A Better Way to Keep Basketball Stats
Think your kid has what it takes to play in the NBA? Do you just like to keep your kids basketball stats? Are you a high school, or kids basketball coach and want to be more effective in coaching your team? Looking for an easy way to do it? Technology can help! If you answered yes to any of these questions, chances are you are serious about your basketball. If so, you know the importance of knowing how your players are doing on the court. I bet you sit in the stands, with a notebook, tallying all the shots, rebounds, free throws and assists your team makes. Notebooks can do the trick, but you will soon find out you spend all of your time either transferring stats from your notebook to a spreadsheet, or computing stats by hand on your notebook. We live in the digital age, and it’s time to start thinking digitally to keep these stats. There are several methods you can use to do this, some high tech, and some not so high tech. If you have a laptop or a netbook, you can easily bring it to the games and enter stats into a spreadsheet. With just a little work, you can come up with a spreadsheet design that works for you, will track the stats you want to track, for the players on the team you want to track them for, and even calculate percentages based on those stats real time. If you get fancy, you might even create a “workbook” with several sheets, one for each game, with season stats on the first or last page of the book. Those who are a little more technical, may chose to use a database, like Microsoft Access to store stats. Using Access, you can create input screens that look exactly like you want them to look, making it easier for you to work with, then store the results in a database, where all computation for percentages can be done quickly and displayed in a multitude of ways, including charts and graphs. Using Access, you could even export each players stats to a spreadsheet so at the end of the year, they would have a record of how they performed each game. While these two solutions work, and are efficient, it may be cumbersome to bring a laptop to games, where you risk having people spill food and drinks on them, and in the excitement of the game it could get dropped or damaged. So, is there another way? A way to store and compute stats without a laptop, but still avoid the notebook? Sure! Today’s smart phones are powerful devices, capable of running real applications on them. You will probably have your phone with you already, and phones are compact with lots of storage space these days. We already use phones for lots of purposes other than talking. We text, take pictures, listen to music, use calendars and even keep our contacts on them. Why not use your smart phone to track basketball stats as well?
James is a software developer with over 10 years of development experience. He specializes in building enterprise applications in Java and iPhone applications. His latest creation, Basketball Stats is now available on the App Store.
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Tags: Basketball, Better, Keep, Stats