I'll give an answer and you can decide if I've answered you or not.
If not I'll try again.
1--actually, to be pedantic I was suggesting the previous posters needed to re-orient how they approached putting their squads together.
My principle point was that it's very important to take into account what is going to be required of the players in the new format as opposed to what has been accomplished in a different format. Your question takes the next step by asking how, when trying to assess progress and improvement, do you separate out all the potentially conflicting or confusing info. What's important and what's not.
(Briefly back to putting the lines together in the first place. As it's more art than science, as you well know, there are also a myriad of intangibles that also deserve some consideration but I tend to view them more as variables within a more or less constant equation. To give it a mathy sound.
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2--at one level if the disparity in team ability is sufficiently broad it ought to be reasonably apparent but even so the evaluation process works the same way. The principle means I begin with is execution. How did each individual player perform in a basic paintball skills sense and further how did each line perform their required duties? (Much more detail below.
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3--to my way of thinking you're mixing two separate and distinct elements here. A bad strategy doesn't necessarily equate to bad players or poor performance so I throw it out of the basic evaluation process except of course when I'm evaluating myself and my performance.
4--First, I'm going to separate the players from the tactics because by "tactics" I take you to mean the breakout(s) employed and the goal of a particular or singular point, heavy snake, center push and so on. I am further going to designate the "game plan" as the strategy in a particular match as it is, or ought to be, made up of numerous breakout options and contigencies considered in advance and prepared for a specific opponent. Neither tactics or strategy are immediately relevant. What matters is individual execution; how each individual player performs the paintball essentials.
This is pretty straightforward. Staying alive, gun skills, movement and so on. Breakdowns at this stage typically mean work harder, get more focused. Identifying them is job one because you can't fix what you aren't aware of. They also mean a reduced level of execution at the tactical level because the basic level of individual play isn't being met and that is a pre-requisite. They may also signal a particular player is reaching his/her talent limit.
(There are also, helping to confuse things, a few intangibles here. Things like recognition and timing. Even so they tend to simply be indicators of bumping up against the talent ceiling although even these deficiencies can, to an extent, be trained for.)
Now it's time to take tactics into account because the next step in evaluating execution is assessing how a given line-up of players performed their assigned roles during the points they played.
OFF TOPIC--(Btw, roles are not, to my mind, player specific though they tend to turn out that way, but are better thought of as tactic specific. It's just that most players ultimately demonstrate patterns of strength and weakness that associate with certain roles like snake player, etc. I prefer to think of roles as tactic specific because I think it promotes greater individual player versatility.)
Again, we're not directly concerned with what the other team did. We want to know what we did or didn't do. Here it's necessary to know what was supposed to happen so that if your sweet-spotters shot the wrong lanes or your wire support was looking the wrong way it is readily apparent. This requires charting the breakouts and using some means of recording the players' actions. Videotaping is probably best but the right sort of contemporaneous notes is okay. Proper evaluation at this stage also requires the ability to identify the key components of role execution in order to identify failures of same. Things ranging from accuracy to disciplined lane control, keeping your wire leads alive and supported to containment from positions of advantage and effective close-out practices, etc. And each component more or less important given a particular role in a specific play.
Like before certain failures come to light and once identified can be corrected. Other failures are less susceptible to evaluation.
This is where we consider the other team. A pattern of getting your snake player blown up repeatedly means one of two things; he's really sucking it up or the other guys are doing something unaccounted for. The dividing line between execution breakdown and what the other team is doing may seem hard to grasp but in practice it's not really that indistinct.
At the end of the day most often the failures are of the execution sort. (This will be especially true at any level of play below Pro and not uncommon at the Pro level either.) The decision left to be made is what is the appropriate fix. Most of the time using this method identifying the problem suggests the corrective. Sometimes, however, when there are breakdowns of tactical execution that cannot be confidently identified we enter the realm of the intangibles and have to once again think about re-ordering our lines to alter the mix. Sometimes its personalities, sometimes it can be trust or comfort issues, oftentimes stuff like that goes unspoken, sometimes it's style and rythym (which is another whole discussion), etc.
Alternatively, if the assessment is the individual and team execution is at least on par with the competition but you're still losing then you know it's time to reassess your tactics and strategy.
At any rate does that begin to address your query, Pete?
