Every college athletic program deals with statistics and we wanted to write a blog post on all the ways in which SIDEARM Sports integrates statistics throughout our software solution. We encourage you to read/glance through everything below and ask us any questions regarding live/on-demand statistics. Stat Entry

Stat Crew has been the defacto standard for stat entry in collegiate athletics for many years. After CBS acquired them several years back they began developing a new version of their Stat Crew software (Stat Crew Next Gen). The new version leverages cloud computing and moves away from the legacy DOS based software.

Around the same time Presto Sports announced that they were releasing statistical entry software and that it would be “free for everyone.” We understand this could be a cost savings for many institutions.

The best news is that SIDEARM Sports is 100% compatible with both platforms. Regardless if your school/conference chooses to use Stat Crew or Presto Sports statistical entry software, you can utilize all the statistical features within the SIDEARM Software.

At the end of the day you need to ensure you are using a stat entry solution which is reliable and easy to use. It does not matter to us which provider you choose for stat entry as that has no effect on your website provider.

As a side note, SIDEARM Sports is not interested in developing statistical entry software. Our core competency is collegiate athletic websites and we believe stat entry is a completely different software model (see blog post from May, 2011 - SIDEARM Sports reacts to Stat Crew news).

Live Stats

SIDEARM Sports has always been a leader with college live stats, often leading and innovating beyond the competition. SIDEARM Sports offers many versions of Live Stats (note – once you subscribe to our live stats service you can have access to all the versions listed below).

1. Traditional Fan Based Stats – It is not uncommon for fans to spend lengthy periods of time watching live stats. These stats were designed to be glitzy and glamorous and catch the fans attention. We offer these for all sports in which Stat Crew or other provider provides a compatible XML file.

2. Media Stats (perhaps future fan stats) – In 2011 SIDEARM Sports developed HTML 5 compatible media stats. We began to see more SIDs, media, and fans for that matter bring iDevices to events and we wanted to provide a non-flash interface for them to follow stats. While developing these we added some features which we believe are not available in any other live stats platform.
   • Ability to filter plays – As we know a full play by play is lengthy. However, many times you or media may be writing a release and want to quickly filter on all the 3’s that were made/missed throughout a game. Or perhaps a student athlete had a career night and you want to filter on his/her plays throughout the game.
     

   • Runs – While writing a post-game recap you may want to quickly know what runs occurred during a game and the time elapsed during a run. With SIDEARM media stats you can click on any two plays and view this information:
     

3. Which should you use? – Many schools provide links to both the traditional fan stats and the media stats. However, after reviewing analytic data it is clear that fans want the same information that the media have and gravitate towards the media stats. You can see how one of our clients solves this issue by providing links to both from their schedule page:
   

4. Site Integrated Scoreboard – Most SIDEARM clients use a scrolling scoreboard/ticker on their homepage. Traditionally this would display past and upcoming events. However, now the scoreboard/ticker can display live in-game score updates.

5. Mobile Stats – There is no doubt that an increasing # of fans want to access live stats from their mobile devices. SIDEARM Sports was one of the first (if not the first) to offer HTML formatted mobile stats. Our software detects if a user is on a blackberry, iPhone, Android, and several other mobile devices and interactively delivers the live stats to their phone’s browser. Again, all of these are included and operational for clients that use our live stats solution.
   

6. Android Stats – Clients who have us develop a native Android app for their college can take advantage of our live stats. What’s nice with these is the app can push the stats to a user’s phone and anytime there is an update the user can be notified on their phone without having to go into the app or launch a web browser.

Box Scores & Cumulative Stats

Once a game is complete our clients can use SIDEARM to upload their stats XML file. Once this file is uploaded several things happen:

1. Schedules, Stories, & Box Score – A link to the box score will show up on the schedule. When a fan clicks on the box score link they are presented with a interactive box score including full play by play. Fans can sort the stats anyway they choose (i.e., name, #, points, steals, rebounds, etc). In addition, fans can click on an athlete’s name and be brought to their roster page with dynamic stat integration (explained below).

   In addition, there is the option to automatically include a link to the interactive boxscore from within the post-game story.

   
   

2. Rosters/Stats – traditionally the roster page was a place where a fan would find a photo, brief bio, and some stats which were manually entered for every athlete. However, with our stat integration as soon as an XML file is uploaded, every athlete’s roster page is automatically updated to include game-by-game and overall season stats (and soon career stats).
   

3. Cumulative Stats – You no longer need to upload cumulative stats after every game. Since Cumulative stats are essentially a combination of all the game stats, SIDEARM will dynamically generate the cumulative stats for you (and make them interactive for the fans).
   
   

Conference Scoreboards

SIDEARM Sports works with a large number of conferences. One feature fans like to see is a conference scoreboard, a single page which shows all the games in progress and updates after every play (of any game). Regardless if all the schools in the conference are SIDEARM clients, conferences can take advantage of our no-cost conference scoreboard.

NCAA/ESPN Integration

1. NCAA Stat Integration – Once your XML file is uploaded into our system you have the option to have SIDEARM submit the XML file to the NCAA on your behalf. This should save SIDs time as it is one less thing for them to have to worry about after an event. The SIDEARM system will also give confirmation so that you know the NCAA received the file.
   

