Timely Information for Takedown Scoring and Stats Users
Short Time Scoring Report
Important Predictor of Match Outcome
Why do coaches care about “short time” performance?
The reason is simple: points scored in short time are difficult for an opponent to make up because of the imminent time-out due to match clock expiration. Short time scoring is similar to edge scoring in this sense.
Many in the wrestling community believe that scoring the first takedown is the best predictor of victory and that might be true. However, short-time scoring may be just as relevant and if you’re looking to goose your winning percentage, short-time scoring merits some practice attention.
Implementation in Takedown Scoring and Stats
This Short Time Scoring report can be found in the Reports section of the app.
Recognizing that ‘short time’ means different things to different coaches, Takedown allows you to set a short time value of 5, 10, 15 or 20 seconds. For each wrestler, the report displays the number of points scored and conceded within this short time ‘bucket’ prior to clock expiration. Use filters to narrow or expand the scope over which short time scoring is calculated.
The report also provides a ratio - Average Point Advantage - that allows you to quickly evaluate a wrestler's short time performance. This statistic is simply short-time points scored minus short time points conceded divided by the total number of periods wrestled.
If the Average Point Advantage is positive, then your wrestler is scoring more short-time points than conceded. If the value negative then the opposite would be true. This wrestler will be far less likely, on average, to win matches.
As a coach that's what you want to know.
The accuracy of the Short Time Report depends on your having scored the match live because the stat requires an accurate match clock. If the match has been marked as “transcribed” then Takedown excludes the match from the short time scoring statistics.
Why is it so Difficult to Score a Wrestling Match?
Why can’t coaches, managers, athletes, parents accurately score a wrestling match? Lots of reasons.
In athletic competition the score matters. Wrestling is no different. All wrestling matches are scored according the the applicable rules book. It’s harder than you might expect. Why is that?
Rules Book is Bad
The NFHS rules book is an old, expansive, intricate document conceived of and edited by committee over many years. It is often difficult to interpret and is subject to annual revisions for clarity and rule changes.
Certain sections of the rule book are no longer relevant and are routinely ignored in practice. These sections aren’t culled over time as they should be so that the book is confusingly bloated with vestigial passages.
Finally, the rules yield "corner-cases" -- infrequent scoring sequences -- that trip up even the most experienced. The net result is scorers, coaches and officials do not — and probably can not — have full command of the rule book and its application in all possible situations.
Referee Role
After athlete safety, getting the bout score correct should be the referee’s #1 priority.
In this light, referees should signal scoring promptly, using official hand gestures persisted long enough for recognition by the scorer. When there’s a quick flurry of activity and lots of scoring, the referee should communicate with the table to verify that all the scoring was accurately recognized and reflected in the score.
Also, prior to an event a good referee will discuss with the scorer their responsibility — “recording points scored by each contestant when signaled by the referee” — and procedures for fulfilling that responsibility as outlined in NFHS Rules 3.1.4.e and 3.1.5.e or appropriate state rules.
A great referee will be in frequent contact with the official scorer to insure all is well.
Scorer Role
The scorer’s primary role is to get the score right by recording the scoring events signaled by the referee.
If there’s confusion or disagreement about the score, the official scorer should ask the referee for assistance and resolution. To translate the referee scoring signals into a recorded scoring event, the official scorer should be familiar with the “Referee’s Wrestling Signals” in the NFHS rules book.
Proper notation helps, too, when reconstructing from the scorebook what happened on the mat. Official “Scoring Symbols” are documented in the NFHS rules book.
That Never Happens
In practice, the implied contract between the referee and official scorer is almost never fulfilled.
In practice, scorers typically lack the confidence to stop a match to clarify scoring confusion. This is especially true in high school.
In addition, scoring hand gestures are often confusingly and quickly presented by the referee. Sometimes non-standard signals are employed.
Compounding this problem is the referee’s apparent desire to move the action along at Mach 5, creating the impression that pace is more important than an accurate score.
That behavior can lead to disastrous outcomes as in the case of Ian Miller at the 2015 NCAA Championships.
Technology Helps
A carefully engineered digital scoring solution will drastically improve scoring (and clock) accuracy by embedding the rules book into well-designed scoring interface.
Here are few examples of how digital scoring can help your scoring table:
Uses standard scoring symbols
Prevents illegal scoring sequences, e.g. near fall for defensive wrestler, escape for offensive wrestler, escape/reverse/near fall not allowed in neutral, etc.
