StatChat — how to use it

Live high-school football stat tracking. Built for one person entering plays from the sideline or the press box.

1. Before the first game

The sample games

Every new school starts with two games already on its dashboard. They are there so your first screen is not empty, so every report has something to show and every button has something to do.

Both teams in them are invented. It is not your school playing anybody, and nothing in either is a record of anything — they exist to be practised on and looked at.

The finished one answers the question people ask first: what do I actually get out of this? Open its ⋮ menu and read the Game recap, the Stat package and the Score summary. Those three only exist once a game is final, so before there was a finished sample there was nothing on a new dashboard that could show them to you.

The part-played one is where you practise. Finish it: start the second half, run a drive or two, mark the quarter, then end the game. That takes you through the guided kickoff, ordinary play entry, the clock and the ball spot — and leaves you with a second finished game you scored yourself. Worth the ten minutes before a real Friday.

“See what you get”

Underneath Getting started, a new school also sees a short card listing the three things a finished game produces — the recap, the stat package and the score summary — each linking straight into the finished sample.

It is a tour, not a checklist: there is nothing on it to tick off. It goes away on its own the moment you create a game of your own, because from then on you have your own versions of all three and an example is just clutter.

Accounts and roles

Everyone signs in with an email and password. There are three roles:

Your team roster

From the dashboard, open Team Roster. This is your own squad and carries over from game to game. For each player enter a jersey number, a name, and a position.

Uploading a roster from a spreadsheet

Both Team Roster and the opponent roster on New Game take an .xlsx or .xls file. Pressing the upload button shows a picture of the layout before it asks for the file: column A is the jersey number, column B the name, column C the position. A header row is ignored, and a player with no position is fine — he is offered in the broad pickers and kept out of the narrow ones (passer, kicker, punter) until he actually plays the role or you seed him there.

What is read, and what is ignored

Only the first sheet of the workbook is read. Any other tab is ignored completely, so a file with Varsity and JV as separate tabs imports whichever one is first and gives no sign the other exists.

A row is read only when column A is digits and column B is not empty. Everything else is passed over: the header row, blank lines, a school name across the top, a Coaches block at the bottom.

Positions, and what the app does with them

The position is read as an abbreviation, upper or lower case. Wide Receiver spelled out is not understood — it reads as WIDE, which is not a position the app knows.

A position the app does not know, and a position left blank, are treated the same way and neither stops the import. The player is still on the roster and his number still works during a game; he is simply not filed under a unit yet, so he appears in the broad pickers and not the narrow ones. The game setup page lists these under needs assignment with a tag to apply.

Two players wearing the same number

This is treated as a fact about the team rather than a mistake, and nothing is merged or dropped. Both players are imported and kept.

• One on offense, one on defense. Nothing to decide. Each appears in his own unit's pickers.
• Both on the same side of the ball. Both are kept, and the game asks which one on each play where it matters. The setup page counts these for you before you start so it is not a surprise on a Friday night.
• Both with positions the app does not recognize. This is the one case that needs a hand: there is nowhere to file either of them, so the setup page asks you to tag them.
• The same name twice on one number is flagged as one player entered twice, with the suggestion to delete the extra row.

Uploading the same file again

Re-uploading is safe and is the normal way to add players who arrived late. Anyone already on this season's roster is skipped, and the preview says how many before you confirm.

• Names are matched ignoring case and surrounding spaces, so MACARIO DADE JR and Macario Dade Jr are the same player.
• A different spelling is a different player. Mac Dade and Macario Dade Jr both import.
• Two identical names in the same file are both added — the check is against the roster, not within the sheet.
• Matching is scoped to the season and to your team, so last year's squad never blocks this year's.

Your roster and an opponent roster behave differently

The same file can succeed in one place and be refused in the other, and it is worth knowing which is which before a game night.

Rosters are kept per season

A Season picker sits at the top of the roster page. The current season is the only one you can change — add, edit, remove, upload, or clear. Pick an earlier season from the dropdown and everything on it becomes read-only: no controls at all, just the squad exactly as it was, kept for reference.

A game always uses the roster from its own season — reopening an old game to fix an unrelated detail pulls up that game's own historical squad, never whatever is loaded as current today.

Your team's look

Customize team sets your logo and colors. These appear on the banner, the live view and every report.

What makes a good logo file

The line under Choose file says it in five words — square, PNG, transparent background works best — and the same line sits under the opponent's logo on the game setup page. All three parts matter, and for the same reason: this one file gets drawn in a lot of places you are not looking at when you upload it.

A crest that is genuinely dark artwork on a transparent background is a special case: the app puts a white plate behind those in a few places rather than letting them disappear into a dark card. That is a rescue, not the intended look — a logo that reads on both is better than one that needs the plate.

2. Setting up a game

Dashboard → + New game.

1. Name and opponent. Give the game a designator you will recognise later — it is what you type to confirm a delete or reset.
2. Opponent roster. Upload an .xlsx if you have one, or choose Skip roster and type numbers by hand during the game. A programme with just names and numbers is worth entering; positions are optional.
3. Likely starters. Fill in QB, RB1, RB2, WR1, WR2, WR3 for the opponent if you know them.
4. Opponent branding. Logo and colors, so the banner and reports look right. Same guidance as your own logo — square, PNG, transparent background — and for the same reason: the opponent crest is drawn in the same square slots by the same code. See What makes a good logo file above.

Players you type in by hand during the game are added to the picker from then on, so a number never has to be typed twice.

