Pocket PCs Score with L.A. Laker

The National Basketball Association (NBA) season is underway, and while the Los Angeles Lakers coaching staff and team are concentrating on trying for a third championship in a row, there are other members of the Lakers organization whose job it is to worry only about future seasons. These are the scouts.

Professional scouts spend the season going to college basketball games and looking for players who are good enough to play in the NBA. They are not just looking for the next Kobe Bryant-level superstar, but players with qualities that their team may find to be an asset on their roster. That means they have to keep track of a lot of players.

Despite the high stakes involved with scouting—each player is a multi-million dollar investment for the team—the job has always been quite low tech. Although each team uses its own methods, the one the Lakers used was not unusual: The scouts recorded player information on a scouting card with an outline of one half of the basketball court drawn on it. The scout marked where the player took his shots during the game, and indicated if the shot hit or missed. Additional information was recorded in the form of written notes, or using a portable tape recorder to make verbal notes. Since each scouting card contained information on only a single player, and the scout may be monitoring a few players from each of the two teams playing, it was often necessary to juggle eight or more scouting cards on his lap while sitting in the stands watching a game. Add to this the logistics for the team managers to review and keep track of all of this paper, and you have a system that is ripe for automation, and especially for Pocket PCs.

Team management can access the data collected by the scouts using a standard Web browser.

However, like many potential applications for the Pocket PC, there is a huge resistance to change. For someone that is comfortable with computers, it may seem obvious that computers are ideal for keeping track of the data collected by the scouts. After all, storing and organizing data is what computers do best. But if you consider that scouts are highly skilled at evaluating basketball players and generally not familiar with computers, the prospect of changing the way they perform their job in a very fundamental way can be quite scary.

Yet, despite these obstacles to change, the Lakers scouting staff is now on their second season using Pocket PCs and an application from Infinite Mobility called Pocket Hoops (www.infinitemobility.com).

The Pocket Hoops application combines a Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC used by the scouts with a server system maintained by Infinite Mobility that provides access to this data via a standard Web interface.

Since the information collected is not of an urgent nature, wireless communications was not needed. Instead, the scouts synchronize with the host computer from their homes or hotel rooms via modem after the game. The host system not only consolidates the data collected by the various scouts, it provides prospect information downloaded to the Pocket PC.

A scout can enter information about a new prospect on the Pocket PC and the data will be uploaded to the host during the next synchronization.

As the Lakers only track offensive action, Pocket Hoops shows the same half court layout that the scouts were used to seeing on their scouting cards.