Presents 2nd and 3rd period choice for correct wrestling
Implements the penalty table including disqualification sequences
Starts/maintains injury timer for each wrestler
Maintains blood, recovery timers for each wrestler
Implements choice on restart as appropriate
Records each scoring notation offset from previous for easy readability and reconstruction of scoring activity
Implements overtime protocol
Does period arithmetic for automatically recorinding cumulative match time for bout-ending scoring events such as a fall or disqualification
College: automatically stops/starts riding time clocks with change in control and calculates riding time advantage
Continuously calculates the tie-breaker counts by criteria and identifies the winner
In dual meet, automatically calculates team score.
Takedown Scoring and Stats has all of these features.
Scoring a wrestling match is hard. Make it easier by using a state-of-the art, high quality digital scoring solution.
How Fat Are High School Wrestlers?
Periodic look at the weight certification data for high school wrestlers. States include California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, …
As with college, every once in a while we drill down into the high school weight certification data.
For this past season, 2019-2020, we looked at data for 80,209 male wrestlers rostered for 3,127 teams in seven states: California, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas, Washington and Nebraska. This data is is from February 2020.
You can explore the data on your own here.
In all states except Pennsylvania, roster size by school year declines from freshman (Fr.) though senior (Sr.) year. In aggregate, Pennsylvania freshman are 22% of the total roster whereas in all other states freshman account for 30-32% of the total state roster.
Average roster size varies considerably in this group from a low of 19.5 (Nebraska) to a high of 31.1 (Texas) wrestlers per team.
Weight Related
Except for 113 pounds, wrestler count by minimum weight class (MWC) is relatively flat from 106 to 145 pounds and then declines steeply from 152 to 285 pounds.
At certification, average body fat percentage ramps from 14.3% at 106 to 23.4% at 220 and then declines a bit for 285.
Roughly 32% of the wrestlers had an assessed body fat of more than 20%.
In this sample, 73,871 wrestlers had a certification weight exceeding their MWC. On average, this group had to drop 9.7% of their certification weight to reach MWC.
Excluding 220 and 285, If all wrestlers in this group dropped to their respective MWC, average body fat is 7.9% with a narrow range of 7.5% (138 MWC) to 9.1% (106 MWC).
Which State is the Fattest?
You decide.
High School Wrestling — Fat % by State
Reminder: End of the Road for iOS 9 and iOS 10.
It’s been a good ride.
We’re at the end of support for iOS 9 and iOS 10 devices. Apple obsoleted these versions of iOS a few years ago and the supporting hardware is starting to show its age. Problems are arising for Takedown users, some of which we can fix, some of which we can’t. An example of the latter: Trackwrestling no long supports Safari on iOS 9 for logging in. We rely on Safari for copying your match results and weigh-ins to your Track account. If Track doesn’t support Safari in iOS 9, then users aren’t able to upload their results to Trackwrestling using Takedown.
Next season, we will remove support for iOS 9 and 10. Please plan your iPad acquisitions accordingly.
iPads models impacted are:
iPad1
iPad2
iPad3
iPad4
iPad Mini 1
How Fat Are College Wrestlers?
Periodic look at the weight certification data for college wrestlers.
Every once in a while we drill down into the college weight certification data. For this past season, 2019-2020, we looked at data for 7,706 wrestlers rostered by 251 NCAA, NAIA and NJCAA wrestling programs. This data is from the week prior to NCAA Division I conference championships.
You can explore the data on your own here.
In this sample, 7,268 wrestlers have a certification weight (also called assessment weight) in excess of their Minimum Weight Class (MWC). Average body fat % at certification for this group is 15.9% with a range of 14% to 30.3% depending on MWC.
If all wrestlers in this group dropped to their MWC, the average body fat is 6.9% with a narrow range of 6.4% to 7.4% excluding the 285 weight class. Somewhat counterintuitively, at least for me, with all wrestlers (except 285 pounders) sucked down to their MWC the fattest weight class is 125 pounds at an average 7.4% body fat. Didn’t expect that.
For NCAA Division I wrestling teams, average body fat % at certification is 14.8% with a range of 13.6% to 16.7% depending on conference.
