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2008 UPA Grant Project

First Season's Statistics

By: Patrick Peterson
UPA Grant Award: $250

Project Summary
When I was a part of Spring League play earlier this year in Efland, NC, my teammates and I on Four Score began wondering out loud why there was no real way of quantitatively tracking a player's progress on the field from week to week. So, I spent a few days coming up with a pencil-on-paper system that came to be called "Patrick's New Ultimate Tracker," or "P-NUT." This stat tracker is a simple and thorough method of notating player achievements on the field by speedily taking note of every "touch" on the disc. After the game, PNUT allows the statistician to produce a score sheet that includes individual player "stat lines"  for further study by players, coaches, the media, and other interested parties. PNUT has already been successfully tested twice in 11th-Edition-rules matches, where it generated a lot of player interest and useful feedback. On May 29 2007, the stats from the spring tournament final were published on the web as part of the spring wrap-up, and PNUT became Ultimate's first in-depth statistical system to publicly release its figures on cyberspace. Now, I want to take PNUT to the next level, but I don't want to lose sight of the collective vision that inspired it- it's time to find out how much boost PNUT can give to the greater Ultimate community.

Which brings me to the goals of The First Season's Stats Project. They are twofold: First is to exercise this system of notating Ultimate game statistics over several consecutive games, where we will follow the same team in an odyssey of league play (specifically, a team from the 2008 Interlink Spring League in Charlotte with consenting captains). Player feedback will assist the 1SS team in generating meaningful new questions while answering the old ones about PNUT, like: Is the system truly solid enough for consistent use in assessing game-by-game performance? What can be changed, without sacrificing data resolution, to make PNUT easier to learn? Optimally, after this project's completion in May, a new Ultimate statistical-assessment product will be ready for beta distribution to other Ultimate lovers.
The second goal of 1SS is to use player comments and PNUT stats in blindly assessing progress of the team and its players over a ten-week spring season. We would like to conduct an hour per week of short interviews (where we will ask for consent beforehand and honor confidentiality afterwards as necessary) with the players and the captains before, during, and after the season to find where they stand with regards to their own progress as players and as a team. We seek to act strictly in an observer role, and not come between captains and players. This project is as much an exercise in journalism as it is in stat-keeping.

The outcome of this project may have tremendous implications on the future of statistics in Ultimate. For example, a statistician equipped with PNUT, a laptop, and some programming skill would be able to generate live outputs in full from the sideline for mid-game study by the coaches, fans, and media.