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hello coaches coach KW here hope you're all well uh winter is coming along nicely here in New England one of the things I want to talk about today is
using stats for your team collecting stats for your team and more perhaps interestingly using AI llms to maybe analyze those stats I know there's some controversy about collecting stats for
youth soccer because again really in many many ways there's no reason to do it like we're not trying to rank our players on our teams by goals and things
like that although as they get older having some sort of metrics where they can feel they can compete can be a method by which you induce uh motivation
uh these players want to get better and one of the ways they may do it is to uh to judge their stats it also can cause problems so the stats I'm going to show
you today I do not share with my players in any way shape or form except for the game stats but what stats can be useful for Youth Soccer Coaches and clubs and
teams and towns is that it can show you some Trends and so I'm going to share with you the spreadsheet of how I capture the stats how I do it I'm going
to then look at some of the things that we pull out of it that I find useful and you might as well and then we'll also uh
feed them into uh the AI animal and see what comes out with it and see if it also comes with the same sort of information so let's get in and take a
look at what I can capture how I capture it and why I capture it and then we'll have some fun with uh the magic of AI all right let's
go so here we are uh I use a Google sheet to capture these things uh just because uh you could use any spreadsheet obviously and I will see if I can find a
way to provide a link to share this template if you kind of want it so this first page we're looking at is kind of a summary page it does math and so it's
collecting information from all the tabs that are down at the bottom if you take a look down there so it's showing my boys 51 team my fifth grade team playing
9v9 this fall showing uh their stats uh obviously they had a fairly dominant uh season uh with nine wins and no losses or draws uh some of that can be
attributed to our league perhaps putting us in the wrong Division and some of it can be attributed to the fact that our team's this team's been together for
three years and they do a really good job playing together and they're really talented boys they work hard uh so uh you know give them credit what credit is
due but this is kind of a summary stat and this is kind of fun to look at but it's not that meaningful I mean having a 45 to6 gold differential that that
really doesn't do anything for me or anybody else for that matter it's the individual stuff but it is interesting to look at some Trends you can see how
many shots against we give up versus we take On Target and off Target um which is a good indicator of us playing well and in the final third you know at least
putting pressure on uh quarters goal kicks a lot more goal kicks for the other team because we miss the net or goes out of bounds off sides pretty even
which is interesting I think again because we possess the ball a lot of times uh throwi wins are absolutely equal which is kind of a bizarre stat to
keep I keep it anyways I don't really know what to think of it but we'll see what AI thinks about it later on okay um uh fouls that we give away those are
anything with a penalty kick not a penalty kick any sort of kick indirect or free uh we give those too and then we had a couple of PKS go both ways so how
do I capture this well as you know I record most of my games um I recorded all but one of them this year and when I record the games I watch them back and
honestly I really don't do much more than make a simple tally sheet on a piece of paper I'll hold it up here simple tally sheet and I literally just
tick off what happens and what doesn't happen the game it's nothing sophisticated I don't have anybody on the sidelines doing this it's not real time it's really dependent could you do
it on the sideline sure you could you could ask a parent you could ask the kids on the bench uh to keep a simplified version of this if they have
a hard time focusing you can give them a whiteboard or some other sheet and let them mark off things but I do it watching the video after the fact and I
record it all here so let's take a look again I'm not all that interested in too many of these things but the shot percentage was one that I found useful
and we'll talk about that in a minute um I'll throw my video links in and you also notice two of the games are in Gray for whatever reason our league dropped
this in division four even though we asked for division three this year and then they realized they mistake two games in when we basically complained to the league that for the entire second
half of both of these games I had to play keep away so I didn't go over the maximum goals differential uh it's seven in our league but I really didn't want
to get there if I could help it because it was such a mismatch um so that first game and the second one I didn't even bother recording obviously um we were in
division four and then we moved up to division three where it was a little bit more competitive so it kind of gives me a you know sort of a big picture and as
the year goes along when the spring season comes in whether they move us in division or not it'll be useful for me I feel like to have these stats to see how
we've progressed through the entire year again our opponents obviously as a coach you're assessing how your team is doing just from the fact that you have practices and games and you know how