2. ESPN Live Stats Integration – Those who use traditional Stat Crew know that there is a two limit FTP option within TASFTP. While many providers including SIDEARM have written our own FTP software to get around this limitation, schools may find it challenging to keep up with all the locations they need to send a stat file. For our D1 schools ESPN wants a live feed of the stats so they can update the Bottomline, ESPN.COM, as well as many other outlets.

   For a D1 client that uses SIDEARM’s live stat software we have partnered with ESPN and will send them your stat file after it reaches our server. In other words, you simply upload the file to us and we pass it on to ESPN.

While perusing through one of our most recent launched sites, The University of Mary Marauders, I found myself on one of the SIDEARM Sports schedule pages – and I came to the realization that (especially given the vitally important nature of these pages) they were pretty visually unexciting…and perhaps even a bit confusing.

Knowing it was time for a visual overhaul, my design team spent the next few hours scouring the web for examples of well-presented schedules – NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, you name it, I bet we looked at it, saving bits and pieces of sites that we thought were both easy on the eyes, and simple to understand.

Today, I’m proud to present a prototype of a new look for the schedule pages. This look is still very much in its infancy, and I’m sure there may be additional enhancements and visual changes that are included when it makes its debut in early 2012, but I wanted to give you a look into what we’re working on.

Click to view:



Some notes about our intentions:

1)Consolidated Fan Options: Fans like to print, email, and even subscribe to your schedules, and although all of these options are currently available, they’re not very prominent. These options are now grouped together at the top of the page for ease of use.

2)Home/Away Notation: Previously, the differentiator between home and away games was use of bold(or not bold) text. Realizing it should be easier to quickly see the difference, the background color of the row now correlates to the status of the game. There is also a key including on the top of the schedule for quick reference too.

3)Current Record: This area was very visually confusing. Completely overhauled visually, our intent is also to give you more control over what shows in this area, being able to show/hide information that is relevant to your schedule.

4)Opponent Logos: Many schools choose to include your opponent’s logo in the “Details” view currently. Fans can now quickly scan and find the logo of the game they’re looking for, and it’s also a pretty nice visual as well. If the logo for your opponent isn’t available, your own logo will show in “grey” instead.

5)Conference Game Notation: Previously this was done will all kinds of punctuation - asterisks, hash marks, percentage signs and everything in between created a completely confusing experience for visitors. Now, you can clearly mark conference games with your conference abbreviation, making it much easier to see which games are part of the in-conference schedule.

6)Win/Loss: Once a game is finished, the far right column of in-game links will clearly display the result.

7)Pre-Game/Post-Game Links: The second column includes game information – including space underneath the game location for customizable pre-game links before the game, and post-game links for after the game.

8)Tournament Games: Tournament games are now clearly visually marked as a group, with no need to select a different color for each tournament. Yes, that’s right.. we’re revoking your ability to turn the schedule page into a rainbow :-)

I hope you’ll agree that this is will be a great visual addition to your site! Our engineers are working this (and many, many other enhancements) now, and we’ll be sure to let you all know as soon as this look is available for use. If you have any thoughts or feedback in the meantime, they are certainly welcome.

Happy Holidays!
Chris

SIDEARM has worked with NCAA to enable submission of xml game files directly to the NCAA. This feature was already available for everyone over the weekend and feedback has been very positive. The NCAA accepts the following sports electronically Soccer, Volleyball, Field Hockey, LaCrosse, Basketball, Baseball/Softball.

Now when you upload an xml game file after a game to your SIDEARM site to get results, generate boxscores, individual and cumulatives season statistics with a single upload, we will also submit the xml file to the NCAA website. In addition, we provide you with an instant response from NCAA whether the file was successfully submitted or if there were any validation issues. When the response is positive you can be sure things are ok on the NCAA side. However, if you do not receive a positive response you will know right away that there was an issue will help you and us to resolve it faster.

We hope this will save you some valuable time and help you finish post game tasks a little bit faster.

We would also like to thank NCAA.com technical staff for being extremely helpful in establishing this beneficial integration for everyone.

I don’t use Facebook and I’m not alone. There are a rough estimates by various media outlets that 50% of US population are using Facebook, compared to nearly 80% of total population using Internet. A portion of the remaining 30% are using Twitter and LinkedIn. While of course there is overlap between the three, there are millions of users that only use LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the 3^rd most popular networking site out there, see Top 15 Most Popular Social Networking Sites. With over 100 million users and growing, it is largely used by professionals and college graduates for professional networking. Nowadays, it has become a standard to have LinkedIn profiles for most aspiring and working professionals and a large number of your alumni are currently using it.

Similar to Facebook Pages, LinkedIn provides has “Groups” with their own feeds and membership that you could take advantage of as a way to have another list of alumni and fans to engage with and promote your athletic program and events.

We thought that providing you with LinkedIn Share as one of the fan interaction options was necessary. Your fans and alumni using LinkedIn will now be able to share your stories and press releases with in their feed providing your websites more exposure.

Check your “Fan Interaction” options to start using it today.

For some demographic information, please see following slide deck - LinkedIn demographic statistics.