I’ll open with a confession: I have spent hundreds of hours tracking and analyzing youth hockey stats. Shots, goals, assists, zone time, you name it. Spreadsheets that would make an accountant proud.
Most of that time did not make a single player better.
That’s a hard thing to admit, because the instinct behind it is right. Games are full of information, and a coach who pays attention to that information will develop players faster than one who doesn’t. The mistake isn’t caring about what happened in the game. The mistake is believing a stat sheet is the best way to capture it. In youth hockey, it usually isn’t, and this post is about why, and about what I do instead.
A goal is not a goal
Here’s the core problem with youth hockey stats: the events you’re counting aren’t worth the same amount, and the gap is enormous.
A goal against a struggling goalie on a team with no defensive structure goes in the book exactly the same as a goal against a top AAA team that defends the slot like it’s a bank vault. The kid with 12 goals, most of them against the bottom of the schedule, is not necessarily a better goal scorer than the grinder who chips in every few games against everyone. But the spreadsheet says he is, and the spreadsheet is what gets remembered.
This isn’t just my opinion. Dave Starman, an NHL scout and USA Hockey Level 4 coach, made the same point in a piece for Minnesota Hockey: “We have the analytics that can show a lot, but the eyes can see through a lot of numbers. Some kids are playing against really good teams every weekend and their numbers might not be as good as another kid in another conference that is playing against less talented players.”1
It gets worse when you think about styles of player. Some kids thrive in aggressive, physical, fast environments. If your schedule only serves up that environment a handful of times a season, that kid’s stat line will never show you what you have. Meanwhile the soft-schedule scorer’s line glows. Now project both players forward to high school hockey, where every night is heavy and fast. The kid who thrives under pressure is the one who translates. The stat sheet has been pointing you at the wrong player all year, and the player who actually needed the focused development, the scorer whose game doesn’t survive contact with better teams, never got it.
That’s the real cost. Not that the numbers are inaccurate, but that they quietly redirect your development attention to the wrong places.
You can model your way out of this. It isn’t worth it.
The standard analytics answer to everything above is: adjust for it. Weight goals by opponent strength. Track shot attempts instead of goals to fix the sample-size problem. Build the youth-hockey version of Corsi.
You can do this. I’ve tried. And every layer of sophistication you add costs more time while returning less, because you run into problems that modeling can’t fix:
The sample sizes are tiny. The whole reason the NHL moved to shot-attempt metrics like Corsi is that goals are so rare that goal-based stats are mostly luck over small samples. Even at the pro level, with 82 games and professional trackers, analysts concluded that goals and assists are too random to draw conclusions from over a few games.2 Your team plays 40 games, tracked by a parent with a clipboard and a coffee.
The underlying data is bad. Youth scoresheets routinely miss assists, especially the defenseman’s breakout pass that started everything.1 One hockey dad who dug into this found score sheets so unreliable that he stopped treating them as a record of anything.3 Starman again: “At the youth level, it’s skewed. How many youth hockey officials give second assists?”1
Somebody has to do the tracking. Tracking hockey stats comprehensively requires a dedicated assistant or parent, every game, all season. That’s a real cost in a volunteer program, and in my experience it doesn’t pay back. The return on investment diminishes the more complicated the model gets, and the model has to get very complicated before it stops lying to you.
Even if you did it all perfectly, you’d end up with a beautifully adjusted number that tells you what happened and still nothing about why, which is the only part you can coach.
What the spreadsheet does to your locker room
There’s a second problem with stats that has nothing to do with accuracy: what they do to the people reading them.
When you publish numbers, players and parents will optimize for the numbers. Not for what you’re teaching, not for what the team needs. For the numbers. Youth coach Barry Biegler put it bluntly in a piece on why statistics can be dangerous: the best players become more focused on scoring instead of team play, the struggling players feel worse than they already did, and the defensemen (whose best work never appears on a scoresheet) get undervalued by everyone.4
And every family will pick their own favorite stat. Dad watches goals. Mom watches ice time. The kid watches points, because that’s what the kid next to him watches. Now your team has fifteen different definitions of a good game, and none of them is yours. Stats hand the development narrative to whoever is holding the spreadsheet. Sweden, widely considered a world leader in player development, went as far as eliminating stats and standings entirely at the 13U level.1
There’s a coaching cost too, one that took me too long to see: stats don’t feed practice planning. A stat line can tell you the power play went 1 for 5. It cannot tell you the entries were fine but the retrievals collapsed, which is the difference between practicing the right thing Tuesday and practicing a guess. Worse, a misleading stat line actively derails planning, because you spend ice time fixing a number instead of a behavior.
