Offensive Hold Rates: Club Nationals 2014–2017

Craig P
Craig P
Sep 2, 2018 · 3 min read

A dive into offensive hold rates at USAU Club Nationals 2014–2017


This is a follow-up to an article I wrote last year about hold rates in the college division at USAU Nationals. Below are data cuts of hold rates for the Men’s and Women’s divisions at USAU club Nationals. Data were scraped from the USAU Club Nationals web pages.

Club Division

The table below shows the offensive hold rates for each division at USAU Club Nationals from 2014–2017. I broke down the rates by winning teams and losing teams from each game. The reason is that the lesser of two opponents will end up playing more offensive points and skewing the total number for the division, so this should be taken into account when analyzing the results.

Comparison to College Division

The table below shows the offensive hold rates for each division at USAU D-I College Nationals from 2014–2017.

For the Men’s division, the hold rates are very comparable for the club and college divisions. The Women’s division has slightly higher hold rates in the club division compared to the college division.


Club Division by Year & Weather

To add a little more detail for each year, I show the average hold rate by division and the average wind speed each year. The wind data was collected from weatherunderground.com and averaged over all the round times for Club Nationals.

Note that stronger wind correlates with slighter lower hold rates for the Men’s division and slightly higher hold rates for the Women’s division. I wouldn’t make any sweeping conclusions from these data though. It’s hard to know which direction the fields were in relation to wind direction. For instance a heavy upwind/downwind game would likely increase the hold rate whereas a heavy crosswind game would likely decrease the hold rate.


Club Division vs. Simulated Results

Another way to think about the hold rates for winning teams and losing teams is to compare hold rates for simulated games where each team has the same probability to score each offensive point.

For the Men’s division, I used a 70% offensive hold probability in the simulations and a 63% probability for the Women’s division. As you can see, the club division hold rates from Nationals are similar to what you see from the simulations. The actual club game data have a bit lower rates for losing teams and a bit higher rates for winning teams. This is to be expected as teams aren’t equal in every game. As teams are more unequal, you would expect a bigger difference in hold rates between winning and losing teams. Comparing to the Club division, we see that the Women’s division has more unequal teams playing each other than the Men’s division.

Simulated Hold Rates

Club Nationals Hold Rates (same table as above)

Craig P

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Craig P

The Flip

The Flip

Talking ultimate and stats.

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