Specify all game starters — for the broadcast only

Below the likely starters is a collapsed section marked BROADCAST ONLY. It holds your full starting lineups — eleven on offense, eleven on defense, four on special teams — and it exists for one reason: to drive the three starting-lineup overlays your production crew can put on air. See 15. Broadcasting for the addresses.

It is entirely optional, and partial is fine — fill in four names or all twenty-six. An overlay draws nothing at all for a unit with no lineup, rather than an empty frame, so a card left in a switcher bank all season is simply blank until there is something to show.

Import last week’s lineup

Most weeks the lineup is last week’s lineup with a change or two. Import last week’s lineup, at the top of the section, finds the last game that had one saved and fills all twenty-six slots from it. Your team only — there is no opponent version, because last week’s opponent is not this week’s.

It shows you what it found before it fills anything in: which game it came from, and anything that changed since. Press Fill the lineup to accept it or Cancel to walk away. Nothing is saved until you save the game, the same as everything else on this screen.

Three things get reported, and none of them happens quietly:

• A number that changed is updated and listed by name, old number and new.
• A player no longer on your roster — a senior who graduated, usually — is still filled in, with last week’s number, so you can see which slot needs somebody. He is named above the panel and stays flagged until you replace him. The slot is never silently emptied: a boy who left and a roster you have not uploaded yet look identical from here, and clearing eleven slots on the second guess is the worse mistake.
• A lineup saved before August 2026 recorded numbers only, with no names. Those slots are matched on the number alone, and the import says which ones.

Two things it will not do. It will not run before your roster has loaded — it matches by name, and there is nothing to match against until the roster is in front of it. And it replaces rather than merges: if you have already typed slots in, the preview says how many it is about to clear, and you can cancel.

If nothing turns up, it says so plainly. A first-ever game has nothing to import — fill it in by hand and next week’s takes it from here.

• Fill from likely starters copies the six you already entered above into the matching positions. It never overwrites a slot you have already filled.
• Positions are yours to choose. The line and the quarterback are fixed labels; every other slot is a dropdown, so a Wing-T team stores FB where a spread team stores SB, and the card prints what you picked.
• A number can only start once per unit. Two boys may share a jersey number on the roster, but never on the field together, so a repeat inside offense or inside defense is refused and the slot is cleared. The same number on offense and defense is fine and is not questioned — the two units draw from different number ranges, so it is almost always two different players.
• Special teams combines. One boy in both the FG and PAT slots appears once on the card as FG/PAT, not twice.
• A shared number asks which player. If two boys on your roster wear the number you typed, the section asks which one and remembers the answer — the same question the seeded starters ask above.

Edit the lineup any time before or during the game, including on a game that already has plays recorded — officials change a lineup right up to kickoff. Clearing every slot removes the lineup entirely and the overlays go blank again.

Marking a game as preseason

Tick This is a preseason game for a scrimmage or anything else that should not count toward the year's numbers. Everything about the game works exactly as normal — you enter it, view it, and export its own recap and stat package the usual way. The only difference is that Season Report and Player Report skip it entirely, so a scrimmage never quietly shifts a season average.

The dashboard's game list shows a small PRESEASON tag on any game marked this way, so it stays easy to spot months later, long after the reason for excluding it has been forgotten.

If you change your roster after creating a game

A game keeps its own copy of your roster, taken when it was set up. That is deliberate — a finished game must not change because somebody edited a roster afterwards — but it means a position you correct later does not reach a game that already exists. The roster page will show the correction and the game will not, with nothing to say they disagree.

Edit the game and use Re-import roster from your team. It shows you exactly what would change before anything is saved — for example Bryce Ross (#1): offense → special — and you still press Save changes afterwards.

Correcting a roster during the game

The wrong number for a player is usually noticed on a Friday, halfway through a quarter, after a play has already been credited to him. The Rosters button on the utility rail opens this game's own copy of both rosters, and an admin or a scorer can correct it there without leaving the game.

• Edit on a row changes his number, his name, or the unit that row is filed under — which is what decides the picker grid he appears in.
• + Add player puts somebody on the roster who was never on it: a call-up, or a name the programme did not have.

It changes this game's copy only. Your master roster is untouched, so a game played last month and the season report cannot be disturbed by a correction made here. Fixing the master roster as well is a separate job on the roster page.

Adding a player retroactively fixes plays already entered against his bare number, which is usually exactly why you are adding him — the panel says so.

3. Starting the game

Open the game from the dashboard and press Start game. The app walks you through the opening kickoff:

1. Who kicks off? Pick the kicking team.
2. Kicker, and which way they are kicking. The direction arrow sets up the field-position strip; it flips automatically each quarter after this.
3. What happened. A return, a Touchback, or a Muffed / fumbled catch.
4. Where the ball ended up, then the clock.

Then you are in normal play entry.

4. Entering plays

Every play follows the same three steps:

1. Pick the play type — Rush, Pass, or one of the special-teams buttons.
2. Fill in the panel that appears.
3. Review play, check the sentence, then Save.

The Review step exists so you read back what will be stored before it is stored. It is worth the half-second.

Rush

Pick the ball carrier, enter yards (or use the calculator), then any of LOSS, Fumbled, Safety, Touchdown. Tackler is optional, and folded behind a + Tackled by button — tap it when you want it. Punts and kickoffs fold their returner the same way, behind + Returned by.

Pass

Same shape, with a passer and receiver. The extra outcome is Incomplete.

