The information below is provided by Jim Wright, Director of NCAA Statistics, and the
NCAA statistics staff. This information was presented during the St. Louis Convention.
Download this information: PDF .doc
NCAA statistics and records website
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Are Divisions II and III football statistics moving to a Sunday release day?
As we enter year five of the single-game reporting system for II and III football, more and more SIDs are asking if we can move up the posting of football stats from late Monday to late Sunday. Since many SIDs do their weekly game notes late Sunday or early Monday, this would allow everyone to include the latest numbers in their release. Our programming allows us to make that switch, but it really depends upon the willingness of the II/III SIDs to provide their game XMLs before the end of the weekend.
Our plan is to get a feel for what most schools want during the CoSIDA Convention, then poll the membership through the conference offices to make the final decision.
Our proposal is to move the deadline for providing a game XML from Monday afternoon to SUNDAY AFTERNOON (specific time to be determined). Also note that II and III do not necessarily have to be in agreement on which way to proceed. We could move football stats to Sunday for one division and keep the other on Monday if that is the preference.
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More single-game statistics coming for Divisions II and III
Thanks to the continued great work of our Division II/III SIDs, we plan to expand single game reporting in 2012-2013 to include the sports of baseball, softball and men’s volleyball.
That means women’s volleyball will be the only sport in any division that will NOT be using the single-game system next year (more on that later).
We plan to continue the twice-a-week statistical updates for men’s and women’s basketball next winter. As we did last year, there will just be weekly updates before the holidays, then we’ll move to two times a week after the first of the year and through the beginning of the national championship.
Also note our ultimate goal for all sports and all divisions is to provide daily statistical updates. That still may be a few years down the road, but we believe once schools make uploading their home game XMLs to the NCAA part of the normal end-of-game routine, we’ll be able to deliver daily stats to everyone.
• Single-game reporting for Divisions II and III women’s volleyball still set to begin in fall 2013
While our staff knows the logistical challenges each school must face with multiple sports in the fall, we also believe that since 2013 will mark the 20th anniversary of NCAA women’s volleyball stats, the time has come to bring the sport into the 21st century when it comes to stats keeping.
In consultation with selected institutions and conferences, we announced at CoSIDA last year a two-year notice (now one-year!) regarding the implementation of complete statistics that must be kept by all home teams and tournament hosts starting with the 2013 fall season. We believe the two-year window allows all institutions sufficient time to work out the details for keeping complete statistics for both teams and we also are happy to help any league or school that may require our assistance in making this a reality by next fall.
• Digitized historical documents project nearing completion (only DI football remains)
Since the 1940s, the NCAA Statistics Staff has collected both single-game (DI football only) and cumulative season statistics from member schools. Access to these 370,000+ documents is now available to the membership in a PDF format. We have been digitizing one sport (for all divisions) at a time, and now have all sports in the database except DI football. We still are scanning those reports, but expect to add those PDFs, five years at a time, throughout the next few months. To check out what we have in the archives for your school, go to this link:
http://web1.ncaa.org/stats/StatsSrv/careersearch.
Select the “School/Sport Search” on the right side of the page, use the dropdown to find your school, select the sport (leave both “Year” and “Division” at the “ALL” setting) and click “Search.”
You then will see all years for which we have a final report from your school in that sport. Click on the year and you will see a PDF version of the original document submitted to us by your institution. You then can print a copy of that form, create your own PDF, or simply review the data from our site. Many of these hard-copy reports were rapidly deteriorating, so we are very excited to preserve all these one-of-a-kind documents for everyone to use.
• New sports statistical leaders possible in 2012-13
The staff is working on adding statistical leaders for the sports of men’s water polo (fall), women’s bowling (winter) and women’s water polo (spring) for the upcoming year. The biggest challenge is determining the best way to have institutions report their stats to the NCAA since no current software exists that would allow us to use the XML model. More about this possibility later in the summer.
