Little League evaluations can generate some of the most paperwork of the season. If you live in the Northwest, there is also the very real danger of scheduling an evaluations date a couple months in advance and it turns out to be raining all day.
Even under a canopy, ink runs, paper gets wet and sometimes falls to the ground.
You get home and then someone or a group needs to enter all the evaluations data into a spreadsheet.
Very time-consuming.
With the help of Paul Grimes, I developed a web app which you can find over on GitHub.
The app currently deals with Registration, Fielding, Hitting, Pitching and Baserunning.
Registration
At Registration we assign a bib number to each player and take a picture. At each station the volunteer enters the bib number and an optimized picture is displayed to confirm the right child is being evaluated.
Fielding
For fielding we record successful catches of ground balls, fly balls, throwing and general baseball IQ.
Hitting
The Hitting station records number of contacts, power and mechanics.
Pitching
Pitching records top velocity as measured by a radar gun, accuracy (number of strikes) and mechanics.
Baserunning
Baserunning records the time to run from first to third.
Normally the data entry took a couple days. Now I can do exports as soon as I get home and we can start to analyze data.
Redmond West has now used this for baseball and softball evaluations with much success.
Tech Stuff
The app is just a web application, you don’t have to get it into an App store. It will work on any recent-ish smartphone. For the backend, It’s written in PHP with minimal javascript and uses MySQL for the database. I avoided using any frameworks to keep it lightweight and fast. If your Little League has access to a web server, or if someone on your board is a web developer it should be pretty easy to get this up and running for your own organization.
If you are interested in deploying the app for your own Little League evals, let me know in the comments and I’ll get back to you.