Along the top of the panel are three switches — Completed / incomplete, Sacked, Intercepted — which change the panel to suit. The one you are on stays gold with a tick, and you can move between them freely until you save, so picking the wrong one costs nothing.

On Intercepted there is a Downed in the end zone — touchback option: the defence takes over at their own 20, with no return to record.

The receiver is optional. If you did not catch the number on a deep ball, leave it blank — the completion, the yardage and the passer's line are all still right. The catch is credited to Unknown in the receiving table so the columns still add up: passing yards always equal the sum of receiving yards, which is the first thing anyone checks on a stat sheet.

Optional, but not silent: a completed pass with no receiver picks up NO RECEIVER SELECTED on the review card, above the sentence. It is a warning rather than a refusal — the entry saves exactly as described above if you go ahead. It exists because leaving the receiver blank is nearly always an oversight rather than a decision, and the review card is the last moment it costs nothing to fix. An incompletion is never flagged: there is no catch to credit, so a blank receiver there is only a missing target.

Two places ask harder, and only two.

On a Touchdown the Save button itself changes to read Save with NO RECEIVER. It still saves — you just have to press a button that says what it is about to do. A touchdown is the one catch where the number is never really unknown: the receiver is standing in the end zone holding the ball, the PA is announcing him, and the clock is stopped for the try. It is also where a blank costs the most, because it goes into the scoring summary and onto the public recap you send to local media.

On a Fumbled catch the receiver is required, and the save is refused until you pick one. That is not a judgement about how important the play is — a fumbled completion is stored under the receiver's own number, so without him there is no play to store at all. Before 3 September that entry failed with a bare Unrecognized entry and no explanation; now it tells you exactly what it needs. If you truly cannot identify him, your best judgement is better than losing the play: on a fumble you almost always know within a snap or two.

What is on the screen

The play-type ladder is a fixed column down the left. Whatever you pick opens beside it, always at the top of the frame, so the panel never moves depending on which button you pressed. With nothing open that space reads Make a selection to begin.

Either side of the entry card are two margins that do not scroll away:

• Left — the current drive, with Undo and Redo at the top of it.
• Right — Checks and Live totals. See below.

Pressing Review play collapses the tree so only the confirm box is left, which saves scrolling back down a long panel to reach Save. Edit brings the tree back with everything you entered still in it. There is a Clear on the confirm box, and another on the top row beside Quarter marker — that one throws away whatever is open from wherever you are.

Pickers

Player buttons are ordered by who did it most recently, so the back who just carried is first next time. Type a number into the box if the player is not offered. On the longer lists — ball carrier, receiver, kicker, punter — that box sits at the end of the list rather than off to one side, so the names get the full width and take fewer rows.

If a number is shared by two players, you will be asked which one — that choice applies to that play only, so a mis-tap cannot rename the jersey for the rest of the game.

Typing a number opens a pop-up keypad

Tap any yardage or jersey-number box and a large number pad opens over the field, rather than the device's own keyboard. Type on it, or on a connected physical keyboard — either way updates the same box, so switching between them mid-entry never loses what you have already typed. A checkmark commits the number and closes the pad.

5. The yardage calculator

On the Rush, Pass, Sack and Punt panels you can enter the play two ways:

1. Tap the side of the field the play ended on. Your current side is already selected, so most plays need only a number.
2. Type the yard line.
3. The green bar shows the working: from own 25 to own 44 = +19.

• A backwards play sets LOSS for you.
• Touchdown fills in the distance to the goal line automatically.
• Typing in the yards box clears the calculator, so the two can never disagree.
• On a fumble the label changes to ball came loose on, because that is a different spot from where anyone was tackled.

On a punt the calculator reads Or enter downed/received on and gives you the punt distance. A touchback or a block turns it off — there is no landing spot to measure.

On a sack it reads Or enter sacked on, and the box beside it is Yards lost — so there is no LOSS button, because a sack is always a loss. If you enter a yard line ahead of where the ball was, the app refuses it and says so rather than recording a loss you did not mean. A quarterback dragged down on the line of scrimmage is fine: that is a sack for no gain.

A second spot for the return, on punts and kickoffs

Below the punt distance (and on the kickoff panel, where there is no distance to give), two more fields work the same way: Fielded at, then Returned to. Give both and the app fills in the return yards for you, and moves the takeover spot to match the return rather than the catch. Leave returned to blank and that is the answer for no return at all — a fair catch, a kick that was downed, nothing further to enter.

Fielded at defaults to the receiving team's side of the field, since that is where a kick almost always comes down. Tap the other side if a mishit kick landed short.

6. Field position and spots

The strip under the banner shows where the ball is, the line to gain, and which way the offense is going. Hide it with Hide if you want the room.

Sides of the field

Everywhere you enter a spot you pick a side first. "Own 30" means 30 yards from the goal the offense is defending; "opp 30" means 30 yards from the one they are attacking. The buttons are labelled with the team names to keep it concrete.

If a spot is incomplete

Review play refuses a change of possession that has no spot, and says what is still needed — a side, a yard line, or both. A yard line typed with nobody's side beside it used to save quietly with no field position at all, which switched off every yardage check for the rest of the drive.

Change of possession

Any play that hands the ball over asks where the other team takes over — punts, interceptions, fumbles, missed field goals, muffed kicks. Fill it in, or field position is lost for the whole next drive.

