Recommendations for recording match results & data?

[jrebelo]

Earlier this month, I shot at the final match of the season with the Nanaimo, BC silhouette group and was impressed at the lengths they go to for their club. They recorded stats from every shoot for every shooter and at the end of the season gave out prizes for various achievements over the course of the year and so forth.

At my club, results are tabulated on paper by the director and handled with the sanctioning body from there, but I was thinking that starting in 2013 I would like to offer to take on the task of importing the match data from each match into my computer and then at the end of the year we could at least have some interesting statistics to look at and maybe come up with some small prize ideas to make it interesting.

Off the top of my head I'm thinking I'll just whip up some kind of multi-page spreadsheet with a template page to copy for each monthly match and just have everything laid out in a tabular fashion. However, I also would guess that some or many of you folks have already done something similar to this and if anyone knows of a well developed freely shared spreadsheet that has been designed for this purpose, I'd appreciate any assistance that would save some time. I'd like to record everything for each shooter. Each stage of each match, noting pins earned, long run scores, and other points of interest.

Thanks in advance for any tips.

Justin

[Jason]

I'm working on doing the same thing between now and the middle of next month when I take over as match director for our smallbore silhouette matches. Let me know what you find.

[jrebelo]

I tried tooling around a bit with a possible usable spreadsheet in google docs since I posted up the thread, and it's making me think I'll probably change gears and develop a simple web-based app that saves the records to a database. This will be much more fruitful at the end of the year when it comes time to pull statistics and interesting data from the records.

I'm a web app programmer by day so something of this nature should be pretty easily handled over the christmas vacation. I'll post up here if I end up slapping something together. I could pretty easily make it freely usable by other clubs as well if there'd be interest in something like that.

[Jason]

Sounds great. I work at Microsoft in the Windows Azure group, so let me know if you'd like to host this on Azure. I'll set up a service in my Azure subscription and make you co-admin of the service.

[cslcAl]

Guys,


I don't have my pocket protector yet. Is this program something a want to be geek can use without an MIT degree?

Al Foust

[Jason]

What Justin is describing is a web-based app that you'd just go to with a web browser and interact with there. Setting up the application itself and the database behind it wouldn't be anything that anyone other than administrators would need to touch. Think of it like using the SteelChickens forums. Mike sets up the phpBB forum application and the database that it uses, including all of the initial setup and ongoing troubleshooting (which can be a huge timesink), and the rest of us just get to reap the benefits of his work. A match director data tracking app would be similar, except that there's no pre-made package to set up and just tweak like the phpBB forum package that we use here.

[jrebelo]

Yeah, what Jason said. If you can use a web forum without a pocket protector, you can manage pretty much any simple data entry application. And thanks for the offer, Jason, but I have my own hosting for my other interests already on a LAMP setup which is what I am both more familiar and comfortable working with.

On the subject, anyone have any suggestions for non-obvious pieces of data that such a record keeping system would need to handle? Obviously we have matches which are of a particular rifle category in which shooters of various classes will have recorded scores for each bank of animals. The locate and date of match, etc, would be properties. Beyond these obvious things, I know it would also need to allow the record keeper to record long-run results. I'd want to have flags to denote the top senior, junior, lady, etc. Are shootout results generally recorded, or does it suffice to denote the 1st and 2nd place finishers since equal scores implies a shootout took place? Any other ideas?

[Jason]

For tie breaks, there could be a pull-down menu with things like "shootoff" or "reverse animal count." For the match data, a text field for notes that the match director might want to add could also be useful. Having the ability to generate a pdf of match results or yearly results would be great, but those are on my "nice to have" list that I didn't expect to get to, as I work more on services and infrastructure than dev. I spend more time remembering syntax than I do actually creating.

[jrebelo]

Thanks, Jason. I forgot about the reverse count tiebreaker. I had already anticipated a free-form notes field for a match and also a notes field for each shooter in a match just in case it's desired.

Generating results PDFs is certainly the kind of thing I'd want to do with the data ultimately. Not a lot of sense storing data without representing it somehow in a usable fashion. Graphs of shooter improvements over the year is something I'd like to have, as well as various other stats for year-end, but per-match results pages would definitely be good to have.

[cslcAl]

Sounds good. If it's fairly user friendly there should be a lot of interest from match directors. Al