How You Can Chart a Hockey Game

A little background first. Back in February my high school team was eliminated from the state tournament. After we were eliminated, I was under the assumption that I would be able to play for my club varsity team, whom I played with for 15 games before the start of my high school season. This team had their state tournament coming up the next weekend, so I started to look at film of teams to see how they played.

I watched a game between the top two teams in the state, Dayton Stealth and Hilliard. These two have always been the powerhouse for the past couple seasons. The year before, I played on this team for my sophomore season, and I played Hilliard in the state semifinals, however I’ve never gotten the chance to play against Stealth. Since it had been a while since I played them, I wanted to see if any of their play styles had changed. 

Now, this was all before I was told I couldn’t play because of some rules, but nevertheless it still taught me a lot.

Over the course of a day or two I watched this game, and I ended up charting it to see if I could. It turns out, if you keep it simple enough, it can be pretty easy.

Now, don’t get me wrong, charting games can be way more complicated than what I did, so I give props to the people who do it for a living.

When I was learning this, an article by Thibaud Chatel really helped me along the way, so I recommend giving it a look because it goes much more in depth than me. 

1: Know what you want to do

This seems pretty simple. The first step when charting a game is to know exactly what you want to do. Know what game you want to look at, know what softwares you want to use, etc. 

Another thing you want to keep in mind is how you want to chart. For me, and for most people, I used excel. It’s an easy way to keep everything organized and to keep everything in shape. 

Also know what symbols you want to use in order to track everything. I would keep it as simple as possible. I kept it down to just a couple of letters, between 1-3, so that I don’t spend as much time typing in things. You also want to know how you will distinguish between the two teams. For me I used D and H, Dayton and Hilliard, but you could also use H and A for home and away, or 1 and 2, or whatever you find comfortable. 

You also want to figure out if you’re going to keep track of the time or not. I chose not to, as there was no clock anywhere in the video so there would be no way to, so I just took track of the period. 

2: The charting

Obviously, the easiest way to chart a game would be to put the period in the left most column, and then the action, and the team, that’s what I did. I found that to be the easiest way for me, because I wanted to keep everything short and simple.

When charting the game, I found it best to have the video on one side of my screen, and then the excel sheet on the other side of my screen, since I didn’t have access to another screen at the time of my charting. I also didn’t keep track of numbers. Since it was hard to see the numbers on the video, I decided to keep them out. If you want more advanced stats for players when charting, then putting in numbers would be the way to go. 

Chatel has a good picture in his article where he showcases one way that he charts games, which I recommend looking at if you want to get very serious into charting. There he displays each of the lineups on the top of his chart with all of the numbers. I think that is a great idea as it is a great way to keep track of all the numbers on each of the teams.

Overall, the process maybe took 2-2.5 hours for an hour and a half game. Obviously, it would be much longer for a professional game as each of the periods are about 5 minutes longer. However, I ended up with 528 events during the game, and you could probably track more than what I did in a game, like passes or hits. 

3: The results

Now, what do you want to do with your results. If you are keeping track by player, it would be best to sort it by player so you could get all the numbers. For me I just created a graphic showcasing the differences between the two teams.

In the game you can see by the results that Dayton dominated the game with their shots. It showcased why they were #1 in the state for club high school hockey. 

Of course, all of this is customizable to the person’s liking. This was only my first experience with charting a hockey game and I think it turned out very positive. But to sum it all up:

• Know what you want to do

• Keep your symbols for events simple

• Have a video player where you can go back and forth

• Be willing to dedicate time to it

• Know what you want to do with your results

• Chart and have fun!