The spot nudge, after a change of possession

Once a play that hands the ball over is saved, a short amber card takes the place of the confirm box, headed NEW DRIVE SPOTTED AT. It states the resulting situation in football rather than in coordinates — Red Stick ball, 1st & 10 at Bayou Gators 40 — so a wrong spot reads as a wrong sentence.

It asks nothing and blocks nothing. If the sentence is right, start the next play; the line beneath it says starting the next play accepts this spot, and it costs no tap at all. Dismiss closes it early if it is in your way.

If it is wrong, there are three ways to fix it, and they are all on the card:

Then Adjust spot. It goes through the same path as Adjust Down/Distance — a marker, the confirm card, a save — so there is one implementation rather than two, and nudging a spot twice is as safe as nudging it once.

It appears on a new drive — possession actually changing hands — and not on a new series for the same team, such as a muff the kicking team's opponents recover themselves. That is the same distinction the play log's own New drive and New series wording draws. An adjustment made from the nudge is not itself counted as a drive, so it cannot leave a phantom drive in the reports.

If the window is still sitting deep in a long tree when the play saves, the page scrolls the nudge into view. A nudge nobody sees is worse than no nudge — the whole point is to catch a spot in the seconds before the next snap.

7. The clock

You are asked for the clock when a possession starts or ends. It is what drives time of possession.

On a scoring drive the clock is asked at the touchdown, not at the try. Enter it when the ball crosses the line, and again at the kickoff. That way the drive's time of possession is the time the DRIVE took, rather than the drive plus the PAT.

Every box that asks for a clock shows the last value you entered beside it, with the quarter it belonged to — for example Last entered 8:42 (Q2). The same line, in the same shape, sits on the main game screen too, on the row above the play buttons — so the last clock is visible even when no clock box happens to be open. If that quarter is not the one you are in now, the number turns amber: the same 8:42 means a very different moment in Q1 and Q3, and the color is the whole warning, on purpose, to keep the line short.

The label names the moment it wants

“Clock” on its own reads as the clock after the play, and on most turnovers that is the wrong instant — possession changes partway through the play, not at the whistle. So on those trees the box says which moment it means:

Only the last one matches the plain reading, which is why it is the only one left unlabelled. On the other three, entering the clock after the play hands the whole return to the team that just lost the ball: the return's seconds fall before the receiving team's possession begins, and are credited to nobody.

A punt with no return — a touchback, or a kick out of bounds — gets no moment either. There is no return to misattribute.

Kickoffs fill the clock in for you

The clock is stopped before every kickoff, so the value is not a matter of memory and the app puts it in the box already, with a note saying where it came from:

• The opening kickoff of a half — the clock is still at the full quarter. The note says so.
• A kickoff during the game — the clock stopped on the score and does not run during the try, so the value is the clock at the last stoppage.

Both notes end the same way: leave it unless the board actually showed something different. Type over it and the note goes away — you have taken the value over, and from that point the only thing that matters is whether the box ends up empty.

If a clock value cannot be right, the app says so

Two checks run as you save. Neither of them refuses the entry — you are the one who saw the board.

• A value that is not a possible clock reading — more than 59 seconds, or longer than a quarter — is rejected, and the message names which of the two it is and quotes this game's quarter length.
• A value earlier than the last one recorded gets a confirmation that shows you both numbers, their quarters, and the difference between them, and nothing else. It does not guess why. OK saves it as entered; Cancel takes you back to change it.

If a clock does end up running backwards against the possession it closes, the app tells you how much time it could not count, in the message bar, at the moment it happens rather than in the report a week later.

On a kickoff, the change of possession is the catch

This is the one that quietly costs you accuracy, and it is worth getting into your routine before it matters.

Nobody owns a kickoff in flight. A free kick is a loose ball — the kicking team has given it up and the receiving team has not got it yet. That ambiguity does not matter, because the clock is not running either: on a free kick it starts when the receiving team legally touches the ball. The flight consumes no time, so there is none to argue over.

The return does consume time. Once the ball is touched the clock runs, and every second of the return belongs to the receiving team. StatChat gives it to whichever team the clock value you enter says it belongs to, and the change happens at a single instant: one clock reading ends one possession and starts the other.

Nothing warns you about this, because the app cannot tell a late reading from an accurate one. It is a habit rather than a rule — the prefill above removes the memory problem, not the reading one: if the board really did show something else, only you know that.

The clock is optional everywhere. Skipping it does not block anything — that possession's time simply is not counted, and the app says so under the field.

8. Special teams

Kickoff

Kicker, the two-spot calculator above, and where the ball ended up. There is no box to type return yards into — give the two spots and the app works them out and shows the answer underneath. Touchback fills the receiving team's own 20 for you. Muffed / fumbled catch asks who recovered — if the kicking team recovers, possession does not change and they get a fresh set of downs.

Fumbled during the return is separate from a muff: the return happened cleanly, and the ball came loose afterward. Return yards are unaffected either way — they are measured to where the ball was lost, not to wherever it was finally recovered. Say who recovered it and the takeover spot follows automatically: the receiving team's own field, or a spot of its own for the kicking team, in their frame, since nothing needs flipping if they end up keeping it.

Safeties on a punt

Two ways, and both live where the play actually went wrong. Blocked → Recovered by own team gives you In the end zone — safety; Muffed / fumbled catch → Recovered by the kicking team now gives you the same button, for a bad snap chased down into your own end zone. Either way it is two points to the other team, the drive ends, and no takeover spot is asked for — a free kick follows, so where the next drive starts has not happened yet.

The safety option only appears once the kicking team is the recoverer. If the receiving team recovers in the kicking team's end zone that is a touchdown, not a safety.

