Today we have the pleasure of chatting with Wil Osberger and Tomàs Marquès from Spain. Let's see how they use Steazzi for their daughters' team !
Who are you? Can you introduce us to your club and team?
We are Wil Osberger and Tomas Marques, parents of Mimi and Jana, respectively. We are both passionate parents who like numbers and statistics, somehow related to our professional lives.
Mimi and Jana (thirteen years old) both play in the Club Handbol Sant Esteve de Palautordera, a small club from a small town close to Barcelona. Our club has a long history of dedication to training young people in this sport. For our town, handball is more than just a sport. It's also a place for social gathering and a place where young people (and not so young!) go to cheer their team and meet with friends and colleagues. Our national senior teams, both in male and female categories, are amateurs. But last season, we played a game against the FC Barcelona professional team in the Catalan Supercup. Quite an experience!
How would you describe Catalan handball?
While handball generally receives less publicity than football, it continues to be one of the most popular team sports in Catalonia. Catalan teams perform very well in the national Spanish championships, and many Catalan players are chosen to represent Spain. It helps to have very strong teams like FC Barcelona and Granollers in our region, so our younger players can have role models. In some small towns like ours, handball is by far the preferred sport of children, and the level of competition is very high.
What are the statistics that you use the most during a game, and why?
Being amateurs and being parents, we like to enjoy the game. So, initially, our introduction of data points into the app was limited. Now that we have been using the app for around a year, we are able to track pretty much everything that the app allows (we use the mobile version, which misses a couple of the features that are available on the tablet). We track the score, position of scoring (both in attack and defense), minutes played, lost balls, recovered balls and general fouls. We do that for several reasons, but one of them is that it keeps us calm and focused on the numbers in these very competitive and tense games! We then pass the statistics to the coaches, and it is their decision what to do with them.
What statistics do you use the most after the game, and why?
This is the coach's decision and not ours, but they keep track of scoring efficiency and sometimes a more profound analysis is being carried out to improve the training of the team. After accumulating statistics over several games, some of our coaches sit down one-on-one with the players to look at individual scoring tendencies and evaluate each player's strengths and weaknesses.