Avoid the Season Start Blues

Here are the things that can be frustrating at season start and how to fix them before the referee blows the whistle.

Crash on Launch

For a variety of technical reasons, if the app hasn’t been launched for a few months it will often crash or simply close very quickly after launch. Delete the app, download from the App Store and log in.

YouTube Upload Limit

YouTube temporarily imposes upload limits on new YouTube accounts. You can fix this and it is a very good idea to do this prior to the season. See this support article.

Bad Email Address

Your Takedown login email isn’t accessible and you need it changed. See this support article.

Can’t Find Email Verification Message

Common problem especially if you use a school email address. See this support article.

Subscription Problems

Can be very frustrating for you and us, too. Common causes: (1) invalid payment method on your Apple ID so your purchase didn’t complete; (2) purchased the subscription(s) with an Apple ID that isn’t used on any of your Takedown iPads; and (3) you forgot that you cancelled auto-renewal.

We can’t fix these problems, but we can offer some help:

1. Make sure at least one of your Takedown iPads is registered to the Apple ID that purchased the subscription.

2. Use “Check for Active Subscriptions” to force Takedown to get your subscription status (Takedown>Settings>Takedown Store)

3. Use “Manage Subscriptions” to see if Apple thinks the Apple ID on the iPad has a valid Takedown subscription. (Takedown>Settings>Takedown Store). Again, only one of your Takedown iPads needs to be registered to the Apple ID that purchased the subscription.

These articles from our support site have more details.

Rosters

The process we use to gather rosters from Trackwrestling is very labor intensive and manual. Our database isn’t dynamically synchronized with Track. It can be a day or two out of date.

If you notice a Track roster that’s not in our online database, let us know here. We can fix this same day during the week (but not same minute).

---

Don’t wait for your hair to catch fire before fixing these typical season startup problems. Reach out to us if we can help.

Table Top Stand is Way Too Easy

For a dual meet, it doesn’t get any easier. See our Helpful Accessories page.

3 Tasks for Success

Using Takedown for the first time in live competition can be overwhelming. Here are three things you can do to get your scorers prepared for using Takedown in the live competition context.

1. Transcribe from Paper Scorebook

Copying matches from a paper scorebook is the first step. This context doesn’t have the pressure of a live situation so that the scorer can take their time and get familiar with the scoring interface. It also affords an opportunity to schedule and configure Events. The task should include a full dual meet and some tournament matches. The user shouldn’t be concerned with the match clock — just start it and enter the scoring, then move on to the next match. The goal here is to replicate the paper scorebook.

If you don’t have a paper scorebook handy, try this training exercise from our support site.

2. Score from Recorded Video

Any video recording of a wrestling match will do. It could be of your team or just some matches on YouTube. This is the next step-up in difficulty as the action is live but can be paused if necessary. Don’t worry about getting the names of the competitors correct. The goal of this task is to simulate the pace of live competition. Keeping the match clock accurate is an important skill development area.

3. Score Challenge Matches in the Practice Room

The last step, this is live competition without the pressure of a large audience and, perhaps, an impatient official. It’s a safe environment. In this task, all the skills developed in steps 1 and 2 will be tested at a live pace. In addition, the user should practice using the video recording feature.

In our experience, if your scorer follows these three steps, they’ll be successful when scoring and video recording live competition. When the training is done, you can simply delete the matches or events so that they don’t corrupt your analytics. You could also create a “Training” Season for all this activity and that would keep all the data separate from your competition seasons.

One Last Item

Add your managers/scorers to the Contacts portion of Takedown located at the top level in My Team. Doing this will add them to our mailing list so that they will be informed. When a manager/scorer moves on, they can easily unsubscribe from our mailing list.

What Does the Data Say About Short-Time Scoring?

To gauge the relevance of short-time scoring as a predictor of victory, we gathered data from 7,355 matches wrestled by 181 athletes at 13 high schools, all users of Takedown Scoring and Stats.

We filtered the data as follows:

• Included varsity competition only

• Included wrestlers with greater than 20 periods of short-time scoring data

• Excluded exhibitions and forfeits from win-loss record

From this sample, we found the following:

1. With a negative Short-Time Scoring Average Point Advantage the probability of having a winning season is 41%.

2. With a zero or positive Average Point Advantage the probability of having a winning season is 82%.

This chart shows win percentage as a function of Average Point Advantage for this sample (each dot is a wrestler):

View fullsize

Stats: Short Time Scoring vs. Winning Percentage

And, while the relevance of short-time scoring is hard to deny, we wondered if improved short-time scoring performance — a positive and increasing Average Point Advantage — is simply a matter of experience. That is, does advantage increase as a function of cumulative match experience?

Surprisingly, in this sample, the answer is no. There’s no meaningful correlation between experience (measured in matches) and short-time scoring performance.

View fullsize

Short-Time Scoring v. Matches Wrestled

So, we know (at least in this sample) that short-time scoring proficiency can increase one’s chances of having a winning season. It also appears that short-time scoring performance doesn’t naturally improve with experience. Maybe scoring in short-time is a skill (or perhaps a mindset) requiring focus and practice.

Something to think about for coaches wanting to help wrestlers get to the next level.

If you’re interested in tracking short-time scoring performance, check out Takedown Scoring and Stats.

A Word On Email Addresses and Contacts

Credentialing is the price we pay for online privacy.

Takedown is no different — every account needs a secure identity comprised of an email address and password.

If you want to ease credentialing headaches, here are a few tips.

Get a Team-Focused Email Address

The challenge with using a personal email address for logging in to Takedown (or YouTube) is that people — parents, coaches — move on, email addresses get deleted or the email owner becomes unreachable.

