
Presenting stats is useless for rugby players
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Presenting stats is boring for rugby players
Here’s why the numbers are important to determine your intention when you go and play
(and how to make the numbers exciting)
99% of rugby players when they see a spreadsheet in a team meeting, they switch off.
Period.
The engagement drops off the edge of the cliff.
Maybe there’s one or two players in your whole squad that have perspective to view numbers, correlate them to the game of rugby then determine how that is going to influence training based on the coaches' opinions.
Thats complicated. Most players don’t have that capacity. (not a bad thing)
Here’s why the numbers are important to determine your intention when you go and play…
More often than not when players see numbers there is no context behind those numbers. There’s no link to what it means for them in the actual
game.
If you want to go and play rugby and have fun, you don’t need to know the why, you don’t need to know how successful your tackles are as a percentage and you don’t need to know the score in the game.
But if you want to become a professional, if you want to become one of the best at what you do then knowing the score is incredibly useful and essential.
It’s an indicator, a marker of where you are at that period of time.
It is simply one measurement which shows how well you did something.
It has nothing to do with how you felt when you did that thing.
Or that it wasn’t good enough or you could’ve done it differently.
Knowing the number percentages is a small part of the iceberg.
Like goal setting, it is imperative that you understand where you are now and where you want to get to. It is also important that you put in place a plan which guides you on what things are you gonna do each week, the process to get where you wanna go.
A process based solely on how you feel is an inaccurate way of tracking if you’re getting closer to your goal or not.
Measuring based on feeling is grey.
Measuring numbers is black and white, clear.
Measuring something objectively is based on solely what has happened, success or failure, win or loss. 1 or 0.
Measuring something subjectively is based in an individual's feelings and judgements.
When you understand this, this context to viewing numbers related to your performance broadens your perspective and makes it meaningful.
This is when it gets fun, this is when it gets really useful.
Logging three or five different measurements from your game is not time-consuming and has nothing to do with the bigger picture (as a snapshot).
The bigger picture comes into play when you review these measurements every once in a while maybe after two weeks or a month or six months.
The reality is that growing, creating new habits, or improving skills, the output of those things takes time to change and probably takes a lot longer than you think.
But if you have a comprehensive understanding that (e.g over the course of a season) when you review your markers, you see if you’re moving in the right direction or if you need to change something.
Use measurements to intelligently inform your direction and where you spend your energy.
That makes it simple.
That makes it quite interesting to invest time in taking measurements/logging outputs from performances.
This is the tip of the iceberg because after you can apply game-specific knowledge and compare across your sport the needs and targets of others to inform you and create effective plans to get better.
I hope this post has been thought-provoking about how you can use stats to your advantage instead of it being a chore when it comes up on the projector or in a team meeting.
If you are a coach, I hope this has contributed to your delivery and use of statistics with your players.
If you’d like to take a deeper dive into creating exciting targets and help create useful measurements in your sport, send me a dm.
SLTBHFPCITW
PLJ
#stats
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