Hey Coach: CurlBook – Your One Handed Curling Stats Application!

I mentioned in the previous blog I would do a more indepth review of CurlBook – a new curling statistics program built for the Apple iPhone and iPod.   I have to admit I am extremely impressed with the job Andrew Flemming has done.   If you are a regular iPhone application addict you may find the price of $99.99 a wee bit steep however as a curling coach I believe you would find this invaluable in helping you with your team as well as decreasing the amount of equipmet you may need to bring to the rink! I just updated to version 1.1 today and love the changes Andrew has made. The home screen has five options at the bottom.  They are: Games, Players, Teams, Clubs, Events. In Games you may add an event and then within that event the club(s), number of sheets and rock colour.  This comes in handy as later on you may add information pertaining to rocks so this program may also become your rock book.  Having a detailed rock book is something I personally believe most teams do not do well and this application, if solely used for this purpose, could pay off multiple times if you are not continually trying to find the bad rocks at clubs you have already played at! The Players button looks like a contacts list of players.  The nice thing is that once you enter a player you only have to do it once.  Next year if they switch teams you simply integrate them into a new team. Clubs, as mentioned above, will allow you historical information on previous clubs. The meat of this application comes after you have entered stats for one game.  Mr. Flemming has created two sets of stats – one performance stats based on shooting percentages and the second scoreboard stats.  Statistics can be broken down for the entire team or specific to one player.  In those categories you can then select all of the stats, just those that were made or just those that were missed.   Scoreboard stats has 8 specific statistics (see picture below) simply based on when and how many your score within a game. The very cool thing about a program like this, and a software developer as intelligent and open to input as Andrew Flemming, is that this program is ever changing.   In the 6 weeks it has now been in circulation it has gotten better already! If you have an iPhone or iPod and are coaching a team I truly believe this will streamline the process.  Version 1.2, coming soon, is rumoured to feature computerized house pictures so you can drag and drop rocks into position and rework an end that way – very cool.   Not a new feature for curling stats – but the fact you can do it with one hand is really cool. Yours in curling, Paul Webster