Tuesday, December 30, 2014

"A must have experience"


Statbeat has some cool features you might not be aware of. In this blog post Mika tells about the ones he likes the most. IBK Vantaa is an amateur floorball team playing in the 5th division. Follow IBK Vantaa in Statbeat. 




"It has been great to have Statbeat in our Talvi-liiga and Helsinki Floorball cup matches. Few know, but there are many more features in Statbeat. Here is the stuff I like the most."


One personal profile for all the your teams across different sports


"It's cool to have one profile for different teams. I play Floorball in two different teams and it is great that I do not have to use different places to check my other team ongoings. I have also noticed that Statbeat provides all of the stats from games, tournaments and leagues in one place."
Pss! Your one profile can be used to create and join as many teams as you like across different sports. Create your own team, add friends and you are ready to roll!


Awesome stats


2014-2015 IBK Vantaa stats






Random Helsinki Floorball Cup game

"More and more tournaments nowadays provide standings and tournament results, but it was nice to see personal stats in Arena Center's Talvi-liiga games. In addition to that, there are also team stats from all of the tournaments that we participate in."



Calendar integration



Calendar integration is probably the simplest and the most useful feature at the same time. Nothing beats its simplicity and convenience.



Psst! Have you already integrated your games into the calendar?



written by David from Statbeat

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Do I really need the internet? pt 1.

My friend coach asked me this question two years ago in one tournament. This was straight after I was murmuring about the low attendance levels in our training events. I have to point out that I don't know any team in Finland that doesn't use some sort of online service for reporting about attendance to events.

The conversation was buried in my subconsciousness for years, until today. I was reading a science magazine form as early as 2001 and about the future of mobile broadcasting. Back then, terminology as WAP, UMTS and GPRS were new to the people. The author assumed that the usage of mobile internet would slowly increase in business use in coming years.

Now, over 10 years after (dear god, is it really that long!) that article, I can say that the business data is only a fracture of the amount of data transmitted and received wirelessly.

How can you use the internet efficiently when managing a floorball club?

As it seems, while reading this article, you have been selected as the target group for the other main usage for internet in terms of sports team managing. You are the receiver of public information. I like to divide the usage of internet to two main aspects, internal and external communication.

Internal communication- team sports services

This internal communication is conducted mainly via different team sports management services that allow the team representative to generate a training and match schedule for the players of the team. Usually, these events are visible for team members only.

Needless to say, officials moderate the users, so no unwanted viewers are able to see what's up with the team.

Our team uses the Finnish free service called: Nimenhuuto. This site allows you to arrange events and distinguish them, for example to training, matches and other events (parties and such). Players choose to either attend or not to attend. This is efficient way for a coach to preliminary plan the drills to the amount of players attending. Also you can upload files for internal distribution and use the "wall" as communication channel. 

After my very loose googling, I have been able to find only one alternative service in English, called PlayerLineup. This site is managed by the same company as Nimenhuuto, and the site is exactly the same. 

However, sites mentioned here, are not so good for managing the team. They have only limited usage profiles, that are suitable for only very-non-professional teams. At least I am much more interested about more complex web service, that can be used, not only for communication and calendar, but also for coaching itself.

And this is the time when Statbeat comes along.

Statbeat for team

Though our team does not (yet) use Statbeat efficiently, I have been browsing the site recently and found out, that this web service is much more usable for team that is keen to take their actions to the next level. 

Besides the attributes mentioned earlier, Statbeat also has ability to collect statistics. For the team statistics. This is however much more usable, than some lame old excel sheets or google docs. 

Also this site has one very hefty feature. The line ups. For this day, the line ups of our team, have been presented on the day of the game. This feature enables communication with the team prior to the matches. This could be useful indeed.

What I have heard also, is that the Statbeat is also launching some sort of tournament-system. I have no information about it yet. 

I will present the possibility of using Statbeat for our internal management to my team. We'll see what's the response. I have to be straight about this, some people may not agree about the usefulness, as they are only players. 

External Communication

Well, anyone who reads this post, is most likely directed to here via social media. For sport in general, social media has increased the possibility of gaining "visibility". I will use our team as an example.

Two years ago, I moved to my new hometown from Jyväskylä. As I had interest for floorball coaching the only reasonable and easy way to get information about the teams in the area, was internet. Now I know this isn't actually the social media in it self. For example, the team that I had priviledge to join, was not at all active in common social medias. They had the website, but that's pretty much all.

