and for some sports, like Soccer and Volleyball, that data was inconsistent at best. This is not the fault of the coaches, they just did not have a way to gather the data and if they cannot truly gather good data beyond the final score, there is no way for me to tell the story.
So, I solved part one of the equation, I created a scoring app for Soccer and Volleyball to gather the data for stats, to capture notes for game flow and most importantly, to make it easy for someone to help me do all this without taking away the enjoyment of the game for them as a parent or fan.
I created an online app that works via web browser on any relatively current web capable mobile device, and I made access to that app public.
The creation of this app was actually quite fun, and I think it even generated some excitement for both Boys Soccer Head Coach Jamie Swanson and Girls Soccer Head Coach Christian Waage. Both coaches spent time with me and the app testing it, both had players or managers testing it and both gave excellent feedback on how to better use it and utilize the stats it tracks.
Soccer data entry is a little more complicated when it comes to a goal being scored or a card being documented, but overall, once the backend of the program was cleaned up, it runs very smoothly and can be done be even the most casual of soccer fans.
The playing of soccer moves fast, but the game of soccer overall is slow. By that I mean, the game is forgiving from a data entry point of view. The likelihood of two goals within 10 seconds of each other is slim. The scorer has time to gather the right data without fear of missing the next big play.
Volleyball on the other hand is a fast paced data gathering process, so that had to be made simple and efficient while still providing robust details on the back end. You can get a point being scored every 30 seconds in Volleyball.
The challenge between the two was keeping similarities of the user interface as close to one another as possible while customizing it to tell the story of a point in soccer or a run of points in volleyball and feedback has been great for that.
Now, I am not going to just throw the website out for everyone to see or test, I think that would be irresponsible regarding the integrity of the data. I also want to at least know who is using it for reporting results so that I can help with any issues they might have to either improve the process on the application side, or to teach the scorer how to be more efficient with the app.
For my first ever trial of this app, one parent was quickly frustrated with the large lag spikes of the app. That frustration was so clear that his feedback forced me to look at one major flaw I had not thought of resulting in a huge performance increase without losing any data. His single level of frustration truly led to one of the most important fixes.
From Coaches Waage and Swanson, I made some drastic improvements to both the interface and data collected as well as how to use that data for soccer. Which also led to improvements on the volleyball side. The Braucks family also tested soccer scoring and provided both results for girls’ soccer and valuable feedback on how the app worked.
One of my favorite parts of being the Hastings reporter and a Hastings graduate is maintaining the connection with many of my classmates through sports of their kids. That also puts me in a unique position to ask for help from people I know and trust who also trust and know me. Classmate Sarah McTague provided invaluable tests on the volleyball side and without her, this app would not be ready to score volleyball, nor would I have this week’s volleyball story.
I am now comfortable with telling the general public, if you want to help me gather data for stories by scoring a soccer or volleyball game that you intend to go to. Please reach out to me via email, bruce@hastingsjournal.news. I will give you access to the app, tell you how to use it and guide you through scoring a test game between our very own Hastings Raiders and the fictional team, the Twin Cities Flying Pickles.
Yes, I made that team so obviously fake to ensure no one would think it is real, but the cool part of the fake team is, Lexi Gruden could block a shot from The Rock, Hulk Hogan, Ricky Bobby or The Big Lebowski in a test volleyball report or Sienna Sanchez could score a goal on Mickey Mouse or Darth Vader in a test soccer game.
The bottom line is that this truly takes a village and with my number one goal being to brag about all these awesome student athletes, I figured out a way to make telling their story more consistent and easier on the coaches with a little help from the community. The coverage we want to provide our readers needs your help. We want to cover more than just football in the fall. We want all seven of the fall sports in the paper each week. We already get consistent and accurate data from three of those seven, this app just made three of the missing four sports significantly easier, but we need you to give it a go.
For the first parent or fan from each of the three sports, Boys Soccer, Girls Soccer and Girls Volleyball to step up and volunteer to use the app to score the remaining season of games, we will hook you up with a free year subscription to the paper to say thank you. Just shoot me an email and we’ll get things started!