"As a competitor or club owner, what do you think that most important stats should be for me?"
Never one to let any work go to waste, I thought I would post my answer here as well
As club owner these are some of the statistics I think are important:
- Number of students
- Number of PAYING students
- Number of families
- Age of students - average and age distribution
- Length of time students have been members of your club
- Average number of practices a student attends per month
- Average attendance by day of the week
- Average attendance by month
- How students heard about your club - ad, word of mouth, demonstration
As competitor, or someone analyzing a competitor's performance, I think these are important
- Number of repetitions of specific techniques each practice
- The trend in the number of repetitions of each technique you do each week and in a given time, e.g. in one minute
- Your average number of practices attended each week
- Average number of minutes you spent in standing randori and in matwork
- Number of tournaments you fought in each month
- Number of matches in tournaments you fought each month
- Number of matches in tournaments you won against people your level or higher - I'd define your level as around your age and rank - so if you're 50 and a 3rd degree black belt, I wouldn't consider a 25-year-old 2nd degree black belt your level.
- Percentage of matches you won against people your level or higher
- Number of different techniques you used to win
- Percentage of times you lost by a throw, matwork or penalty
Regarding students in the dojo I would agree that how they heard about your dojo is a big key as well as how many of them are paying students. Knowing how they heard of you helps you determine which marketing strategies are working the best.
ReplyDeleteThe coach should also have the statistics about the whole team for the wins and losses of their students on tournaments. It would be good to see which kind of techniques people from a club are most vulnerable and which kind of judo is the strongest. The club where I started practicing judo, did not teach counters to young people until very late and we would all loose against opponents that would base their judo on counters. Then my coaches started to teach how to counter counters and during that year, we won a lot of fights like that. These words would make much more sense if I had some statistics of it. The point is that this kind of changing of teaching habits might occur much faster if statistics are kept by coaches for the whole team.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point, Jorge, that the type of statistics a COACH should examine is more than what an individual ciompetior looks at
ReplyDeleteSo, as both a statistician and a judo coach, do you keep these (or any other) stats on your dojo/competitors? And have you read Moneyball? If not, it was partially about mining data to find what baseball stats were best correlated with success. Are there any "moneyball"-type stats in Judo that are underappreciated, but very useful? Any stats that you wish we had, but just aren't available? And for that matter... what stats *are* available? Someone here, in Europe/Japan/etc must do a good job of keeping judo stats...
ReplyDeleteSomeone gave me Moneyball but it is in a stack of books that includes textbooks to review for the statistics course I'm teaching this fall, so it is on the bottom.
ReplyDeleteWhen Ronda was competing in judo, I did keep track of the number of different techniques she used to win international matches. As a competitor, I kept track of most of the stats I mentioned for myself and Ronda had a book she kept for herself that includes most of the statistics I mentioned.
The West Coast Judo Training Center had a manager for a long time that kept records. She hasn't been around lately. I need to track her down. (Yes, Yazmin, I'm talking about YOU.)
Pretty effective data, thank you for this post.
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