Out of bounds is for a kick that goes out untouched: the receiving team takes over at their own 35, filled in for you and still editable if they elect the inbounds spot instead. No returner and no return yards, because nobody touched the ball. Available on the opening and second-half kickoffs too.

Punt

Punter and distance (or the calculator). Then Touchback, Blocked or Muffed / fumbled catch as needed, the returner, and the spot the other team takes over.

Fumbled during the return works the same way it does on a kickoff: return yards stay put, and only the takeover spot depends on who recovers it.

Field goal

Kicker, distance, Good or Missed. A miss pre-fills the defense's own 20, which is right for a kick that reaches the end zone — type over it for a short miss that lands in the field of play.

Blocked and Muffed hold both force the result to Missed. A muffed hold means no kick was attempted at all, so the kicker is charged with nothing.

PAT and 2PT

Straightforward: kicker or ball carrier, and the result. A kickoff always follows a try, whatever the outcome.

The kicker and punter are remembered

After your team's first kick, the app pre-selects whoever did it last — the same way the quarterback is pre-selected on a pass. The player is highlighted and the list collapses to just him, with +N more beside it if you want somebody else — so if it is the right man you need do nothing. Tapping him confirms; +N more opens the full list, and typing a number overrides it. The number box stays empty and reads “or type #”: the highlight is what tells you who is suggested, and a number already sitting in the box looked like something you had typed.

Three separate memories, not one: kickoffs, field goals and PATs together, and punts. That is deliberate — plenty of teams have a kickoff specialist who is not the placekicker, and a wrong suggestion is worse than none because it looks deliberate and gets confirmed with a tap. Field goals and PATs share, because that really is the same player. Nothing is suggested until your team has actually done that kind of kick once, and each team has its own memory.

9. Utilities

Enforce from spot of foul is for a foul during a play, where the yardage is marked off from where the foul happened rather than from where the ball started. Tick it and give a side of the field and a yard line.

The clearest case: a back runs 8 from your 30 and holding is called at the 34. The ten yards come off the 34, so the ball ends on the 24 — a net loss of six, not ten. Without the toggle it would mark off from the 30 and put the ball on the 20, which is not where the officials will spot it.

It cannot be combined with Dead-ball, and picking either clears the other: a dead-ball foul happens after the play is over, so there is no spot of the foul to enforce from. It can be combined with Automatic first down or Loss of down, because defensive holding is routinely both spot-enforced and an automatic first down.

On a kickoff, enter the kickoff first with its ending spot set to where the penalty will be enforced from, then add the penalty. During the guided kickoff at the start of a half the utilities are switched off, so finish that sequence before entering the foul.

10. Fixing mistakes

During the game

• Undo last removes the most recent play. Press it repeatedly to walk back. Redo last puts it back. Ending a half writes two entries — a clock line and the divider — and Undo removes them together, so one press takes you back across the interval cleanly.
• Clear on any panel closes it without saving.
• Adjust Down/Distance corrects the situation without adding a play.
• Edit play on the newest play in the Current drive tile puts it back into its own tree with everything you entered still filled in. Change what was wrong, then Review and Save.
• Edit players on any other play — in the drive tiles or in All plays — changes who was credited without touching what happened. Ball carrier, passer, receiver, kicker, returner, the man who recovered, the tackler. You can add a tackler that was missed, change one, or take one off.

After the game

Once a game is finished, Undo is disabled — the database will not delete plays from a finished game. To correct something, an admin uses Unlock to edit on the finalized banner. That reopens the game and gives every play in All plays its own controls. Press End game again when you are done.

The four controls on a reopened game

• Edit players — change who was credited. Nothing about the play itself moves.
• Edit play — put the play back into its own tree, at the moment of the game it happened in, and change what it was. A three-yard carry that was really thirteen; a completion recorded as an incompletion.
• Delete — remove a play that should not be there at all, such as one entered twice.
• Delete & re-enter — remove it and enter it again from scratch, through any tree. A dashed slot appears in the log showing where the replacement will go and what situation it will be measured from; enter the play normally and it drops into that position rather than onto the end.

Edit play, and what it will not do

When you save, every later play in the same possession is rewritten so the down, distance and field position follow on correctly — and their players and their yardage are left alone. Before anything is written you are shown exactly which lines will change, each one as it reads now and as it will read, with a confirm or quit.

It deliberately refuses several things, and says which when you press it:

• Kickoffs and punts. They hand the ball over, and the drive after them starts from a spot that was entered by hand.
• Any play where the ball changed hands — an interception, a lost fumble, a turnover on downs. Use Edit players to correct who was involved, or Delete & re-enter to change what happened.
• Any play that scored. The possession ends with it and a kickoff follows, so the change would reach past the end of the drive.
• Any change that would make the rest of the drive impossible. If adding yards hands you a first down you never had, the fourth-down punt that ended the drive stops making sense — so it is refused, and it tells you which play broke. Nothing is saved.
• Plays entered before 6 September 2026. The app only began recording how a play was entered on that date, so there is nothing to refill a tree from. If a whole game predates it, All plays says so once. Use Delete & re-enter.

Checks — while the game is on

The Checks panel in the right margin runs the same tests as the button below, but continuously, a moment after you stop typing. It reads clear in green when nothing is wrong, or a red count when something is. An error found in the second quarter is a ten-second fix; the same error found after the whistle is an unlock and a re-entry.

It never blocks anything, and it never interrupts entry — it waits until the page is quiet before it runs.

