GOT metrics

Darren Cheesman is a hockey coach from England. Cheesman played for GB / England and his club hockey in the domestic leagues of England (East Grinstead) and the Netherlands (Oranje Zwart). Very active in the FIH Academy as a highly regarded coach educator, he is doing his on field coaching these days in Germany and before that in Belgium and the Netherlands.
For The Hockey Site Darren Cheesman previously also hosted a very interactive live session in his coach chat on long corner offensive tactics in 2021.

Recently Cheesman published a thesis for his Master of Science in Elite Sports Coaching Practice entitled: “Reviewing GOT Metrics as KPIs for the German Women’s International Field Hockey team, and as a tool to inform future strategy and training interventions. A Case Study approach.” That was a good enough reason to ask him to tell us more about this topic in a new masterclass…

Download the PDF of this dissertation

Whether you’re coaching at a national level or fine-tuning a club side, field hockey can often feel overwhelming—so many variables, so many options, so much data. But if there’s one thing to take away from the recent masterclass on GOT Metrics, it’s this: structure is your best ally in navigating the complexity of field hockey.

GOT Metrics (Goals, Opportunities, Threats) aren’t just a way of counting circle entries—they’re a framework for making sense of the chaos within the attacking and defending circles. The true utility is not in how many entries you tally, but in the quality and context you attach to each one. If you’re used to measuring just quantity, it’s time to rethink: “Traditionally we talk about the quantity of circle entries or quantity of shots that we might be able to generate in a game,” says Darren Cheesman. “But actually, there’s a whole load of insight that goes into the fact that the quality of each of those circle entries is just as, if not more important.”

Why does this matter? Quality entries connect directly to scoring chances. Instead of looking at a stat sheet and thinking, ‘We got into the circle 25 times,’ you start asking, ‘How many times did we get a shot off without defensive pressure? Where on the pitch did our most dangerous entries initiate? Are we consistently creating the kind of opportunities that match the strengths of our squad?’ This shift allows coaches to be far more targeted in their tactical reviews and far more intentional in their session design.

Here’s the crux: GOT Metrics aren’t a magic bullet for goals, and they’re certainly not a guarantee of wins. But used consistently, they provide a roadmap for improvement that’s rooted in evidence, not gut feel. You move away from coaching ad hoc, toward a method where data supports your intuition and sharpens your athletes’ focus.

As Darren Cheesman summed up, “These metrics are just metrics and the only metric that really matters is the goals. Just because you do well in the metrics, it doesn’t mean that you’re guaranteed goals… It’s just there to help you tell a story, to help you identify things, to understand trends, to be able to identify where you might need development areas.”