We're very excited about the opportunity to work with the NJCAA and its members for a national statistics system, but we know we've made a bad first impression. I wanted to talk through what we did wrong, explain some key concepts about the new system, and go over what we're working on.

Mistakes we made

I feel we made three key mistakes ahead of the fall 2012 season. 

First was that we had bad assumptions on how stat collection happens at the NJCAA level. The two specific bad assumptions were that you would have opponent rosters and that you would go directly from paper to our scoresheet system. I know you've gotten frustrated because you only had your "half" of the box score and were trying to upload the stats from a different stats program.

The second mistake was the amount of testing we did for scoresheet. Since entering in-game statistics is significantly more complicated than entering statistics into a scoresheet, our testing was focused on in-game and we missed many bugs that should have been caught in scoresheet.

The third mistake was our prioritity in making the statistics system functional rather than easy to use. We were not prepared for the number of requests for help when you started to use this new system because it was not easy for you to use.

How it should work

There are a couple of points about how the NJCAA statistics system that we wanted to go over to make sure everyone is aware of it.

The first is that this is a central national database. Everyone is updating shared information so that you have reduced stats reporting and you don't have discrepancies. We know this has confused people when they see their opponents have already submitted stats, but this is by design and will be an improvement once you get used to it.

The follow-on point is that every single change in the system is tracked in the system. Some users have been frustrated that their work is lost, but nothing is ever lost... it's just an earlier version in the system. You can always see the earlier versions of a box score and download it as a packed file or XML. You can upload these earlier versions to restore what you used to have, and we're going to add an easy way to revert those changes.

Finally, you can set up email alerts to know when other people have made changes to your schedule and statistics. This is great when you want to know that your opponent has updated the score and uploaded the statistics for that road game. Now you know you have nothing to do and your stats are all set.

Next steps

We have made a lot of bug fixes and improvements since the start of the season with the second major set of changes going live this morning. We believe these will significantly reduce the problems that were frustrating NJCAA members. We appreciate all of your help pointing out where these problems are and helping us diagnose the cause of these problems.

The NJCAA statistics system is our company's top priority right now, and we are committed to making this a success. We have many changes on our developers' plates that I want to share.

One NJCAA issue we're addressing is having to get your opponent's roster. This is currently in testing, but in another week or two, you will only have to have your own roster to enter statistics.

One of the biggest challenges we want to address is ease of use, so we're currently going through a "user experience" review process. This is where we walk through each step of the system and identify where screens are not intuitive and where we need more explanation. We're also planning to improve the graphics and design of the software to make it easier for you.

We're also working to address the "half box score" problem. This is a challenge at the NCAA in volleyball competition as the sport is simply too fast for most people to enter complete stats. We are working on a feature that will allow you to preview the changes when you upload from another stats program as well as to merge your half box score with your opponent's box score.

Finally, we want basketball to be a great experience as it's the biggest sport among NJCAA members. We already did testing of in-game basketball stats last year, and we are going to spend the next month working to make basketball scoresheet go much more smoothly than the fall sports did. Between this greater focus on testing, the bugs we fixed during the fall sports, and the additional improvements we discussed above, we're looking forward to make basketball a success.