• Weekly statistics and Division II/III score reporting complete first year as one system
After some early growing pains, our staff believes we have successfully combined the reporting of weekly stats with Division II/III score reporting. We hope this has given all of you just a little more time since schools no longer need to provide results to the championships staff for those sports for which we already keep stats. By uploading your single-game XML (or league XML in women’s volleyball), you satisfy the requirements for both the weekly stats and score reporting. Although we hope to expand the number of sports in future years, there will be no additional sports using stats/score reporting for 2012-13.
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Anything new in Division I single-game stats?
For the first time in a number of years, we do not plan any significant changes in Division I. The addition of baseball and softball to single-game reporting this spring meant all DI sports now use the single-game model. Our next goal is to improve and expand the output we provide, but much of that is tied to the availability of our national office programming staff. We encourage suggestions for what our next steps should be and any way to make the national stats more helpful to all of you.
• Some new names may be your stats contact in 2012-13
In an attempt to gain some more efficiencies and combine talents, the statistics staff and media coordination staff have begun working together to share responsibilities for selected sports. We quickly discovered that updating weekly statistical leaders and tracking down results for score reporting required a few more hands on deck throughout the year. Our friends in media coordination still will be handling their usual media duties, but you may see some new names when it comes to stats in 2012-13. We still are working out the details,
but have listed the names of the media coordination staff (along with the statisticians) at the end of this document.
• National Player-of-the-Year resource for all NCAA sports to launch this fall
NCAA statisticians hate it when any of you call with a question that we can’t answer. And that’s what happened last year when a league office asked if any athlete in any sport ever had won national player-of-the-year honors all four years of his or her career. We do maintain POTY listings in the sports for which we keep weekly statistical leaders, but we were pretty much clueless for most of the other sports. So Sam Hovland of our staff combed through web sites for every NCAA sport and every division to create what we hope will be the definitive listing of all POTY, broken down for each year that award has existed. We expect to post it on our site later this summer or early fall.
• Openings on NCAA Statistics and Records Advisory Board
We are looking for replacements to our advisory board. Specifically, we need to replace Al Barba from the California Collegiate Athletic Association, John Painter from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Jeff Schwartz from North Dakota State. For Al’s spot, we need a representative from a Division II conference office, for John’s opening, we’ll need someone from a FBS institution, and Jeff’s replacement would need to be a representative from an FCS school. Since we want to assure that as many schools and leagues as possible have an opportunity to serve on this board, the three replacements cannot come from the same institution or league as the individual they are replacing. It is a four-year term, and each board member will participate in three annual conference calls, along with an in-person meeting at CoSIDA. Please email any member of the statistics staff if you are interested or you’d like more information about these openings.
NCAA STATISTICS STAFF PHONE NUMBERS AND E-MAIL
Kevin Buerge 317/917-6108 kbuerge@ncaa.org
J.D. Hamilton 317/917-6124 jhamilton@ncaa.org
Sam Hovland 317/917-6721 shovland@ncaa.org
Bonnie Johnson 317/917-6142 bjohnson@ncaa.org
Gary Johnson 317/917-6139 gjohnson@ncaa.org
Jenn Rodgers 317/917-6109 jrodgers@ncaa.org
Sean Straziscar 317/917-6122 sstraziscar@ncaa.org
Jeff Williams 317/917-6138 jswilliams@ncaa.org
Jim Wright 317/917-6137 jimwright@ncaa.org
Adrian Tucker (intern) 317/917-6492 atucker@ncaa.org
MEDIA COORDINATION STAFF PHONE NUMBERS AND E-MAIL
Mark Bedics 317/917-6541 mbedics@ncaa.org
Laurie Cannon 317/917-6547 lcannon@ncaa.org
Rick Nixon 317/917-6539 rnixon@ncaa.org
Kristen Jacob Smith 317/917-6584 kjsmith@ncaa.org
David Worlock 317/917-6120 dworlock@ncaa.org