Potential of Online Scoresheets

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Potential of Online Scoresheets

Postby harip » Sat Nov 10, 2018 4:46 pm

Just a few hours ago, the "Give Thanks for Matt's Buzzers V" at MVS just finished running a tournament using online scoresheets. While most of the scoresheets were entered by hand, I believe that the success of this tournament shows the potential for online scoresheets to be used in future high school tournaments across the country. In this post, I would like to make a case for the increased usage of online scoresheets in future high school tournaments. By "online", I am not referring to something as complex as OphirStats, but a database running off of Google Sheets.

WHY ONLINE SCORESHEETS?


    Stats could be viewed immediately. With the spreadsheet we used today, we were able to get and prelims and full stats on the spreadsheet within ~5 minutes of the last round ending. The spreadsheet we used even calculated, PPB and individual PPGs. While this may not be as big as a concern in the high school world as in college, it still exists. Online scoresheets have the potential to solve such a problem.

    Tournaments could run a lot smoother and quicker. Because the scoresheet is automated, it would save a lot of time with having to total everything. Obviously the system isn't foolproof, but computer errors tend to be less likely than human errors. Tournaments would also spend less time re-bracketing during lunch, since the prelim stats are instantly up.

    Stats are live. This is a very minor concern, but I think it would be nice for outsiders who aren't at X tournaments to "watch" certain quiz bowl matches at those tournaments.

WHY NOT ONLINE SCORESHEETS?

    Technological issues. The plethora of things that can go wrong with something utilizing the internet is big: WiFi, losing data, limitations of Google Sheets, etc. However, I believe we can slowly solve this issue with each new development in scoresheet technology.

    Huge learning curve. At today's tournament, the readers utilizing the online scoresheets had a lot of trouble with the permissions, as well as figuring out how to mark substitutions/putting bonuses in the right/etc. In general, online scoresheets will naturally have a higher learning curve for inexperienced and experienced moderators, but with practice, I believe that it could be easily overcome.

    Paper scoresheets work very well on its own already. Why should there be a need to complicate things?

I'm curious to know what the community's thoughts on this are. If you have any questions about the scoresheet or wish to use it at your tournament, feel free to DM me or email babyk315@gmail.com. Huge thanks to Patrick Matthews who helped me out with it immensely.
Hari Parameswaran
Beavercreek High School 2019
harip
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