A good time was had by all visitors to Linfield last weekend during the annual Homecoming gathering.
I wanted to share a story with you about a Homecoming experience I enjoyed. One of my very first work-study student assistants came up to the pressbox after the football game to say hello. I immediately recognized Charlana (Saniatan) as if I had just seen her last week. Hard to believe that she graduated in 1991.
During my first two falls at Linfield, Charlana worked with me on the football statistics crew and helped out in the office during the week. Her surprise visit sent us both flashing back to the “old” methods we once used to compile stats and how dramatically they differ from today thanks mostly to new technology.
Back then, we worked out of a crude pressbox that was nothing more than some plywood tables pounded into the last two rows of the stands. The “pressbox” was dirty, hard to get in and out of, and difficult to work in because of the crowd noise. Charlana typed the play-by-play on an actual typewriter (anyone remember those?) while other work-study students (Scott Nelson and Debbie Sowell) compiled offensive and defensive stats on worksheets. At the end of games, we would spend about 30-45 minutes totaling all the stats up by hand, then would hang around another hour or two calling or faxing in the stats to the local newspapers and the conference office.
One of the tasks I hated most was hauling all our gear, including a hefty portable copier, up the Memorial Stadium steps each home game. What a pain that was!
Wow, talk about the stage coach era of sports information. But that’s what we had to work in the late 1980s. The 1990s ushered in the age of compterized statistical software programs but the early versions were only marginally better at totaling game stats up and compiling the season totals. I think those early programs were created by some stat geek in Excel in their basement. They were clunky at best.
That seems light years ago. Now, we have a bonafide professional level StatCrew software program that is common among all the schools we compete against. A keyboarder enters the data in for each play, such as “Run 42, tackle 21 and 44, new spot Linfield 32″ and the computer does the rest, including generating a detailed play-by-play.
During the game, running cumulative totals are displayed on monitors throughout our enclosed, heated and secure press box for all the media members to see. Each quarter, we print out a “Quickie” stats report, which is then photocopied on a machine that never leaves the press box! After the game, it takes only a few minutes to finalize the game stats, update the season stats, and export them to the Linfield Web site. One email to all the media outlets that includes links to the story and stats gets the news distributed quickly.
In 20 years, we’ve come a long way.
1 Comment
November 17, 2009 at 12:15 am
It was great to see you, Kelly! I was really feeling my age after seeing how much things have changed, but it sure was a lot of fun. Hope to make it back again soon!