Timely Updates for
Takedown Scoring and Stats Users
More Leaders Needed in College Coaching
Sample NCAA Division I head coach responses to an email outreach:
Head coach 1: "I'd like to learn more about your app."
Head coach 2: "I didn't ask for this email, take me off the list"
Neither coach has a top 20 team.
Head coach 2's team website is sparsely populated with stats and their team Twitter feed lacks timely and consistently presented dual and match results.
Head coach 1 may or may not use Takedown.
But, that isn't the point. Head coach 1 is a learner.
College wrestling is in dire need of more coach 1, less coach 2 leadership. The sport can't survive with coaches that spend more time polishing their cauliflower ears than they do innovating in all aspects of their program.
We need more CEOs, fewer mat moppers.
The Cost of Breaking the Top Twenty in Division I Wrestling
How expensive are team points in the NCAA Division I Wrestling Champsionship?
Expenses associated with men's college wrestling are publicly available from the US Department of Education. Team points earned at the championship, as a measure of program performance, is also available. We wondered if there's a relationship between investment and performance using these two available metrics. And we also acknowledge that these metrics can be problematic. There are many ways to measure success and investment, some of which are difficult to quantify. We chose these two metrics because they're available and, in the case of expenses, consistently surveyed and reported. Many would agree, we think, that team points earned in the championship is a measure of program success.
Team points and program costs over the period 2013-14 through 2016-17 for the Top 20 Division I teams in 2018:
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Total Expenses
We used four years of expenses to smooth out any year-to-year aberrations. We also wanted to account for the multi-year effort required to earn team points at a specific championship.
Here's a look a the total expenses sorted in ascending order, least to most expensive:
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Team Points for Top Twenty
And, here's a look at team points earned for this group:
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Cost per Team Point
Dividing expenses by team points earned at the 2018 championship, we get:
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Wow, the cost for a team point is all over the map.
Investment v. Performance
Perhaps a better way of looking at costs v. team points is:
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Eyeballing the data (and you might eyeball differently), looks like there's a set of teams for which increased investment is resulting in higher performance measured by team points:
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Another eyeballing shows a set of teams that are spending way more than South Dakota State and achieving roughly the same results:
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Admittedly, as we said in the intro, this is just one way to look at cost-effectiveness of a Division I wrestling program. There are other, perhaps better ways. We used available data, reliably collected and reasonably applied which is a good start.
Takedown Helps Athlete Get College Scholarship
Getting a look from college coaches can be a challenge. Takedown helped one athlete get a scholarship.
From our inbox last week, a very nice and satisfying note from a head coach:
“I have used this app for a few years now. It is amazing. It played a very important role in helping one of our athletes get a scholarship to wrestle for the Univ. of Jamestown. We provided them with very detailed stats and she will be the first in her family to attend college and on scholarship!”
Good luck to this young lady as she transitions to the next level!
If you want to know how to help your athletes get to the next level by using Takedown's digital scoring and stats, see this post.
Record Video and Score Matches Simultaneously in Takedown
Just because you like sausage doesn’t mean you want to live in a sausage factory. Video is a lot like sausage.
Coaches love match video. But they don't like hauling around separate recording devices, transferring files from camcorders (or mobile devices), renaming video files, organizing video libraries and making their video library easily accessible to athletes, parents and other coaches. It's one of those love-hate things. Video consumption is valuable. Video production is a pain (and time consuming).
Integrated Video Recording/Review
Luckily, Apple's iPad is a video production powerhouse. Our upcoming Fall 2018 release will utilize the iPad's native video capabilities to offer video recording and review from within the Takedown Scoring and Stats app. This new feature address the major pain points of video production: recording, storage, labeling, organization, cloud storage and sharing.
Here's a Q&A about this exciting feature.
Demo and Early Access
If you'd like a demo or want to kick the tires, let us know by filling out this form. We expect to continue internal testing this month, offer pre-release this summer and App Store availability in October.
Unfortunate Plight of NCAA Wrestling Assistant ADs and SIDs, Part II
Another example of why NCAA athletic departments must do better and wrestling coaches need to get involved.
In November 2016, we first lamented about the regrettable job of a wrestling assistant AD or SID having to regurgitate rote scoring information that Takedown can generate in automatically. That post can be read here.
Recently, we looked at a Brown University News post about two of their duals. Here's that release with the content that Takedown does not generate highlighted in yellow.
Reciting scoring and match outcomes in 2017 is low value-added. We need more color, back-ground and in-depth content, the qualitative stuff that Takedown Scoring and Stats doesn’t provide. That’s what fans want and need.