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Super 8s Statistics Reflected
Super 8s Statistics Reflected
It was a long, exhausting season doing the Super 8s Statistics. I spent about four days a week doing it. It’s not just statting the match but everything else that goes along with it, e.g. organising who’s filming the matches, answering questions, regularly updating the Facebook page, commenting on it, up/downloading many gigabytes of match video, analysing the data itself etc. This was my third season of doing this but what new things did I learn during this season?
What did I learn?
* . This is good because the more engagement it gets, the more likely other people will take notice and the easier it is to get potential sponsorship. Learning this happened by accident last summer. When I was restatting every single Super 8s match from the previous season for my dissertation, I saw so many amazing things that nobody will ever probably see. So I posted a screenshot of it up on the Facebook page. Screenshots was the easiest thing to do with free drawing to highlight the area of interest. It got likes and comments and I slowly got likes for the page itself.
* . I found the more people that were tagged in the screesnshots, the bigger reach it got. Midway through the season, I decided to post the actual stats as a picture and tag all the players involved, as opposed to a link to the stats. This meant it regularly reached 1,500 to 3,000 people. It was an easy way to advertise that SP8S existed.
* . It started out all about posting the match stats. Now with posting up of the match videos, match highlights, edited videos, screenshots of funny situations, referee queries, detailed analysis, predictions etc, it has the beginnings of becoming a media hub for everything Super 8s. The future of SP8S, if it has one, is trending towards this where the stats is only a part of it.
* . Very early on, I wrote this method of transferring the match video to me. It was simply compress the match and then wetransferring it to me. This method is only used by one club (Lynx) whereas other clubs has slightly different methods. For London Polonia and Team Northumbria, they post it on their YouTube channel and I use Free YouTube Downloader software to download it. For Solent 1, they use their own video editing software to out the cut dead time (e.g. time between sets) and used graphics before using sending it via wetransfer. For Sheffield, they used their own method of compressing the video and then used Dropbox. For Wessex, they uploaded it to the videographer’s website and I was able to download it directly.
What could I improve on for next season?
* . Basically, the first Excel spreadsheet I build to do the job is like a one storey house. Over the past three seasons, I’ve added and change so many things that it is now like a five storey house that is busting at the seams but still have the original foundations. It is now best to build another house that can support five (or really ten) storeys. The current spreadsheet is massive – 63 worksheets massive – and incredibly complex that it is mind boggling at some of the stuff I’ve done on it.
* . It irked me that I did all measures of technical skills except for reception. I had total reception errors and reception errors per set but I didn’t want a negative measure on the list so for a long time I didn’t have it on the lists. However, I did stat reception attempts from the second season onwards. It meant I could have reception-in percentage, which was the percentage of reception attempts kept in play. Not exactly a great performance indicator but at least it was positive. However, I only had reception errors as the total count so although it was negative, I put it in. However, I realised too late that I could of have reception attempts as the positive total count. Again, not exactly a great one but at least it was positive.
* . I noted that one of the reasons why Volleyball England should support SP8S is all the match videos can be edited to make promotional videos and all this can make volleyball in this country more “visual”. I should have done more of them.
* . I was thinking about posting up post-match videos where rather than writing my analysis, I would film myself verbally saying it. It was the same for pre-match videos where I would give out my predictions of the weekend’s matches. It would just add something different to the Facebook page and website.
* . I get weird video conversions in StatEasy where the video is either super widescreen or a vine type dimensions (see below) even though the original downloaded video is in normal 16:9 dimensions. It only happens when the club’s videographer compresses the original match video using a software called Free MP4 Video Converter (see link). Another club videographer uses a different method so it is just a matter of asking him how he does it because the quality still comes out great.
What did I achieve?
* . This is an improvement from last season when I got 51 out of 64 (80%) and definitely after the first season when I got 26 out of 60 (43%). I feel this is a great achievement and a result of three seasons of hard work persuading Super 8s clubs to film and transfer the match videos to me.
* . The intent of my analysis is to provide context to the statistics and educate those reading it. However, I was glad that some teams used it to their advantage. You can read more about it here.
* . I am now starting to see people posting up full match videos, e.g. Heiner Alzate, Darius Setsoafia and TheRBurnett9. The last person posted up the women’s BUCS finals where I was able to do some scouting on Team Northumbria on how they lost to Durham Uni – very useful. Also recently, University of East London Volleyball has their own channel. It was interesting to see how Mark Garcia-Kidd and Taylor Wilson beat Phil Smith and Oli Kimber in the Student Cup. Even Volleyball England is posting up some match videos. They posted up the Super 8s Play-Off Finals where it was previously behind a pay wall.
* . While maybe somebody out there may have talked about a potential All-Star Game in the pub, I was certainly the first person to put the idea on the mainstream with a credible team. This was when I posted up the All-Star Team and later an North vs South All-Star Game where players are selected based on stats. I wrote back then I would have loved to have seen this match so I was pleased SideOut took this idea and actually made it happen! While I was not wholly involved in organising the event (I don’t have the skills), I can take credit that I started the whole idea!
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