Tracking Your Own Kid's Basketball Stats From the Stands
July 31, 2026
You are in the third row with a coffee going cold, and your kid just came off the floor after eleven minutes. You know he had a good game. You could not tell anyone why.
That gap — between I know what I saw and I can show you what happened — is the whole reason this post exists.
Every stat app is built for somebody else
Open any basketball stat tracker and the first thing it asks for is a roster. Twelve names. Then a starting five. Then the opponent, the quarter length, whether you are home or away. Then it puts a scoreboard at the top of the screen and asks you to keep score for two teams.
All of that is correct — if you are the coach, or the volunteer at the scorer’s table. It is completely wrong if you are a parent who came to watch one specific child.
You don’t want the team’s score. You are not making substitutions. You do not care that the opposition’s number 8 has three fouls. You want to know whether your kid is getting shots, whether they are falling, and whether the thing you two worked on in the driveway is showing up when it counts.
Nobody builds that. So we did.
What one-player mode actually removes
In HoopNest you tap one pill at the top of the screen and choose One player. What happens next is mostly a story of things disappearing.
The scoreboard goes. No team score, no opponent score, no “+1 +2 +3” buttons. Nothing to keep track of on behalf of two teams you are not coaching.
The game clock goes. So do quarters and timeouts. You are not running the game.
The other nine players go — not just from the live screen, but from every screen. The dashboard, the season table, the shot chart, the badges, the exports. Open any of them and you see one child, because that is the only child you are there for.
The roster goes too. You do not build one. Type the opponent, type the date, tap start. The app creates the player from the profile name. Two fields and you are recording.
What is left is a large card with your kid’s name on it, and a pad of buttons. Points, rebounds, assists, fouls, steals, blocks, turnovers. Tap what happens. That’s it.
The minutes problem, and the switch that solves it
Here is the thing that took us longest to get right.
Minutes played matter enormously in youth basketball. Eight points in nine minutes is a completely different game from eight points in twenty-six. But minutes are normally counted off the game clock — and we just removed the game clock.
So the clock became a switch. On the player card there are two states: ● On court and 🪑 On bench. Real seconds accumulate only while it says on court. Your kid gets subbed off, you tap it. They check back in, you tap it again.
That switch is the entire substitution model in one-player mode, and it turns out to be more honest than a game clock ever was. The number at the top of the card is time your child actually played — not the length of the game they attended.
Two kids, two teams, two Saturdays
If you have more than one child playing, you already know the problem. Their teams are different, their seasons are different, and mixing them into one roster produces a table that means nothing.
So each child gets a profile. Their own team name, their own games, their own season history, their own badges. Tap the profile button at the top, switch, and everything on every screen changes with it. Nothing bleeds across.
And then there is the button parents actually asked for: Compare. Both kids, side by side — games played, points, rebounds, assists, minutes per game. Not to rank them. Because when your daughter asks whether she is doing as well as her brother did at her age, you now have something better than a shrug.
What about the final score?
We removed the scoreboard, which creates a small honest problem: at the end of the season your games all read 0–0, and that is not a season anybody wants to look back on.
So when you tap Finish, the app offers two boxes: your team, their team. Type the score if you want it remembered, or skip it. The fields start empty rather than at zero, because a game saved as 0–0 when nobody kept score is a lie that will confuse you in March. And if you type one number and not the other, nothing is saved — half a score doesn’t tell you who won.
You can also add it later. The score button sits on the box score in the Games tab, ready for the day you remember that it finished 58–61.
What you actually end up with
After ten or fifteen games, something quietly changes. You stop having opinions about your kid’s basketball and start having evidence.
You can see that the rebounds went up the month they moved him to the four. You can see that the turnovers spike in the fourth quarter, which is a conditioning conversation and not an attitude one. You can see, on the shot chart, that the left corner has slowly filled up with green — the same corner that was empty in November, the same corner you two shot at in the driveway all through the winter.
That is the thing worth having. Not the numbers. The proof that the work showed up.
The parts that matter quietly
It works offline. No signal in the gym, no problem. There is nothing to connect to.
There is no account. Nothing to sign up for, no password, no email. You open a file.
Nothing is uploaded. Data about an under-age athlete stays on the device you typed it into, because there is no server for it to go to. This is not a promise about our privacy policy — it is how the thing is built. The only way your child’s data goes anywhere is if you export it and send it yourself.
You pay once. Most trackers rent themselves to you by the month, forever. This one is a single file you download and keep. It will still open in five years without an internet connection.
Try it before you decide
There is a free trial that records five full games with every screen unlocked — nothing hidden, nothing cut down. Both PDF guides are free too, in English and Lithuanian, and there is a short quick-start if you would rather not read forty pages before your kid’s next game.
And if you only ever want the shooting, the shot chart tool is free and always will be.
HoopNest — basketball stats for coaches, and a one-player mode for the parent in the third row. Offline, one file, one payment, no subscription.