"It was 1997 and I had just volunteered to take over the statistics position for the recreational mens hockey league in which I played. As an experienced user of computers, I looked around for suitable software which would make the task a little less time consuming and a lot more enjoyable. Finding no quality products designed for this purpose ( and not considering Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to be a viable alternative ), I decided to draw on my 5+ years of programming experience and build a suitable application.
The first year I concentrated on the data entry aspect almost exclusively as I realized that, as league statistician, processing scoresheets was fast becoming the bane of my existence. The scoresheet metaphor seemed like an intuitive solution to my problem and the Microsoft Windows graphical user interface (GUI) provided the technological means for implementation. With screen design out of the way, I concentrated on creating a robust processing engine for tabulating statistics from raw scoresheets. An epiphany occurred when I realized that a game is really just a series of unique events. Using this model, I was able to accurately determine statistical categories simply by cross referencing various events plotted in time ( ie. by cross referencing scoring and penalty information I was able to determine powerplay and shorthanded scenarios without manual intervention ).
On a steady diet of coffee and Coca-Cola, I developed and used the software extensively during that first season. Many people offered suggestions and encouragement and I gradually began to see the potential of the product on a larger scale. By the time I was personally satisfied with the stability and feature-set, I realized that the only logical progression was to professionalize the product and take it to the next level. At that point, I had no idea in regards to the amount of time and effort I would have to invest and how this project would ultimately affect my life.
Professionalizing a product is a large endeavour. In hindsight, the number of hours spent testing, writing an on-line help system, creating a website presence, building a professional installation package, establishing a business model, etc... was monumental to say the least. The first release was named SNAPSHOT! Hockey Statistics Manager and I still remember the excitement of the first sale to Jim MacDonald from Rankin Inlet, NorthWest Territories.
Early users of the product pushed its limits and, at times, suffered the beta-testing blues. I would be up at all hours of the night fixing defects, adding new features, and dealing with client issues. Through it all, the product began to mature and the user base continued to grow. I offered free upgrades for registered users and pumped out new versions at a steady pace. Knowing the first-hand pressures and frustrations of being a statistician, I always tried to maintain the highest level of customer support possible. At times my personal life suffered tremendously under the burden of balancing work and family - a normal entrepreneurial dilemma.
Once the data entry was perfected, the next step was to provide a powerful reporting model. Researching other products, I soon realized that providing a fixed list of canned reports was not the most optimal solution. As a statistician, I wanted to create my own reports with my own sort criteria, filters, and content in the format I required. I decided that a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get ( WYSIWYG ) reporting paradigm provided almost unlimited flexibility and was extremely intuitive from an end-user perspective. It also allowed the application to support many different output formats. Realizing the Internet was the wave of the future I offered an HTML report option in addition to the standard Printer and Text options.
Over the years, the application has undergone many changes. At one point I decided to include Schedule Generation and Registration Management in the application and spent many hours developing the appropriate interfaces. In the end these features, although integrated, did not meet the needs of the intended audience and were subsequently removed. The heart of SNAPSHOT! is statistics management and I firmly believe it is better to perform a single task very well rather than to perform many tasks in mediocrity. The future involves building complimentary bridges between SNAPSHOT! and other applications so that users have the flexibility to choose the best tool for each specific task.
Through the life of the application, many friendships have been created and I owe my gratitude to those who shared their patience, expertise, and loyalty in making this application what it is today. Names such as Jim MacDonald, Bruce Wawrzyniak, and Gary Millsaps mean nothing to most of you but I tip my hats to all those who volunteer their own personal time for the sake of their children and others. I can only hope that this software has helped you and provided a certain measure of relief from the overwhelming burden of statistics management."
-Shaun Walker (Author)
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