Live totals

Under it are both teams' score, total, pass and rush yards, possessions, time of possession and timeouts, then each team's passing, rushing and receiving leaders and a team defence line. It is there so you can check against the stadium scoreboard without leaving the page — a timeout or clock discrepancy caught in Q2 is a small fix.

Checks — at the end

Run checks again looks for impossible entries — a down that jumped, a gain longer than the field allows, a touchdown that did not reach the goal line, plays with no spot, punts on the wrong down. It warns and never blocks; you decide.

11. Halftime, overtime, ending

• Quarter marker at the end of the 1st and 3rd quarters. It offers only the quarter that can legally start next, and is greyed out at the end of either half — those close with a button of their own.
• End 1st half at the interval. It asks you to confirm and shows the score at the half, so check it before you say yes: a missed PAT caught here is a ten-second fix, and caught after the interval it means unlocking the game. Both pages then read HALFTIME.
• Start 2nd half runs the second-half kickoff.
• End game finalizes it and runs the checks. It will refuse on a tie.
• Start overtime if the scores are level. It writes End of regulation into the log and asks who gets the ball first.

How overtime runs

Overtime is played in series, not as continuous football. Each side gets the ball from the same spot, and the app walks you through it:

• You pick who starts. The spot is prefilled to the opponent's 10 — edit it if your association uses a different one.
• When a series ends — a score, a turnover, or a failure on downs — the same panel comes back by itself: “Sterlington starts their series.” The spot is prefilled again.
• That panel also carries End game once one side is ahead, so you can finish there rather than setting up a series nobody is going to play. While the scores are level it says so instead.
• The header reads OT1, OT2, OT3 — one round is a series each way.

Kickoff and Punt are greyed out. There are no kickoffs in overtime, and a series starting on the opponent's 10 has nowhere to punt to. Field goal stays available: it is how most overtime series end.

You are not asked for the clock. There is no game clock in overtime, so time of possession stops at the end of regulation and no overtime time is counted toward it.

12. Reports

All four update live while a game is running, so a page left open stays current.

Analytics in the stat package

Added 8 September 2026. After the player tables, the stat package now carries the same analytics the season report has — scoring, yardage, the run/pass mix, discipline and efficiency — drawn for the one game. There are five sections: Game totals, Run / pass mix, Yards by quarter, Discipline and Efficiency. Each chart has its own row of figures directly above it.

The charts are by QUARTER, not by game. That is the only real difference from the season report. Most of the season charts gain a bar for each game played, and asked to draw a single game they would show one bar in a lot of white, so here they plot Q1 to Q4 instead — plus an OT column when the game went to overtime, exactly like the quarter line at the top of the page. The four charts whose shape never depended on the number of games — points by quarter, yardage by half, and the two run/pass donuts — are the same chart in both reports.

Printing is unchanged — Download PDF as before. The charts print centered on the page, on US Letter and on A4.

Second-half totals on the crew view

From the first play of the second half, the Total Yards, Pass Yards and Rush Yards tiles show the game total followed by the yardage since the break — 487 [203] means 487 for the game, 203 of them in the second half. In the first half there is no second half to report, so only the running total shows.

Coming back from a report

← Back to reports returns you to the season you were reading, not to the current one. Opening three reports from the 2023 season no longer means picking 2023 three times.

Time of possession

Shown on all four: on the live view it sits under the timeouts at the right of each team's colored bar, and on the recap, stat package and season report it appears with the team totals. The season report also gives a per-game average.

It is built entirely from the clock values you enter, so it shows nothing at all rather than 0:00 when none were entered — a zero would claim the team never had the ball, rather than admitting nobody recorded it. For the same reason, the season average is over the games that actually recorded a clock, and says how many that was.

What follows from that, in practice:

• Read the board. Do not reconstruct it. If you did not actually see the clock, leave the box empty. Empty makes TOP incomplete, and the app is honest about incomplete — it shows nothing rather than a figure. A guess makes it wrong, and wrong is indistinguishable from right on the report.
• Take the two warnings seriously. A value the app calls impossible, or earlier than the last one recorded, is the app telling you two things it has been given cannot both be true. It saves anyway if you insist, because sometimes it is the earlier entry that was wrong.
• Treat TOP as the number to sanity-check first. The two teams' times should account for close to the game's elapsed time between them. If they do not, something in the chain is wrong, and it is easier to find during the game than after it.
• It cannot be repaired afterwards from the game itself. A clock error is only visible if you remember the real value, so a wrong TOP is best treated as unrecoverable rather than as something to reconstruct.

What the reports show now

• An OT column in the recap's and the stat package's quarter line, but only when the game went to overtime. Overtime points used to be folded into Q4.
• Comp before Att, and Rec before Tgt, on every surface. A coach reads “12 of 19”, not “19 with 12 of them caught”.
• The crew view's top-right panel carries four series tiles under the current drive — long pass, long rush, penalties and sacks — all measured over the series in progress. They replaced the previous-drive card on 30 August 2026: a crew asks what this series has done far more often than what the last one finished with.
• The recap's leader cards read the same shape as each other — volume then touchdowns. The longest single play was a highlight, not a summary.

Checking the totals against each other

On the live view, each of the Passing, Rushing and Receiving tables shows its category total beside the header. Those are there to be compared with the team tiles in the top-left panel: passing should match Comp / Pass Yds, rushing should match Att / Rush Yds, and receiving should equal passing. If any pair disagrees, something is wrong and it is worth stopping to find out.

