Christopher Byrne, writing on his blog, breaks it all down, as he had a chance to do stats during a recent game in Georgia. It's not nearly as easy as it seems. Chris, in reality, had it easy by comparison to the WGCH crew, and others. For us, we use - GASP! - pen and paper, often while standing. The picture below, taken by Paul Silverfarb of the Greenwich Post on Thanksgiving Day, illustrates that perfectly:
Nick Fox(on the right) has a notebook and writes furiously. This of course, is when he's NOT tweeting. It's multitasking, people!
An abacus is often needed (just kidding) to add the numbers all up.
There are no computers because, to my knowledge, not a single high school press box in the FCIAC has wireless internet. So kudos to Chris for writing about this.
By the way, it often isn't that much better in college (at least at Division III). Mount Saint Mary SID Justin Satkowski sits next to me at home games, and he hands me print outs at every time out. Stony Brook had monitors (Division I, baby!). In Boston, we had to scrounge to get the numbers. At RPI, they had live stats on the computer.
Stats are, as Vin Scully has said, "used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination."
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