Angela and Hannah from Sandringham & District Netball Association (SDNA) made the commitment early in 2022 to roll out live scoring across all their competitions. The new system allows for scores, player attendance and statistics to be input directly into the Netball Connect database by the scorer whilst the game is being played. This helps to decrease the post-match workload that falls on administrators, allowing them to focus on other operations at their organisation.
The Sandringham duo worked closely with Netball Victoria Member Services staff to develop an effective rollout plan, involving social media posts, training for clubs, one-on-one help and a physical help desk on game day. Since its inception Angela and Hannah have been reaping the rewards of time back in their working day, able to put energy into other projects at the association.
Hear from Angela and Hannah as they discuss how live scoring has positively impacted their netball community.
Q: Has live scoring made admin operations easier?
A: It has saved us time, money, and effort every single week. No data input, no collating of all the paperwork, no people coming up to the office losing their pens – everything about it has been fantastic.
Q: How did you find the perception of your organisation when embedding live scoring?
A: We had a very old system running initially, and we are a very old school organisation. There was definitely a bit of shock factor as all of a sudden, we’d moved from paper to the app, but I would say now it’s pretty good and we’re up with the times. Everything’s running a lot smoother, there’s fewer mistakes and most of the time the scores are getting put directly into the system and they’re pretty accurate.
It was an enormous change which is never easy, and I think going 100% for it and adding position tracking too meant that we were probably a bit ambitious – we ended up scaling it back just to live scoring, and we will revisit that [position tracking] later.
Q: What tactics did you employ to embed live scoring?
A: We used email, our delegates, and our club network. We sent out as many cheat sheets and notes as we could along the way, we gave them the complete step-by-step. They could look at photos [of the resources], they could look at the computer, and we also offered paper scoring in correlation with the live scoring for the first three weeks.
Probably the single most important thing we did though was setting up a help desk here at the courts, manned by Hannah and myself. We had people come forward to us with all sorts of questions, issues, problems – I think it was having that level of patience and kindness to help anyone in any way that we could.
Q: Would you recommend live scoring?
A: We would 100% recommend live scoring, we think you’d be crazy not to do it. It saves us time, effort, money, it helps the environment, and everyone has got used to it in a very short amount of time. Most people absolutely love it now, we get a lot of feedback and it’s improved the communication between everyone.
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