The Formation Hit Chart

The Formation Hit Chart may be as old as the game of football itself.  Requiring just pencil and paper, but like many form-oriented tasks, aided greatly by computer form generation, Hit Charts come in many variations. 

A favorite of many of today's coaches is a chart like the one shown below.  A chart with 6 boxes is prepared for each formation. Each row of boxes includes identical formation illustrations, with one showing the Formation Strength to the Right and another showing Formation Strength to the Left.

The result is a template that, when completed, looks like this below. The red X's were added to emphasize the point that in this particular game, this particular team used the formation from only 2 of 6 possible formation/hash combinations. In this particular case, Twins was the second most used formation of the team.

This formation hit chart for Twins Formation is based on the play and game charting logic that is explained in Game Day Scout, an eBook that is available at www.compusportsmedia.com and included with all of CompuSports Easy-Scout products. However, in Game Day Scout, since the charting is done during the game, Hash is not used to illustrate the "hits".

The result is something like this :

Each form has its purpose. 

The first type of Formation Hit Chart (top) was created in Powerpoint in order to achieve the design goal of 6 boxes, and has proven to be an indispensable tool for breaking down an offensive formation - in preparation for a game. By including the Hash and Formation strength, this visual representation often becomes quite revealing.  

The second was created in Microsoft Word - which, at the time, was a better tool for producing portrait-style forms.

If you would like to learn about our Easy-Scout products - inexpensive computer software programs that we used to generate these tendencies,  drop us a note using the Feedback form at www.compusports.com  or visit  www.compusports.com/scouting.asp.