Friday, August 13, 2010

Weigh-in Charts for Football Using a Simple Spreadsheet

For a number of years, I have had a problem with the weigh-in and weigh-out procedure with football. The problem I have had is that the scale and charts are often set up in a locker room where the coaches often don't go to look at the charts, much less do the tedious calculations that are needed. Without doing the calculations, the weight chart are simply ineffective and a waste of time for the team to perform.

Therefore, in October of 2002, I had an article published in the NATA News that offered a simple additional step that created an easier method for making the calculations. In this article I offered a chart that displayed the greater than 97%, 97%, 96%, and 95% values for every possible weight from 100 lbs up to 330 lbs. This was color coded green, yellow, orange, and red for each level of weight loss. The athlete was to then use either a matching highlighter on his weigh out value or use an appropriate colored pencil to record it. This system worked as long as you could keep the pencil tips sharp or the highlighters from drying out. (The kids frequently lost the caps for the highlighters.)

Eventually, I got tired of replacing highlighters and pencils and decided to relocate the scale into the athletic training room. This was one of the best ideas I ever had. I continued using the paper and pencil method for another year, but I still found that I was looking for the caps far too often. So I decided that i needed to design a simple spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel and add the file to an outdated laptop computer that I can left in my office for the kids to record their weights on.

In this file, I was able to let the program do the calculations for me and appropriately color the cells using the conditional formatting function. The cells are either white, yellow, orange, or red depending on the amount of weight lost from time of weigh in to weigh out. Furthermore, I was also able to set a conditional format that allowed me to compare weigh in values between each day. Currently, the cell will remain pink in color (to differentiate it from the red) if the athlete weighs in at less than 99% of his weight from the previous day. This is an added feature and was a function that would have been far too confusing to add to the paper and pencil route. The best part is that it is done automatically for me in the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is currently designed so for a Monday start to two-a-days and assumes practices Monday through Saturday with a day off on Sunday. Changing this is not difficult to anyone who knows how to operate the formulas in the cells. If needed, this document can also be printed out. The only maintenance that I have had to perform with this file was to weights to the correct columns since they were entered incorrectly and making sure I save the file to the hard drive each day. I can even go so far as to copy it to a flash drive or network the computer wirelessly to backup the file automatically.

To access the files directly, the links are:

Old Weight Chart - http://bit.ly/bstKYj

Spreadsheet - http://bit.ly/dadJSB

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