The totals cover every player, not just the handful of rows on screen — those tables show the top few, so a total added up from the visible rows would disagree with the tile it is meant to check.

13. Reading the crew view

The crew view is the page your broadcast team watches. They never see the app itself, so they cannot ask you mid-game what a number means. This is what each one is.

The four panels

The team stat tiles

The series tiles

Four tiles sit under the current drive, top right. They all describe the series in progress — not the game, and not the last drive. They replaced the previous-drive card on 30 August 2026.

In the team header

TOL is timeouts left. TOP is time of possession, and it only counts possessions where a clock was actually entered — skip the clock on a drive and that drive contributes nothing to TOP. A football beside a team name means they have the ball.

What changes at halftime

Five things, all at once, and a crew who has not seen it before will think something has broken. It has not.

• The drive card and the series tiles give way to a scoring summary, headed Scoring — first half.
• The possession football disappears, because nobody has the ball.
• The timeouts-left counter disappears, because timeouts reset for the second half — a counter still reading one would be wrong rather than merely stale.
• The leader rows are highlighted, since this is the moment anyone reads them.
• A line under the summary says who kicks off to start the second half.

Time of possession stays. Only the timeout counter goes; the TOP figure beside each team name is still there, and still correct.

All of it reverses the moment the second half starts. The same happens at the final whistle, where the summary reads Scoring — final.

The bracket on the yardage tiles

Not at halftime — at the first second-half play. The interval itself changes nothing here, which is worth knowing, because a crew watching for it during the break will not see it.

From that first play onward, Total Yards, Pass Yards and Rush Yards carry a second, smaller figure:

264 [80]

The large number is the running game total. The bracket is the second half. So that reads as 264 yards for the game, of which 80 have come since the interval — 184 before it.

14. How stats are counted

This section is the summary a scorer needs during a game. The complete rule set — every statistic, who it is credited to, and what deliberately counts for nothing — is on How stats are counted. That page is written to be sent to a coach or printed for the box.

Player buttons lead with the jersey number, larger than the name, because that is what you are looking for. The yardage that used to sit on each button is gone: it read “0 yds” for most of them and made every button wider.

StatChat follows NFHS scoring, which matches NCAA on the points below and differs from the NFL. This matters if you are comparing against a source that uses professional conventions. One deliberate difference is flagged in the table: a clock-killing kneel is charged to a TEAM row rather than to the quarterback. It is scoped to cost nothing — see the kneel row.

Team rushing therefore shows a TEAM line covering kneels and bad snaps, and the individual rows plus that line add up to the team total. Sack yardage is no longer on it — that sits on the quarterback, as above.

Stats that depend on what you chose to enter

Some fields are optional during entry, so a few numbers count what was recorded rather than what happened. None of these is a fault — each answers exactly the question it was given — but it is worth knowing which is which before handing a report to a coach.

15. Broadcasting (ON AIR)

StatChat can feed your broadcast software live — the score, down and distance, and every stat — so the on-screen graphics update themselves as plays are entered.

The short version

1. Set one game ON AIR from the dashboard.
2. The production team points their software at the feed addresses on the Broadcast setup page.
3. That’s it. The addresses never change, so this only happens once.

Setting a game ON AIR

On the dashboard, open the ⋮ menu on a game and choose Set as ON AIR. Admin and game-entry accounts can both do this.

It is the second item in that menu, directly under Game setup, and it is drawn in the same blue as Crew View and Score summary immediately below it. The three of them are one group — the broadcast surfaces — and ON AIR is the switch that makes the other two live. Once a game is flagged the item changes to ● Take OFF AIR and turns red, so the color tells you which way it will go before you read the words.

A flagged game shows a red ● ON AIR badge on the dashboard row, and a banner across the top of the game page while you are entering plays.

Only one game at a time

Setting a game ON AIR automatically takes any other game off. This is enforced by the database, not just the screen, so two people cannot accidentally flag two games at once.

Why it asks so many times

This one flag decides what the entire broadcast is showing, so the app makes it deliberately awkward to change by accident:

• Every prompt names the game, because picking the wrong one is the real risk.
• Switching to a game that is in progress asks twice — it changes what viewers see immediately.
• Taking a live game off air makes you type “OFF AIR”. A click is too easy to do by reflex during a game.
• Taking a finished game off air only asks once. The friction is where the risk is.

The app also records who changed the flag and when, so if the wrong game is on air there is an answer to “who did that?”

The Broadcast setup page

In the account menu, Broadcast setup lists every feed address with a copy button, and shows what is on air right now. Send that link to the production team and they can set themselves up without anyone reading a web address down the phone.

It is available to admin and game-entry accounts only, because it displays the feed key.

What is on the Broadcast setup page

Four blocks, top to bottom. Most weeks you only need the first.

Feed addresses

Twelve separate data sources, each a web address your production software reads on a timer. The addresses never change from week to week — they follow whichever game is set ON AIR, so a producer sets them up once and never touches them again.

Season totals, not just this game

The six leader feeds — rushing, passing, receiving, defense, kicking and punting — also come in a season version. It has its own row on the setup page, directly under the game one, with its own copy button, and it takes the same XPath.

Each feed is available as XML or JSON — the toggle at the top switches every address at once. vMix and most switchers want XML; JSON is there if someone is building something custom. Copy all for the crew and Email to the crew send the whole set — addresses, XPaths and column names — which is easier than reading them down a phone.

