I have often used a strategy board to discuss game situations with the athletes I coach. A strategy board is a really useful tool and I make sure I have one at each practice and every game.
But one frustration that I have is being able to document situations during a game and be able to discuss them afterwards or at a subsequent practice. Switching to paper when I have more than one situation to document is rather inconvenient – though I’ve done so oodles of times. Moreover, the paper copy is harder to share amongst team members, and my handwriting is appalling (just ask my kids).
A solution comes with the Curling Strategy Tool for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad that’s available from Apple’s iTunes App Store. The application, recently upgraded to version 2.4.1 (20 May 2011), was developed by Jeff Rogers and is from the same firm that also sells the ROG stopwatch curling application, also for iPhone and iPad.
The Curling Strategy Tool isn’t all that sophisticated, but I like its features nonetheless. With it, you can:
- alter the colour of the stones to match the game being played;
- alter the line colour to illustrate different options for both teams;
- flip the house from the top of the screen to the bottom, so that it matches what’s happening on the ice;
- zoom into the house and quite precisely adjust the position of the stones; and
- save an image on the iPhone, and re-load it by name afterwards.
You can export the images off of the iPhone via email; this permits the coach (me) to annotate the diagram with details from the game situation -game details, sheet, end, score, hammer – along with my own notes. The images are included as PNG graphics files (320×448 pixels), each about 40K in size – smaller than the size of a standard iPhone screen capture, which is 640×960. The other save option the Curling Strategy Tool provides is to save the image to your iPhone’s camera folder, which you can then include in an email, or upload to Facebook, if desired.
The Curling Strategy Tool is not a free application, but the price is right: $0.99. It doesn’t replace the interactive nature of a physical strategy board, as the iPhone screen cannot be viewed simultaneously by a coach and all four players. The screen layout emphasizes the rings, so it may not be suitable for tracking an end with guards near the hog line. But despite these shortcomings I think this application is quite useful. For outlining shot selection options after a Little Rock or Bantam bonspiel, it can be just the thing.
Hmmm, a software developer I know quite well is working on something very similar these days. It’s a web-based app, so it will work on desktop browsers and tablets, etc. as well as smartphones. Beta testers needed soon…
Bring it on, Marc – happy to be a tester!
The Curling Strategy Tool app is fine for what it does, but if this new software is going to do more than that – for example, track statistics like the CurlBook application does – then some thought has to be given for data management. CurlBook is a curling statistics app on iPhone that sells for $99.00 and that has a great UI, but the data is only on the iPhone, can’t be migrated to another platform for analysis, and worse can’t be shared between coaches, at least as far as I can tell.
This morning I tripped over a seemingly-equivalent Curling Strategy board for Android smartphones, offered by Cowbell Software.
Saving a state or scenario is good but not being able to delete them will be a pain later. Hope this can be fixed. When it is, the app will be useful for post game feedback.