they're going what I'll tell you is one of the things that this lets me do is it lets me verify biases that happen during the game you get a feeling as a coach
when you're watching a game but your emotions are involved while doing that and you say to yourself ah I feel like X I feel like we're doing this all the
time I feel like we're doing that all the time uh one of my assistant coaches was worried that one of my players was only passing to his Club teammates and
he was getting frustrated with them but then his emotions took over and that's all he saw so afterwards I went back on the video and I literally did a tally
count wrote down all the kids and then ticked off whenever this player passed to another player and of course they weren't just playing to their Club teammates or even their friends like
they were passing the ball all over the place and the data disproved that sentiment that again emotions can sometimes color your assessment of what happens in the game
so being able to watch it back after the fact and then have some stats can help and one of the things I felt like especially after the fifth uh sorry the
fourth game in column e is that we were just taking shots from silly areas of the field we were 25 yards out looping in shots and the keepers would just
having a catching practice and you can see that in the shot percentage area had 28 shots on net and 16 off net I don't care what level you're coaching at
that's a mighty low scoring percentage from that many shots so what did we do in the next couple practices we worked in some finishing drills because they
were making bad decisions so we stopped that piece of it of saying hey these are the dangerous areas and then we worked on when we get into the good areas this
is how not to hit the keeper in the hands and so you could see after that our percentages went up that g column is a little bit of a anomaly because it was
the first time we were on Turf it was a weird sort of game to say the least the ball was bouncing all over the place the rest of the season as we went along it
started to get back up into one and five one and three a lot better sort of conversion rate and that was from having that feeling and then confirming the
feeling with that data I also keep stats on all my players based on what I watched during the game and again I'm not necessarily looking for you know
output here I mean my own kid that's on this chart will show up as having one goal and one assist but he plays as a six or a cent ofb back most of the time
his contributions to the game are someplace else he's keeping clean sheets he's Distributing the ball he's directing traffic with his words we don't capture that stat here maybe you
could come up with a stat that captures that but I capture these stats going across so I've hidden the names across the top but all the way across here
basically each player each week I add a set of columns for that information and I drop it in there uh just so then it summarizes into this sheet here is it
important no it's not important at all but it is fun and interesting to have that information as a coach as you look back over the season and figure out you
know was I putting players in the right places to get certain things interestingly like one of my top goal scorers is my keeper one of my Keepers
because you know he only plays half the game so when he goes out on the field he's only playing half of the game and yep he's one of the top scorers on our
team what can I learn from watching him that I can then use as an example for my other players who are playing upfront that can say hey this kid's being super
successful upfront only playing half of a game in the field and most of it as a striker what are the good habits he's doing that you can copy watch him during
the game watch him during practices when he's up front and what can you take from that to be like your teammate so that's where sometimes these stats can be
really helpful is to help highlight those things that you can then go what is that kid doing that is either innate or we've trained and can we give it to
other players as well so let's take a look at the quote unquote fun part here so now what I did is I went to both Gemini Google Gemini and chat GPT uh
both free additions for what I'm doing I'm not paying anything took this information and it was a little bit of a struggle and to figure out the right
format and but I fed it in you can see my prompt here uh if you haven't used llms or these sort of things before a prompt is basically you tell it what you
want it to do so I said here please use this Google Drive document to provide analysis of the data it contains match and individual player statistics from
soccer games so it found it went through and kind of gave it this summary looking at the record probably fairly obvious but again great to have this summary uh
looking at the individual ones uh it really didn't dive into it on this version so it just basically said this is what you're doing and how you could
use it uh Trends and observations this is where it gets a maybe a little bit more interesting uh shots on them so shots against our team uh our team had
consistently more shots on goal than the others offensive dominance we knew that uh goal kicks again similar I don't necessarily always notice the only reason I noticed the number of goal
kicks is for a number of years I've been recording games so I could use our goal kick example especially in 7b7 to show other coaches and make video content and
I was always frustrated that we'd have so few goal kicks that I couldn't get video of any of them this is just another you know if I wasn't videoing