Setting it up

Every feed row on the setup page gives you the two things vMix asks for, numbered in the order it asks for them, each with its own copy button:

1. Address — paste into the data source.
2. XPath — which element in the file holds the rows.

In vMix: the menu icon at the bottom right of the main window → Data Sources Manager → add → type XML, paste the address, set the update interval to 1–2 seconds, and paste the XPath. Then map each column onto a field in your title.

One row per record — the scoreboard, drive and last-play feeds return a single row; the leader feeds return one per player, so a title using them needs to be built for a repeating list.

Screen overlay

A ready-made transparent scoreboard, if your crew would rather not build their own. It goes in as a web browser input at 1920×1080, not as a data source, and it draws itself. Quicker to get on air; less control over how it looks.

If the graphics stop updating

Open any one of the addresses in a browser. Current data means the feed is fine and the problem is in the production software; stale or missing data means it is this end. That one check separates the two halves of the problem faster than anything else, and it is worth showing a producer before game day rather than during one.

What the production team gets

The ready-made overlays

If the crew would rather not build their own graphics, StatChat ships finished ones. They are added differently from the feeds — as a web browser input at 1920×1080, not as a data source. The background is transparent, so each keys straight over the programme feed and needs no mapping.

Every address is listed on the Broadcast setup page with a copy button. In outline:

Caveats worth knowing

If the graphics stop updating

1. Open one of the feed addresses in a browser. If it shows current data, the feed is fine and the problem is in the broadcast software.
2. The usual cause is a refresh interval that was never set. A data source that fetches once looks exactly like a frozen feed. One to two seconds is right.
3. If it says No game is on air, nothing is flagged and no game is in progress.
4. If the scoreboard is right but stats are missing, check the software is reading the correct feed — each graphic uses its own address.

Between seasons

Nothing needs redoing. The addresses do not change, so last season’s setup still works — flag the first game of the new season and the graphics follow.

16. If something looks wrong

A play will not save

Look for an amber message inside the panel. The usual cause is SPOT NOT SET — use Adjust Down/Distance first.

If the message instead says your free trial or your season ended, that is billing rather than scoring. Everything you have already entered is still there and still readable — the overlays, the feed, the reports and every past game are untouched. What stops is new entry. Open Account to start or renew a season and carry on.

A game already in progress is never cut off. If a season runs out in the middle of a Friday night, the game being scored right now finishes normally; the block applies from the next game. Nobody loses a broadcast to a renewal date.

You are told before it happens

Nobody should meet a renewal date for the first time on a Friday, so the reminders go out well ahead of it. Your school's admins are emailed seven days, three days, one day and on the day a free trial or a paid season ends.

These are not product news and there is no unsubscribe on them. They are about your own account's status, and somebody who has opted out of hearing about new features has not asked to be kept in the dark about their season ending. If you would rather a different person received them, make them an admin, or ask us to change who is listed.

The scoring screen itself also carries an amber strip inside the last week, so a crew who never opens the dashboard still gets the warning where they actually work. Nothing is disabled while it shows — the season has not ended yet and every control still works.

A player is missing from a picker

Type the number in the box. They join the list from then on. To have them there from the start next time, add a position to the roster or name them as a likely starter.

The pages disagree with each other

Reload the report page. All pages update live, but a tab left open through a network drop can fall behind.

Losing the connection

Two things appear, and they mean different things.

A red banner: "No connection to the server." This appears as soon as the connection drops, before any play has failed — the app checks the database every few seconds rather than trusting the laptop's own idea of whether it is online. A laptop joined to venue wifi with a dead uplink will happily report that it is connected.

A yellow banner: "N plays not yet saved." This appears once plays are actually waiting. Retry now forces an attempt, though it retries by itself anyway.

Undo is limited while offline. A play you entered during the outage can be undone as normal — it never left this laptop. A play saved before the connection dropped cannot: removing it here would look right and then the play would reappear when the connection returns, because the deletion never reached the server. The app refuses that one and says so. Once you are back online it undoes normally, and any play can be deleted from a finished game via Unlock to edit.

Keep entering plays either way. They are stored on this laptop and upload automatically when the connection returns. The game scores correctly throughout — the only thing missing is the trip to the server.

If you do get stranded on an error page: wait for the connection, reload, and the queued plays upload on their own. Do not clear the browser data, and do not switch to another laptop — the queue lives in this browser and moving away is the one thing that would actually lose it.

The wrong team has the ball

Use Flip possession, then Adjust Down/Distance to set the spot.

Starting over

An admin can Reset game from the three-dot menu on the dashboard. It clears every play and returns the game to not-started. You must type the game designator to confirm — there is no undo.

None of that helped — telling us

There is a form on your account page: Report a bug or request a feature, at the top beside your email address. Pick which it is, give it a title and describe what happened, and submit. It reaches us with your name and school already attached, so there is nothing to fill in about who you are.

For a bug, the useful things are what you were doing, what you expected, and what happened instead. The quarter and the play help more than anything else — a bug that only happens on a fumbled catch in overtime is one we can find in minutes with that sentence and not at all without it.

A feature request goes to a different place from a bug, which is the only reason the form asks. Both are read.

If you cannot sign in, that form is behind the very thing that is broken. Use statchat.co/support.html instead — it asks for an email address and what is happening, and nothing else. support@statchat.co reaches the same place if you would rather use your own mail.

Something unclear or missing from this guide? It is worth saying so — the confusing parts are usually the parts that cause bad data. There is a form for it on your account page, or see section 16.