Dear Sean,
How do you decide each players final score? -Rebecca, 3/31/2008
Hi Rebecca, thanks for the note. The scores are calculated pretty easily when you look at the numbers by themselves, but here is the low down on how we do it.
We keep track of two stats for every single game played over the season. Each time a four square round is played, we mark up one entrance point for the person in one-square and then one serve point for the person in four square.
After thousands of games in a season, we then divide a players total serve points by their total entrance points. This basically tells us that a person worked their way to the top and served approximately X number of times each time she stepped into the court. That X is their final score. A score of 1.000 means that you served at least once for each time you joined the court. Our final scores range from 0.200 to 3.000
We add another element that is helpful to our players, basically we drop out our player two lowest scoring games without giving them a penalty. Because we're all adults and all have commitments sometimes missing a game is unavoidable and this rule lets our people not worry too much about missing a game or playing very poorly now and then.
Our men and women play together on the same courts during the season, but we track them separately so we can have a mens and womens 1st, 2nd and 3rd place league champs. We also examine the numbers to get some other stats, like the Most Improved award who is the person who shows the greatest positive change in game scores between all ten sessions. Also, we keep a running tally of impressive plays for each player, a totally subjective persuasion by the judges, for recognizing players for heavy hits, acrobatic explosions, cunning feats, and strategery.
We also used to do team superlative awards, with crazy categories like Most Marketable Player and Biggest Bruiser. We stopped doing those because they were just popularity contests and we would rather award people based on merit and great play.
Hope this enlightens you somewhat on how we do our scoring. We are just one model but it seems to work for us. Some people care very much about their scores and some really don't. If you have other ideas or suggestions, let us know and we can try them out.
Laters,
Sean