them I might not have keyed into the fact that we have that many that few of them um which also led me to change one of my practices because I
realized we had a game where we did have a number of goal kicks and we weren't all that sharp at them because we don't get them in games so we hadn't really
been practicing them so next week we spent some time going back over goal kick strategies refining it in the 9b9 game really working on different scenarios because 9b9 that pressure is
right at the top of the box it doesn't have to go back to restraining line and so we worked on things like what happens if the team presses with one or two or
three players and so in later games we had a little bit more goal kicks opportunities and we were able to then execute them more consistently with a
little bit more Comfort it says we have more throwin of the opponents but we looked at that summary where they were dead even so I'm not quite sure again
llms are not perfect so you have to take this with a grain of salt and own goals it says neither team or the opponent scored any own goals we saw that the
data it was so if anything this is an important piece to understand that llms are not perfect even with your own data but you have to take these things with a
grain of salt you have to know your data going in to make sure that you're not getting the wrong conclusion and then it gave me some suggestions like they
talked about time based data obviously it knows it you know it's using some model information to know that soccer matches a lot of times a Time based or
time of possession etc etc I'm not all that interested in that maybe I should be but that's some of the suggestions I have here uh you know overall successful
and dominant team so that was gemni so now let's take a look at what chat GPT did with this information so same sort of deal I had to figure out what sort of
file format chat gbt wanted this time it was a PDF believe it or not and it took a look uh you know win record goes forward against you know gives us that
sort of information you know they using the right terminology achieve several clean sheets so clearly you can see the model is using inferences from other um situations out there the shot accuracy
occasional inefficiency in converting shots to goals and we talked about that already in the video but again if maybe you didn't notice that within a game situation and you weren't keeping the
stats maybe you don't get keyed into hey we're taking lots and lots of shots and not converting them but we've also not worked on finishing for a while maybe I
should change up one of my practices and so that's what happened here uh you can see offensive play quarters uh defensive strength we knew we had that it
understood that we had two PKS scored so suggestions for improvement first one shooting efficiency we talked about that already but the second one is one that I've known about for a while but I just
kind of ignore but it is true from third grade straight through the their fifth grade season and that is we really score from corner kicks now because you can't
head the ball Corners tend to be not that much an offensive weapon in the game until you can really start to head the ball if you're kicking the ball in
you play short and then as soon as you play short because the Nets are small and the areas are small teams tend to just pack the box so it's really hard to
get a shot through when you play it on the ground so lots of reasons why in 7v7 and 9v9 Corners aren't quite the weapon that could be an 11 v11 although
honestly if you look at the 11 v11 stats even for pros outside some of the anomalies like Arsenal this year and a few others Corner kicks are not
necessarily as productive as everybody wishes or hopes they could be but it is a correct analysis there and is something that if I hadn't kind of already known ahead of time this may be
useful to me to say yeah are we doing anything with our set pieces now philosophy wise I don't spend a lot of time on set pieces the kids kind of get
the idea they play in club they watch soccer on TV perhaps the best thing so they get some ideas on their own and I kind of leave it to them to figure out
what they want to try or not try but it is true I don't know how it came to that suggestion because there's no stat in there that says successful Corners
versus unsuccessful Corners so it is interesting to look at that except that maybe it looked at the total number of corners and the total number of goals
scored in each match and said it doesn't seem like that corner number has been influential in the number of goals scored this is what it came up with me
to be um really kind of interesting uh there are other tools out there but uh that's what I got out of both Gemini and GPT so there you have it stats brilliant
or bogus let me know in the comments uh it's the first year I've really done this I've never really done it in the years I did 7v7 I didn't have the
ability to record the games as consistently as I do now but I found it useful I have found it valuable it is again as we talked in the video
dispelled some myths based on emotions and also provided some insight when you had a feeling that perhaps something was happening but you didn't have anything concrete having those numbers in front
of you can be useful and then taking those numbers and feeding them into an llm trying to apply AI I just thought was interesting trying to blend my
background in it with what I do in soccer you know resulted in some interesting results and confirmed some things I kind of knew and also gave me
some new questions to look at so let me know in the comments what you think like share subscribe and until the next time I hope you're all well I'll
see you out in the fields real soon bye