Get a team-focused Gmail address and use this address for logging in to Takedown and for uploading video. Gmail addresses are free and each one is automatically associated with a YouTube account.

Five Places to Use One Email Address

Make your life easier by using the same team-focused email address for these five items:

1. Takedown login credentials

2. Creating an Apple ID for purchasing Takedown subscriptions

3. YouTube uploads

4. Configuring Apple mail app

5. Creating an X(formerly Twitter) account and any other social media account

Takedown Primary Contact

In Takedown’s Contact manager, tag any entry as a ‘Primary Contact.’ This contact will receive all emails from us. Contacts not tagged as “Primary” will receive very few emails from us.

Your Takedown login email address is automatically tagged in our database as a “Primary Contact.” You do not need to add your log in email to the Takedown Contact manager.

Get Your Managers in the Loop

If you want to be successful with Takedown, get your managers onto our email list.

In Takedown, go to the top level in My Team and add their Contact information. The app will add them to our email list and then they’ll receive our weekly message with helpful information.

At the end of the Season, remove their information from Takedown Contacts if you’d like. Also, they can unsubscribe from our email list at any time — that capability is included at the bottom of all emails.

Record Team and Wrestler Goals in Takedown

Takedown allows you to record goals/objectives for your team and for each wrestler. This is another step towards consolidating all of your team’s critical information in one place.

Notes

At the bottom of each Season, there’s a section called Notes. Tap ‘Edit’ at the top and enter whatever information you’d like regarding the Season. Recording goals/objectives is a no-brainer but you can add any other information you’d like in this area. Tap ‘Done’ when finished. You can change the information in this field at any time just by tapping ‘Edit.”

View fullsize

View fullsize

Wrestler-Specific Goals/Objectives

Similarly, add wrestler-specific goals/objectives (or any other information) to the Notes area in a Roster entry. Tap ‘Edit’ as you did for Season above, then ‘Done’ when complete.

View fullsize

Notes are also available for each Event and, for scouting purposes, for Opponent Team wrestlers

Take advantage of Takedown’s Notes feature to capture important information about your team and wrestlers in a persistent digital format.

Get rid of all that random paper.

Update: Digital Weight Management

Last fall we added to digital weight management to Takedown Scoring and Stats. Developed in partnership with Befour, a leading wrestling scale manufacturer, this new feature enabled paperless weight capture — either manually or via Befour’s bluetooth scale — and a variety of reports and graphs for tracking athlete weight.

During this past high school season (2018-2019), more than 150 schools used this feature to record 17,000+ weigh-ins. Of these weigh-ins, 75% were recorded wirelessly using Befour’s bluetooth scale.

Top five states for digital weight management:

1. Virginia

2. Ohio

3. Wisconsin

4. California

5. Pennsylvania

And the top ten programs:

1. Chantilly, Virginia

2. Frederick High School, Maryland

3. Saginaw Heritage, Michigan

4. Middletown, New York

5. Chilton High School, Wisconsin

6. Garden City High School, Kansas

7. Kirtland High School, Ohio

8. Palo Alto High School, California

9. Sulphur, Oklahoma

10. Revere High School, Ohio

Not surprisingly, most weights were recorded early in the week:

View fullsize

Weigh In Recorded By Takedown Scoring and Stats — Percentage by Day of Week

This is an exciting and encouraging start for this new-to-wrestling capability. We will continue working with our partner, Befour, to enhance this feature and promote its adoption throughout the wrestling community.

---

Related content

Original announcement:
https://www.levelchanger.com/blog/2018/10/2/new-release-paperless-weight-management

NCAA Division I Weight Management — Princeton Article
http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2019/03/necessary-difficult-fair-an-investigation-of-wrestling-and-weight-at-princeton

Shot Counter and Success Rate

With release 2.4.2, Takedown Scoring and Stats introduces a new-to-the-world of wrestling capability: a simple Shot Counter and associated stat called Shot Success Rate. Developed in cooperation with a Top 20 Division I team, this new feature allows coaches, for the first time, to easily assess how aggressive and effective wrestlers are in the neutral position.

Using the Shot Counter is optional and has no impact on scoring. The purpose of the feature and associated statistics is to give coaches a simple way to record shots and understand neutral position performance. The Shot Counter is available in the Scoring interface for your wrestler and the opposing wrestler.  The implementation is simple with large '+' buttons to add shots and '-' button to remove shots in the case of an error.

The new Shot Success Rate report presents the total number of takedowns and shots at the match level by period and total.  Results are totaled for each wrestler and across all wrestlers for a view of team performance. Like all reports, you can use filters to narrow the scope over which the Shot Success Rate calculation is performed.  For more info on reports, see our recent blog post.

Here's a tutorial on using the Shot Counter and generating the Shot Success Rate report:

New Score Keeper? Get them trained before your first competition.

Student managers graduate, parents volunteers come and go.

If you have a new score keeper this year, it's important to train them on Takedown Scoring and Stats before the season starts.

Here are the recommended steps in order:

1. Paper. Provide your score keeper with last season's paper scorebook and ask them to score in Takedown a dual meet and a few tournament bouts.

2. Video. Score a few matches from video. Use your team’s video or search for matches on YouTube.

3. Live. Invite your score keeper to score your challenge matches, wrestle-offs or intra-squad scrimmage.

Scoring a wrestling match with Takedown is easier than scoring with paper and pencil. Even so, the workflow is different from manual methods and scorers should become familiar before live competition.

Give your scorers the pre-season training they need to be successful using Takedown to capture scoring (and video) for you and your team.