The practice dashboard consists of two pages.
- A page analyzing performance goals
- A page analyzing practice performance
The Goals analysis page provides context to the Practice analysis page. There is a key (shown below) on the page that explains every metric.
The best way to understand it is to explain a few examples.
The third bowler on this list has a 171.5 median along with a GOAL headpin % of 91.39%, a GOAL single pin spare % of 69.77% and a goal 30 point average of 0.93. If anyone is interested in how these goals are determined, ask Coach William.
Notice the colored columns for this bowler indicate that a focus on spare conversions is a premium when practicing. Also, some consideration needs to be given to the 30 point average which would require focusing on “transition” and other topics related to keeping the ball in the pocket. Bowlers with lower averages would want to focus on hitting the headpin and increasing the first ball average as a priority. It isn’t that practicing spares is less important, it is that honing the targeting process down that results in higher first ball counts is easier to measure and see progress with even when the average isn’t quite following along.
If you hover over any measure it will give you a “player card” that contains a violin plot with their games and their average. In this case the median and the average are the same. They can be different and this tells us something about what we can expect from different bowlers. You will note here that the plot distribution is weighted slightly below the average which means I can expect games in the 160-175 most commonly from this bowler, with occasional games well over 200 to balance the average higher.
Now lets return to our 171.5 median bowler with a GOAL headpin % of 91.39%, a GOAL single pin spare percent of 69.77% and a goal 30 point average of 0.93.
The Practice page allows to to review this information in more detail and to see trends over time. If you click on the bowler whose measures we are reviewing on the Goals page, you will see several boxes at the top. In the business world these are called KPI’s (key performance indicators). The overall measures merge the practices together. The trend breaks it out by practice. They look like this:
Notice that their headpin % is exceeding the GOAL and is thus green, the single pin spare % is exceeding the goal which is also in green. The only measure that is not exceeding the goal is the 30 point average. This lets us know EXACTLY what the priority should be in practice. As a note, when the bowler is very close to a goal, the measure will be yellow (their Fill % goal is 77.1%).
Now the Practice dashboard can be used for a variety of other things. Below I will explain the different sections of the dashboard:
Slicers
- At the very bottom on the left there is a pin deck with all 10 pins on it. You can click on any pin and it will narrow the dashboard to leaves containing that pin.
- At the very bottom in the middle right, there is a slicer that lets you narrow by the First Shot count. For example, if you want to narrow your analysis to single pin spares you can click the 9 and it will only show frames where you left 1 pin.
- In the bottom right there are slicers for Gender, Bowler Name and Practice Date.
Sections
- Games – The games section allows us to look at individual games in the practice sections. Clicking on a game, or a practice date will narrow the other visuals on the dashboard.
- Converted Pin Percent – This shows the converted pin percent’s as pie charts for each pin in the set.
- Most Commonly Left – This shows which pins tend to be left after the first shot.
- Outcomes – This shows what happens in your frames and a count of how many frames you are analyzing. For example, if you want to look at convertible spares that you miss you can click on the Open adjacent to the Convertible.
- Most Common Spare Leaves – This shows what types of spares you are leaving. Multi-pin spares are more difficult to convert than single pin spares. If you are leaving the same types of spares regularly, it likely tells us some things we can do to leave those less.
The best thing I can tell you do to is simply click around on the dashboard. Below I will highlight a few examples of the types of things we can see from the dashboard.
Most Commonly Left – a few case examples
These examples are for a right handed bowler. Each of these tells us something about what is happening on the lane even though we are not there.
- A – ball is hitting the headpin and travelling through the pocket. The 10 pin should be the most common leave for a right handed bowler.
- B – When a 2 pin is the most common leave the ball is going through the headpin to the right and is thus *light*.
- C – When a 3 pin is the most common leave the ball is going through the headpin to the left and is thus *high*.
- D – When the 5 pin is the most common leave the ball is often missing the headpin entirely. In this case we see that the headpin is hit sometimes but that frequently some combination of pins on the right side of the lane remains.
Converted Pin Percent – example
With the example here I narrowed the dashboard to shots where 9 pins were hit on the first shot to analyze single pin spare conversions. The example above is a possible indication of someone who is comfortable with single pin spares that are in the line of their strike shot. Notice the trend of higher conversion percentages near the pocket.
These are just a few examples of how you can look at the practice dashboard to get an idea of how to improve your game. The coaches will be looking at it but there is no reason that you cannot assess your own game. Let us know if you see anything interesting in the dashboard that can help make our team better.
