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You press the keys. BenchNotes does everything after that.

You already rewatch your games. BenchNotes turns that hour into a season of statistics, analysis, shot maps and highlight clips — the kind of detail teams normally pay a fortune for a service to do, on your own computer, for $49 a year.

What you do

  • Watch the game you were going to watch anyway
  • Press one key when something happens
  • Click the ice, if you want that level of detail
QShot
WGoal
EFaceoff
RPenalty

Your team on one row, the opposition on the row below. That is the whole thing.

What BenchNotes does

  • Every statistic for the team, every skater and every goalie, across the season
  • Shot maps, and net maps showing where a goalie is being beaten
  • Highlight clips cut out of your video in seconds
  • The game’s highlights video, built from the plays you already marked
  • A private page for each player’s stats, where every number plays the clips behind it
  • Every shot your goalie faced, in a folder of their own, with their stat sheet as a PDF
  • A printable page per player, with their own maps on it
  • Plain-English observations, and a file you can hand to an AI assistant to ask questions of

“It takes me no longer to tag a game than it does to watch normally, but the stats and analysis I get out of it are the sort of thing I used to think you had to pay a lot of money for.”
— Me, the guy who built BenchNotes

Watch the demo video below.

AI enabled stats in a click

For each game, BenchNotes provides insights into who performed well and what to watch. For multiple game analysis, click the AI export to get a specially formatted file that AI can parse a million ways to discover insights you can't see. Check out an AI Enabled example.

A highlights video creator

Mark plays with one key while you watch, and BenchNotes cuts them out of your video afterwards. Then build the game's highlights video from them: your goals are already in, your notable plays and every save your goalie made are waiting to drop into sections you name yourself. Add your own music, preview the whole thing inside BenchNotes, and press a button to share with your players.

Share it with your whole staff

Publish a team page and your assistants get the whole season on a private link — every play, the shot map, the skaters and goalies stats, and the game log. Pick any game and every play tagged in it is listed, each with a Watch button that opens the game on YouTube at that moment, including every notable play.

Staff can also download their own copy of BenchNotes to their computer if they want to tag games as well.

What you get

Every game you tag rolls up into the season. Nothing has to be entered twice. Click any screenshot to see it full size.

Statistics for the team, the skaters and the goalies

Shots, shots on goal, goals, assists, points, faceoff wins and losses, penalty minutes, plus/minus and Corsi. Scoped to one game, one tournament, a game type, or the whole season.

List of all tracked stats

The season statistics table showing every skater's totals.
Screenshot — the season skater table

Your own tagging keys

BenchNotes counts what most teams count. If your team counts something else — net drives, takeaways, turnovers, whatever you talk about on the bench — make a key for it. Name it, pick the key, say whose play it is and whether a player and a spot on the ice are involved, then add up to three details of your own with up to six answers each. Start from a ready-made template for net drives, takeaways or turnovers, or from blank.

Tagging stays as fast as everything else: press the key, the number keys answer the details, click the player. Each tag then gets its own column in the Skaters table and its own tile on the Stats pages, and clicking a choice narrows the rest of the tile — click “Far post” and the tile tells you how often far-post drives end in a shot. Every count has the clips behind it.

Your tags stay off player pages unless you put them there.

The Add a custom tag window: a net drive tag with its key, whose play it is, and three details of the coach's own with their choices.
Screenshot — building a custom tag

Shot maps, and net maps for your goalies

Every shot you tagged is placed on the ice where it came from, for the team and for each player. For goalies, the same picture from the other side — which part of the net they are being beaten in.

A shot map of the team's season, shown as a heat map over half a rink.
Screenshot — team shot map

Highlight clips, cut out of the game

Mark a goal or a play as worth keeping while you tag. Export the lot afterwards and you get an ordinary folder of video files, named by game, that you can send to a parent or put in a group chat. Clicking on any shot marker, notable play or goal takes you right to that moment in the game video any time in the season.

A folder of exported clip files on a Windows computer.
Screenshot — a folder of exported clips

The game’s highlights video

Once a game is tagged and marked complete, BenchNotes can build you a game highlights video. Create your own highlight sections and drop any notable plays or saves into them. Your goals are already in a Goals section. You can even drop in highlights from the Player of the Game. Trim the start and end of any clip and put them in the order you want and add your own background music. Preview the whole thing inside BenchNotes, and then create a version to send to parents and players.