Facebook

The usual way to say "We're in social media" is to refer to Facebook account. Most teams (not qualitative research based) have only the team site and it's updated not on reqular basis. To be mean, I'd say that most teams only post things to their site when they remember it.

From Facebook, team can quite easilly and for the most important part of all for free, control their PR. This can of course be done in two separate ways. Either by "corporative" posting, wich means that the team posts about their results and other major happenings throughout the season.

Or, as it will be for my team, they can use the site for not only informing about the game, but also as an open advert about the atmosphere in the team. What this means is, players can post pictures, stories and comments on the site and have communication with followers. Later on, team could easily give foundation for sponsorship talks while directing possible sponsors to site and to see, what to actually assist financially.

Ongoing debate about users of Facebook being not happy about the service have not at least yet affected to this side of usage.

Twitter

This here is a complicated issue. Twitter is, as is Instagram, also effective way to do PR, but it needs more delving into. Twitter is known for rapid flood of posting and bigger the amount of followers to specific user, smaller the time frame to be seen for individual post.

For our team, the twitter account has been linked to Facebook account. This means that whenever someone posts something to our facebook site (as admin) the same post is linked to Twitter and vice versa.

Now this means that whoever is in the loop of our Facebook posting, can easily locate us in Twitter also. Eventually, this will increase our visibility in the users of internet.

Summary

I find it very hard to see, how a team willing to succeed in any sports, can despise internet or social media. Actually, I don't believe there is such team anymore. At least some part of interaction either within the team or also to the public is conducted via internet.

However, I wish to point out, that by only having accounts in the services mentioned, you actually gain nothing. People follow those accounts for a reason, most of them want to have some sort of information from there, regularly.

Our team has had meetings about usage of social media and possibilities of individual team members to take part in it. Though yet they have not taken too much part for it, I think, later on we'll have much more buzz on our team site.

And also remember, If you have a team and you are struggling for not having good enough platform for internal communication, use Statbeat! It is the most cost effective way to do it to this date.

Yours.
Tommi Remsu
@remuli

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Getting from 5th to 3rd division in two years: what did we learn?




Liikunnan Riemu (Follow on Statbeat) is a students sports club in Jyväskylä. Most of the team members study in the Faculty of Sport and Health Sciences in Jyväskylä university- the only place in Finland for university level Sports Sciences education. No wonder, these guys are so mad.






There are multiple sport sections in our club but it was in 2012 that the floorball team started its journey. In the spring of that year we took part in the Finnish Student Championships and after doing well there decided to start playing in a competitive level. In our first season in the 5th division we managed to win our group and advance to the 4th division. Last year we did it again and so, next year we will be playing in the 3rd division. How did we do it? And what did we learn? Here are five reasons for our instant success.


1. A good mix of players

To be honest, we have had some really quality players in our team. Two of our best point makers used to play in under-20 national team and we have also had another player who has played in the national floorball league. But there have also been players like me who started playing in the competitive level for the first time in Riemu.



2. Good team spirit

Our team has a really high team spirit. The main reason for that is that we all study in the same faculty and see each other almost every day. We also arrange team nights every now and then and I would say that for making a good team spirit sauna is a very important factor :). But that's no news for us, Finns.

3. Never give up!

Although we have won most of our games they have usually been really tight. For example our very first game in the 5th division had an awful start. After 10 minutes it was 3-0 for the opponent. But we kept fighting and finally won the game 7-6 by a goal in the last seconds. It was a good lesson for us and just showed that - especially in floorball - everything is possible!


4. Versatile training

I have to admit that we don't have that many team trainings in a week. Maybe one or two in best cases. But our strength is that we all do different kinds of sports beside floorball. It's part of our studies but we usually enjoy doing different types of sports in our free time too.


5. Coaching

Some of us study in order to, one day, become professional floorball coaches. And it goes without saying that it's a big advantage for our team. We don't have an actual coach but a few players take responsibility for things like tactics. At least I have learned a lot about floorball in the last two years and become a better player.
That was an insight for our team. You can follow our upcoming season in our website and also in Facebook and Twitter.


