Cleaning Up Stats Data for Volleyball | Voice of the DBA

Cleaning Up Stats Data for Volleyball

One of the things I’ve done the last few years is collect statistics as a coach for the kids I work with. Helping them understand how they are performing in competition is important, and it’s a good way to see if we are actually improving play.

I use paper and pencil to gather data, because it’s reliable and quick. Most of the apps I see try to prevent bad data by enforcing certain flows of data, but I find this often means a mis-press on a tablet screen results in lost data because the game moves too fast. The apps aren’t flexible, either, so it’s hard to grab practice data.

Last year I collected data like this:

I’d total data and then drop it in the spreadsheet, with a formula to calculate percentages. I report this to athletes and parents, which worked well. However, I wanted to build some graphs, which this format doesn’t make easy to consume.

Putting Data in a Table

My kids and parents don’t have a database tool, so I need to give them raw data in Excel. That works well for all of them and they can read the data. This year, I decided to give them a similar “dashboard” of data for each competition. The format I chose looks like this:

Not the best format, but it is easy to print and discuss with players.

For more extensive reporting across the season, however, I need to capture data in a different format.

As a result, when I take data from my paper and enter it, I do so in a separate worksheet in the same file, but in a tabular format. Here’s a sample of one of my sheets. This one captures Serve data.

For a particular tournament, I use a formula to add up the data for each player. Since I store the data for players in the same order each time, I can easily create a formula for 1 player and then copy/paste that for other players. It’s a little manual work, but it goes quite quickly as I go through the data after a tournament.

Next Steps

The goal from here was to publish this data as an interactive report. I want to build a PowerBI report and then make it available, but that’s for another post.