Other Fun Facts
Average roster size: 30.7
Redshirts: 19% of all rostered wrestlers
1st year of eligibility: 40% of all rostered wrestlers
Average weight of all wrestlers at certification: 174.2 pounds
Aggregate weight of all wrestlers at certification: 671 tons
Aggregate drop to get to Minimum Weight Class: 60.1 tons
Highest aggregate team weight at certification: 11,600 pounds
Highest average wrestler weight at certification, Division I: 184.1
Want to explore the data on your own?
More Information
New Release: Takedown LIVE
This week we’ve released new versions of Takedown LIVE for iOS and Android. All users should download.
Takedown LIVE iOS has a significant update to the Scores screen. Now, today’s action — in progress and completed matches — is shown on the Scores screen and results prior to today are accessible via the History selection. Also, we’ve added a user setting for selecting the date range over which historical results are presented. There are a number of presets — last week, last two weeks, last month — along with the ability to select any set of start and end dates. These changes declutter the Scores screen and offer ultimate flexibility in choosing which historical results are displayed.
Takedown LIVE Android’s release improves the Scoring view by including bracket and round information for tournaments as well as competition level — Varsity, Junior Varsity, etc. — for scholastic (non-college) events.
Version 2.13
Better playlist management, YouTube-required consent, bug fixes.
In the app store now. All users should download.
In addition to bug fixes, there is one major feature addition and one YouTube-required consent dialogue.
Better Video Playlist Management
If you’re using Takedown’s video features, you’re most likely aware of YouTube’s daily playlist creation limit which is not published but is very real nonetheless. The daily playlist creation limit seems to be in the 10-25 range though, again, this is an unpublished YouTube limit.
Takedown creates, on your behalf, two types of playlists in your YouTube account: (1) Event Playlists and (2) Wrestler Playlists. These playlists are created during video upload in Manage Video. Since Takedown attempts to create the Event Playlist first, there’s a high probability of success especially if you haven’t uploaded any other events on the same day.
However, large teams attending early season tournaments are likely to hit the daily playlist creation limit as Takedown attempts to create a playlist for each wrestler for whom video has been uploaded. The consequence of hitting this limit is that the wrestler videos are uploaded to your YouTube account, but all of the corresponding Wrestler Playlists might not have been created.
As the season proceeds, each attempt to upload videos and create Wrestler Playlists is more successful and, eventually all Wrestler Playlists are created. However, newly created Wrestler Playlists won’t contain uploaded videos from earlier in the season when creating the Wrestler Playlist failed. These videos exist on your YouTube account, but are “orphaned” with respect to the associated Wrestler Playlist.
The new “Fix Playlists” feature (in Manage Video) attempts to correct the “orphaned” video problem by comparing the video contents of each Wrestler Playlist on YouTube with Takedown’s on-device database of successfully uploaded videos for the wrestler in question. If Takedown determines that there are one or more videos for a wrestler that aren’t in their corresponding YouTube Wrestler Playlist, it will add those videos to the Wrestler Playlist.
Note that “Fix Playlists” doesn’t create new YouTube playlists — it simply attempts to improve the accuracy of existing YouTube playlists.
For information on using Fix Playlists, see our Support article.
YouTube Required Consent
Every thirty days we are required by YouTube to solicit your consent for managing Takedown-created YouTube assets on your behalf. Respond accordingly when you see the consent dialogue in Manage Video.
Video Dooze and Dontz
YouTube is an open platform meaning that you can credential into your YouTube account outside of Takedown and do stuff like upload videos, delete/create playlists, edit videos, add channels and channel sections, etc. Some of this activity will not impact Takedown while certain activities will seriously degrade Takedown’s ability to manage YouTube content on your behalf.
To get the best video experience using Takedown, follow these suggestions.
New Product: Takedown LIVE for Android
Today we’re extending the reach of our market-leading Takedown LIVE app to include Android mobile phones and tablets.
Takedown LIVE for Android offers the substantially the same experience as Takedown LIVE for iOS:
→ Free
→ Real-time, score-by-score results
→ Match and riding time clocks
→ Dual meet team scores
→ Tournament round and bracket
→ Links to match video
→ Live and historical results
→ Follow multiple teams
Download Takedown LIVE for Android from the Google Play Store today!
Version 2.12.14
Takedown 2.12.14 is available for download from the App Store today. This release contains important improvements and bug fixes.
Recommend all users download this release.