Written by Henri Pelkonen, Liikunnan Riemu

Friday, June 6, 2014

Floorball coaching- Tommi Remsu series

Hello fellow Statbeaters!


My name is Tommi Remsu. I am an ordinary Finnish bloke, whose spare time is more or less filled with floorball. And to be more specific- coaching floorball. And if that is not enough, the rest of the time that is usually reserved for sleeping, I reserve for writing about floorball. Since it’s 21st century, I am doing it online. My personal blog is in Finnish and can be found here. In addition to that, I have been writing for almost a year in Floorball central.

I don’t know how, perhaps via Twitter, Statbeat guys approached me earlier this year with the idea to guest blogging. Needless to say, I was excited and little flattered even.

Who am I?

I mainly write about floorball coaching, whether it is about coaching issues in general, or about the progress of our team in particular. This is the way that I’m going to proceed with here as well.
In addition to that, I will write about variety of sports-related general issues. For example planned topics will be about relations of floorball and other sports (ice hockey, basketball etc.). If you have some areas of interest about topics, feel free to contact me.

A word about my background

I am from northern part of Finland. As I am at my early 30’s floorball had not found it’s way to my hometown at my school time. Of course, we played “sähly” (no rink, flexible sticks from the 80’s) but this was far from what we nowadays call floorball. My youth-hood was filled with ice hockey and football (or soccer).

I have however played floorball in competitive level for one season. Or, actually, not full season. We had two tournaments and then some mishappenings in financial sector meant that we had no money left, so that was it. Thank you very much mrs. cashier.

So, some time passed, actually nearly 10 years, before I returned to the game. This time as a referee. I did some whistleblowing for three years in Finnish minor- and junior leagues before moving forward to coaching.

I have coached for two seasons now. 1st one was at SC Pommak women’s team in finnish 3rd division. We finished in the mid-section of the series. That season was actually learning process for me, rather than actual coaching.

For the last season, I moved to Nokia (near Tampere) and got by chance the possibility to be 2nd coach of women’s team of Pirkat which is from Pirkkala (also near Tampere). This season was also rather educational to me, but this time there was more time for actual coaching. We finished 3rd in the series (2nd division), which was a slight disappointment for us. For this season we are determined for promotion to 1st division, that is logically the 2nd highest series in women’s floorball in Finland.

As you follow this blog, you will learn about my ideas about coaching and floorball in general.
I hope that you enjoy reading these posts. If you have any comments, you can find me from twitter with @remuli.

See you!

Friday, August 10, 2012

Embedded Liiqu Graph in Action

Here you can see one Liiqu graph embedded. You can now embed your graphs in your own home page!

It's super simple try it out! The instructions for embedding your own stats into your home page can be found at https://www.liiqu.com/help

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Huge update

You probably thought we were on summer vacation, since there haven't been much Liiqu updates lately. Well guess what snuslip, we've been busy as hell developing the latest version of the best teamsports platform in the interwebs.

This update has some nice changes in the layout and some very neat new features. Under the hood though Liiqu has undergone the most drastic changes. We've been able to pull many open-source components out of the core and publish those as individual components.

Some components we have published thus far:

https://github.com/kvesteri/flask-storage
https://github.com/kvesteri/colander-alchemy
https://github.com/kvesteri/flask-test
https://github.com/kvesteri/bourne

Sorry for the lousy documentation :) Janne is a perfectionist so the components he has published have been thoroughly documented:

https://github.com/jpvanhal/flask-split
https://github.com/jpvanhal/inflection

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Continuing the Sequence of Minor Releases


Like we told last week, we’ll be having plenty of new things rolling out the coming weeks. In case you happened to miss the previous newsletter, you can view it from here to know more about the upcoming features.
The current release we deployed includes
  • Private posts. Team walls now enable you to send internal posts to your team members. Only your team members will see these posts and you can enable any wall post as private by clicking the lock icon before writing to your team’s stream.
  • Enhanced team event tabs now include RSVP icon and number of people attending and missing. This allows you to quickly see the status of the upcoming events as well as to look the amount of event participants in past (screenshot below).
  • Match reports are now more easily readable. We included line breaks and few other minor improvements.
  • We added a help page for newcomers and curious souls

Remember that we are about to bring the long anticipated Facebook Events out soon! Stay tuned!







Let’s keep on rocking! – Liiqu Team