The highlights video screen: the game video on the left, the list of tagged plays waiting to be added to sections on the right, and the music, preview and make buttons underneath.
Screenshot — building the highlights video

An online stats page for each player

BenchNotes can publish a private page for every player, in one step. Their family opens it on a phone — no app, no account, nothing to sign up for.

They get that player's season: goals, assists, points, shots, shooting percentage, faceoffs, plus/minus, penalty minutes. For a goalie, shots against, saves, save percentage and shutouts. Every one of those numbers can be tapped to watch the plays behind it, one after another — tap 23 goals and you watch all 23. Their shot map, where their shots finished on the net, and a game-by-game list grouped by exhibition, regular season, playoffs and each tournament, where each game's numbers play just that game's clips.

Underneath their own season sits the team's: the record, the stats and the shot heat maps, with no other player named. With a single game showing, one button opens the whole game on YouTube and another opens that game's highlights video, if you made one.

All of this depends on you putting the game on YouTube. You also pick which notable plays go on the page.

The page carries their first name and number, never a surname, and never the rest of your roster.

A player's published page on a laptop: season totals, shot map and where their shots finished on the net. The same player page on a phone, listing every goal, assist and notable play with a Watch button.
Screenshot — a player’s page

A report you can print

One sheet per player, with their own maps on it. Plus plain-English observations about what the numbers say — and an export you can hand to an AI assistant yourself if you want to ask it questions about your season.

A printed player report showing one player's statistics and shot map.
Screenshot — a player's printed report

How it works

  1. Set up your team

    Enter your roster once. It carries through the whole season.

  2. Load the game video

    Whatever you filmed on, from a phone on a tripod to the rink's camera. If it is in a format that will not play, BenchNotes offers to convert a copy and leaves your original alone.

  3. Watch it back and tag

    One key per event. A period takes about as long as the period did, and you can pause or rewind whenever you like.

  4. Read the season

    Statistics, maps and observations update as you go. Export clips, spreadsheets and reports whenever you want them.

The BenchNotes tagging screen during a game, with the video, the keypad and the play log.
Screenshot — the tagging screen mid-game
Tagging a game. The video, the keypad, and everything logged so far.

Who this is for

I watchgamevideo I want greatstat dataand analysis I have lotsof moneyto spend BuyBenchNotes Buyprettieruniforms Buyexpensivepaid service Lucky you.
  • If you can afford a service that does the tagging for you, this will not beat it. Those services employ people to watch your footage. BenchNotes is for coaches who rewatch their games anyway and do not mind doing a bit of the work themselves to get that level of detail.
  • It does not watch the video for you. There is no automatic detection of players, pucks or plays. You tag what happened, and the numbers are only ever as good as the tagging that went into them — which is the honest trade for statistics you can trust.
  • It is not a video editor. The highlights video is a clean cut — title cards, your clips, your music. No transitions, no effects, no voiceover, and no music library; you supply the track. If you want more than that, what BenchNotes makes is a good rough cut to take into an editor.
  • Tags mark moments, not stretches. There is no time-on-attack or zone-time number. Everything else is countable: shots, goals, assists, faceoffs, penalties and hits are built in, and you can make your own key for anything else your team counts.
  • No accounts, no league table, no app for your phone. Nothing about your team goes online unless you publish a player’s page or your coaches’ team page — and then only to the private link you send.
  • Windows only. Windows 10 (21H2 or newer) and Windows 11, 64-bit. There is no Mac version.

Price

$49 CAD a year
  • Up to three computers — you and two assistants
  • As many teams, games and seasons as you like
  • Updates released during your year

Licence keys are sent by hand, usually within a few hours. You will get an email from me with your key and how to enter it.

Download

BenchNotes runs free for 30 days from the first time you open it, with everything switched on. No key, no email, no card.

Windows will warn you about this file, and that is expected.

You will see a blue box that says Windows protected your PC the first time you run the installer. Click More info, then Run anyway.

Check that it says Brian Astl. That is me, and that is how you know you have got the real file. Windows shows this warning about any new program until enough people have downloaded it, which takes a while when the program is made by one person.

Download BenchNotes for Windows Version 1.8.0 · 157 MB · .exe installer

What you need

  • Windows 10 (21H2 or newer) or Windows 11, 64-bit
  • Your game video as a file on the computer — BenchNotes does not record and does not read from a camera
  • Room on the drive for the program and for a converted copy of a video, if one is needed