When tracking stats is actually worth it
I’m not going to pretend all tracking is useless, because the best coaching data I ever collected was a stat.
One season I tracked shot locations for goals. The result was blunt: about 80 percent of goals against us were scored from a small radius right in front of our net. When I showed the kids that number next to the video, net-front defense stopped being a coaching nag and became an obvious fact about hockey. They fixed it, because the evidence was concrete and it was theirs.
That experience taught me the rule I still use: track narrow, track on purpose, track temporarily. Pick the one thing you’re intentionally working on, count only that, show the players the number, and stop counting once the behavior changes. Biegler describes doing exactly this, inventing a temporary “hits” stat to fix his team’s physical play, then retiring it.4 Starman’s list of “hidden stats” worth watching (battles won, completed passes, takeaways) follows the same logic: they’re chosen to serve a development goal, not to rank children.1
If a number doesn’t give your players concrete evidence that what you’re teaching is working, it’s not worth the clipboard it’s tallied on.
The better default: write down what you saw
So what replaces the spreadsheet? Something older and simpler: a short game report.
After each game, capture a handful of specific observations while they’re fresh. What worked, where things broke down, and callouts for individual players, positives and areas to improve both. Not a novel. A trained eye watching the whole game in context will catch what no stat line can: the winger who was open all night and never got the puck, the defenseman whose gap control fell apart every time the other team had speed, the kid who won every battle against the toughest team you’ve played.
A game log like that beats a stat sheet at the three jobs that actually matter:
- Practice planning. “Breakout collapsed under pressure four times” writes Tuesday’s plan for you. “Lost 4-2” writes nothing.
- Tracking development. Starman’s advice to parents applies to coaches too: don’t compare your kid to other kids, “compare the kid you see this week to the kid you saw last week and watch for improvement.”1 A season of game reports is exactly that comparison, in writing.
- Alignment. Reports put the development narrative back in your hands. Players and parents stop guessing at what matters (or deciding for themselves) because you’ve told them, specifically and consistently. That’s how a team culture stays pointed in one direction.
One caveat, in fairness: everything in this post assumes you’re coaching from a player development perspective. If you’re min/maxing a championship weekend, stats have their uses. But at the youth level, development is the job.
Where the AI comes in
The honest objection to game reports is time. After a weekend doubleheader, sitting down to write thoughtful reports with per-player callouts is exactly the kind of task that sounds great in September and dies by November. This is the blank-page problem, and it’s the same one that kills the whole player development loop for most volunteer coaches.
This is the part we built AI Reports for. You describe the game the way you’d tell an assistant coach in the parking lot, a few sentences in plain language, and Scout Elite drafts the full report: what worked, where it broke down, player-specific callouts, adjustments for next practice. Player-focused development reports work the same way. It takes minutes, not an evening, and because it learns your team over the season, the reports get sharper as you go. Those takeaways then flow straight into the practice planner, which is the thing a stat sheet could never do.
You get all the value of intentional, evidence-based development, without the mundane and mostly useless work of comprehensive stat tracking.
And if software isn’t your thing, skip it. A notebook and ten honest minutes after each game will still beat the spreadsheet. The point is the report, not the tool.
Your games are already telling you exactly what each player needs. Write it down while it’s true, share it with the people who need to hear it, and let the scoresheet worry about itself.
References
-
Steve Mann, “Are Stats a Distraction in Youth Hockey?” Minnesota Hockey, November 2019. Featuring Dave Starman, NHL scout and USA Hockey Level 4 coach. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6
-
Andy Blaylock, “Moneypuck: Advanced Hockey Statistics for Youth Hockey Parents, Part 2,” Youth Hockey Hub, November 2014. ↩
-
Chris Rutsch, “Points on the Score Sheet Don’t Matter,” RutschHockey.com. ↩
-
Barry Biegler, “Statistics can be Dangerous,” Youth Hockey Coaching Tips. ↩ ↩2