Another high school basketball question

I don't think tracking misses is that hard. I put a 2 or 3 for every shot and circle the makes.

 

Them Goatpunchers rarely miss shots though. They're a hell of a team.

 

I have a couple of teams that do as well. I usually just go with steals.
I just don't know if the reader has an understanding of what is a normal amount of turnovers in a high school game. Therefore, the stat loses some of its value.

 

Here was a tip I learned early on from a mentor of mine: If you're doing a score-by-score listing of the game somewhere and you want to track shooting percentage, you only need to keep track of missed shots. If you're keeping play-by-play basket for basket, you already have the made ones. Just put them down after the game and add that and the misses to get total shots. You don't have to keep individual misses if you think that's a bit much, but you can keep track of total shots this way.

If at the end of the game you have 23 makes in your box and you tracked 50 misses off to the side, then the team was 23 of 73. There ya go.

I note three-pointers by putting an exclamation point after the number. Examples:

On my PBP, a made three looks like this:
FS Coff. Who/how
33! 30 Goltra (LW) <--- LW meaning "left wing."

I keep rebounds, but I don't break down offensive and defensive. And I keep track of total turnovers, not individuals. I figure those aren't important enough in HS games and colleges do those with their scoring progeams.

Also I have a general rule for assists: If I can't decide whether or not it was an assist by the time the other team gets past half court, it probably wasn't one. And I also track those by putting the passer's number in a circle on my PBP:

FS Cof Who/how
33! 30 (13) Goltra (LW)

I also created my own form in Quark where I can track it all on one sheet. One sheet per quarter for a HS game...two per half in college.

My way of keeping stats evolved from my mentor's way. But they're not exactly the same methods now. He's never kept individual opponent's stats, just team stuff. But I can keep track of both teams if I want to. Just keep tweaking a little until you get what you are comfortable with.

With the way I do it, I can get a feel for the flow of the game when I look back at the PBP. The big drawback to my way is, I can't total anything until the end of the game so there have been times when I'm thinking "Wow, this guy is having a heck of a game" but I can't confirm it until after I add everything up and it's then I find out he had 35 points.

I have never used a regular scorebook to track a game. I can see the totals but I can't look at it and see how the game flowed. A regular scorebook can't tell you when that big 12-0 run happened.

My .02.

 

Unless you're trying to track how well an individual player shot, there's a much easier way to track misses... offensive rebounds plus opposing team's defensive rebounds equals total shots missed by the team.

 

That is my goal: individual shots. I haven't had too many situations where breaking down offensive and defensive rebounds would provide a number I thought meaningful, at least not for a high school game. The juco has their computer and can break that down for me.

Besides, I've been doing this for about 12 years or so and it's evolved into something I can keep up with fairly easily. It can get tough when there's five or six missed shots in a row under the basket, but I can scratch those out on a legal pad real quick, then add them back in during a time out.

The point being, really, that you just have to come up with something you're comfortable doing. At first, I didn't keep individual opponent totals, just the team. But as I got more used to it, I was able to start doing individual opponents, too. That came in handy when I tracked an opposing player for 44 points and 20 boards in a game earlier this year (She had a double-double just in the fourth quarter by itself).

In the rematch, she had "just" 24 points....but she had 29 rebounds.