Stat tracker

What it is

A tap pad for what the score sheet skips: shot attempts, shots on net, passes, zone entries, faceoffs, saves, blocks, competitive contact and battles won. Track the team or follow your own player. Goals, assists and penalties come from GameSheet, the official record, so you never tap those.

The coach starts the game and closes it. Taps only count in between, and closing publishes the combined numbers to What the Numbers Say. They appear there labeled as crowd stats, separate from the official ones.

How the numbers are built

This is crowd-sourced data with consensus aggregation. Every parent is a noisy sensor: she catches most plays, misses some, and sometimes taps something that was not there. Several noisy sensors, combined properly, beat any single one. Here is the pipeline.

1. Clock alignment. Every tap is time-stamped on the phone. Each phone first corrects itself against the server clock, then the phones are slid against each other until their taps line up best. A phone that is a minute off, or a parent who reacts a second slower, does not matter.
2. Event matching. Taps of the same stat within about 7.5 seconds are treated as one play, at most one tap per parent per play. Pairing is solved optimally, so two rebound shots two seconds apart stay two shots. Late catch-up taps (up to 30 seconds, like a burst after the whistle) can still join a play.
3. Probability per play. Each candidate play is either real or a stray tap. If it is real, each parent who was watching catches it with her own catch rate (for example 90%). So a play four parents saw is almost certainly real. A play one parent tapped while three careful parents did not is doubtful. A parent who rarely misses and rarely mis-taps carries more evidence than one who does both.
4. The count. The stat total is the sum of those probabilities, divided by the chance that at least one watching parent caught each play. That last step matters: a shot everyone missed is still estimated, not silently dropped.
5. Anchored to the official record. Wherever GameSheet has a number, it replaces the crowd. It also tells us how much the crowd under-counts fast events like shots, and that correction is applied across the other tap stats. With a single tracker, there is nothing to cross-check, so she is scored against GameSheet. The head coach can override anything that looks off before publishing.

How well it works: in simulations of a full season with twelve kinds of parents (sharp, distracted, shots-only, phone clocks off by up to 75 seconds), time-stamped matching cut the average error on a game total by roughly 58% with 3 trackers and 83% with 5, compared with simply taking the median of everyone's totals.

Your private trust rating

After each closed game, every tracker is scored against the other trackers and GameSheet, never against herself. The score combines three things: catch rate (how many real plays she tapped), stray taps per minute, and timing (how close to the play she taps). Recent games count more, with a half-life of about four games, so one rough night fades and steady accuracy builds.

The rating does one job: setting how much weight your taps carry next game, in the probability step above. Everyone starts neutral, so new trackers are not penalized. Volume does not help, only accuracy. It is not shown to parents, players or other coaches. Coaches see anonymous patterns only, like a phone clock that is far off. It rates the tracker, never a player, and is never used to compare or rank kids. You get friendly tips, not scores. Records are rebuilt from stored game results, so approving a game twice cannot double count.

Counting rules

• Shot attempt: any try toward the net, including misses and blocks. Shot on net: reaches the goalie or goes in.
• Pass attempt vs completed: tap attempt on every pass, and completed only when a teammate gets it.
• Zone entry: the puck crosses the blue line with control. Battle won: two players go for the puck and ours comes out with it.
• Adults only, with a team login. No signal in the rink? Taps save on your phone and send when you are back online.