So yesterday I decided to finally tackle something I’ve been putting off – digging into our high school hockey team’s stats from last season. You know how it is, you keep meaning to do it but life gets busy. Anyway, I wanted to understand how the Tewksbury team actually performed, not just hear the highlights from parents at the coffee shop.
Finding the Raw Data
First thing was hunting down actual numbers, not just rumors. I went straight to the source – well, the digital source. The high school athletics site? Total mess, felt like walking through deep snow. Found a page called “Winter Sports Archives” buried three clicks deep under some “Community News” junk. Seriously, why do schools hide this stuff?
Hit the jackpot though – a PDF labeled “Tewksbury Boys Hockey Full Season Report Final”. Opened it and boom, pure chaos. Stats scattered like hockey pucks after a big hit. Some tables looked okay, others were just… bad.
The Copy-Paste Disaster
Grabbed player stats first. Tried copying straight to Excel. Big mistake. Formatting went crazy:
- Shots on Goal and Goals Assists got mashed together in one column
- Some defenseman had a “plus/minus” of “-23” but it showed as “23-”
- Player names were all caps, some had middle initials, some didn’t
Spent like an hour just cleaning that mess. Had to manually split columns, fix the negative signs – felt like doing extra homework. Brewed another coffee just to survive it.
Team Stats Headache
Season scores were somehow worse. Found them listed in paragraph style, like:
“12/17 Away vs Chelmsford L 1-4, 01/03 Home vs North Andover W 3-2 (OT)”
Unusable. Sat there manually splitting each game onto its own row. Wrote down:
- Date
- Home or Away
- Opponent
- Our Goals
- Their Goals
- Result (Win/Loss/OT)
My hand actually cramped up typing all that junk in. And of course, halfway through I noticed the PDF missed the entire January 15th game against Central Catholic. Had to cross-check with a local newspaper archive online.
Figuring Out What Mattered
Okay, data finally cleaned. Now what? Just listing wins/losses felt weak. I wanted real insights. Looked for patterns:
- How’d they do on the road vs home? Way worse away, turns out.
- Power play percentage? Dismal before February, then shockingly good.
- That goalie kid, #30? Save percentage tanked right before playoffs started. Wonder if he was hurt?
Took me forever to crunch these numbers manually. Built some basic averages, win percentages per month, stuff like that. Excel formulas saved my sanity. Mostly.
Staring at the Ugly Truth
Biggest surprise? Looking at player stats versus wins. The guys putting up crazy points didn’t actually correlate much with wins. The boring, grinding defensemen? Huge impact on whether they won close games. Made total sense later – realized those guys played way more minutes in the third period protecting leads.
Honestly felt like solving a puzzle. Annoying, tedious puzzle with a million pieces.
Done (Mostly)
Filled two notebooks with scribbles and covered my desk in printed spreadsheets that look like a blizzard hit. Wrote up a clean summary finally. Key takeaways:
- Team lived or died by their penalty kill early season
- Mid-season slump almost tanked their playoff spot
- One specific forward’s plus/minus was nuts considering they lost a lot
Exhausting? Totally. Worth it? Maybe. At least next time someone claims “the refs cost us the season!” at the grocery store, I’ll have actual numbers. Brewing more coffee now. Need to recover.
