Few things in derby bum me out more than skaters who ignore stats. There are 1,000’s of skaters in the WFTDA Stats Repo who have no idea of its existence and even more listed in bouts on Flat Track Stats with pages that go unloved. Y’all, your NSO’s put in the work to track these stats for you and a lot of leagues have stat books for every single game including home bouts— honour their effort by at least understanding and reading them! Below is a quick resource post to help you find where the stats are and also make sense of them.
Flat Track Stats
Open source and home to many of the world’s best derby stat rats, Flat Track Stats allows you to upload schedules, scores and stat books which, all compiled, run through their own algorithm and (predictive) ranking system. For game and individual skater stats the Flat Track Stats system offers specific insight you can’t get from the Stats Repo or regular Stat Books, and also allows access to many Stat Books that would never hit the Stats Repo which only covers Playoffs, Champs and select Tournaments.
Ohio Roller Derby uploads most of their bouts to Flat Track Stats and are a great league to hold up as an example of a stats savvy league. Their bouts on FTS give access to specific information you wouldn’t get elsewhere including — multiple scoring graphs, star and initial pass counts, Versus Team Average (VTAR) stats, player combos and historic ranking graphs. Across a game, and hopefully a larger sample, those unique stats can give you insight into if a team typically plays better in a particular half, which jammer is most likely to star pass or get stuck on their initial pass, which skater has the biggest positive or negative track rating relative to the team, which line combinations a team is typically running and which direction the team is trending.
For Ohio Roller Derby, with stat books up for all 7 of their sanctioned games this year I know that — Gorges Curves has the most jams played as a jammer (81) as well as the biggest positive track rating among jammers (+193), Pain Train has the best lead jam percentage among their main rotation jammers at 54.5% but also averages the most jammer penalties for OHRD a game with 3.57 a game and that Val Holla is the jammer most likely to star pass with 17.6% of her jams this year seeing her pass the star. The team averages 37.28 penalties a game, only once taking more than their opponent (Blue Ridge) and the most stable lines appear to be Line 1 — Blitz / Khaos / Chainsaw / TKO and Line 2 — Lora / Bigg Rigg / Slammerhead / Zee. All of this information, and more, can be gained from Flat Track Stats and inform either how the skaters themselves adjust their game, or how opposing teams scout them.
The WFTDA Stats Repo
The Stats Repo is amazing during Playoffs and Champs because it updates at half and post game for impatient derby stat rats — thank you NSO’s! Providing a game summary, jam scores, penalty summary, line ups, skater stats and track time, the Stats Repo doesn’t provide much more analysis than FTS, but it does give great near real time stats and is awesome for providing full tournament total stats.
Tournament, and team year stats, compile together and are sortable by every category to give you a great snap shot of top performers — like that time Bonnie Thunders put up 541 points and was a +492 in 3 games in Omaha in 2015 😲 😲 😲 😲 😲 😲
2016 WFTDA Playoff/Champs Sports Information Books
Did your team, or the team you are scouting, play at 2016 Division 1 or 2 Playoffs or Champs? If they did, there is a massive compilation of their season stats that exists online that includes ALL of that teams 2016 stat books compiled into individual stats along with team summary stats. All you need to search is for the “WFTDA Sports Information Book + Tournament The Team Was At.” You can see the 2016 Champs book here.
Amy Jo Moore also broke down some important 2016 team summary stats that didn’t fully make it into these tables, so you may want to check those out as well.
Regular Old Stat Books
Plain ol’ league stat books are also a treasure trove of information to help you learn about you game and your opponents. Sometimes harder to access, and make sense of, I focus mainly on the “game summary” tab of game stat books keying in on lead percentage, track rating, and VTAR broken down by position. A positive track rating is generally good, but VTAR will find the average per jam +/- of the team and apply a skater by position and overall against that average. If your team was an average +1.5 per jam in a game (50 jams, +75 point margin) and you were +0.7 per jam, you will have a negative VTAR even though you had a positive track rating. Small sample sizes mess with VTAR, so if you are below 10 jams in a game or in a specific position things can get wonky and need to be contextualized, but still you can look to other areas like lead percentage, penalty percentage and track rating. Jammers obvi want that high lead percentage (although this can be over rated), both jammers and blocker want a positive track rating, and jammers and blockers should be shooting for under 15% penalty percentage. If a line has an anemic points for VTAR’s over a large sample size, or massive points against, this also gives skaters and coaches a better idea of what your line needs to work on.
These are my favourite derby stat sites and just a few ways that I break down and interpret stats. If you have any other sites, or anything specific that you focus on that wasn’t covered above I’d love to hear about it. Hit us up at The Apex or derbyapex@gmail.com
