Who Is Missing From the Origin Story? — Beyond the Breadcrumbs

Every field inherits an origin story.

Sometimes the story survives not only in later accounts, but in the working documents themselves.

Two papers now sitting beside this Clyde Street trail make that unusually tangible.

In 1985, Celia H. Brackenridge and G. John K. Alderson published Match Analysis for the National Coaching Foundation. They treated match analysis as part of the coaching process: deliberate observation, recording, interpretation and feedback rather than a collection of match facts. Their paper included BRACstat, Celia’s notation system, as one practical example.

Two years later, in Hockey Field, Jean A. Macheath wrote The Value of Match Analysis Techniques to the Coach. Her emphasis was equally practical. A coach needed to understand how data had been obtained, why it had been collected, the definitions being used and the conditions surrounding collection before the material could become useful. She also separated videotaping from analysis itself.

These papers do something that a later list of pioneers cannot. They bring the work into view.

And they create an unexpected mirror for this project. Keith spent years trying to leave other people’s work visible enough for later readers to find.

But an origin story is also shaped by what the archive makes difficult to see.

By April 2015, Keith had turned that problem into a simple question in Godmothers of Performance Analysis: Where were the godmothers?

When the archive goes quiet

Keith’s first search did not produce a neat alternative canon.

He began with people whose work he could trace. Celia Brackenridge’s archive contained early notation and computerised-analysis material. Other surviving hockey and tennis material offered further routes into the history.

Then the trail became less certain.

Keith wrote that he had not been able to find Jane and Celia’s predecessors in primary sources from women’s hockey in the 1920s. Relevant magazines and archives existed. Later historical work suggested routes to follow. But the primary evidence he wanted was not there for him to inspect.

That absence matters because it could easily have been turned into a conclusion.

Keith did not write that no women had done the work. He recorded that he had not found the sources.

The distinction is small and consequential. A gap in an archive is not the same thing as a gap in the past.

What he had found, however, opened another route. He had located women researching basketball performance in the United States in the 1930s: Pauline Hodgson, Nancy Miner and Anna Espenschade.

Six days later, he returned with much more than their names.

Seeing the work, not just the names

In Godmothers of Performance Analysis (2), Keith presented Hodgson, Espenschade and Miner as precursors of present-day performance analysis. He wrote that “their work is rarely mentioned or acknowledged”.

The important change was the level of detail.

He described research into women’s basketball that combined physiological measures with observation of movement and activity. He followed the researchers into the practical mechanics of their work: paths traced on onion-skin paper placed over a court drawn to scale; separate records for each minute of play; multiple observers; reported agreement between observers; distinctions between different intensities of activity.

The post did not stop at adding three women to a list. It made the research activity visible.

Names alone would have told a thin history. In Clyde Street, these researchers became inspectable as people who had designed ways of observing, recording and analysing performance.

The reconstruction still had edges.

One of Hodgson’s papers, published in 1939, had not been accessible to Keith when he wrote the April post. Keith did not know what had become of the original onion-skin movement records. Lloyd Messersmith had cited the women’s papers, but Keith could find no evidence that the researchers had met.

Keith went further and wrote that he saw Hodgson, Espenschade and Miner as fundamental to the origins of notational and performance analysis.

That is worth preserving as Keith’s historical judgement.

It is not the same as proving an uncontested point of origin.

The archive had widened his history. It had not made the history complete.

When the evidence changes the history

Four months later, one of the source conditions changed.

In Distances traversed in women’s basketball: then and now, a contemporary paper on basketball sent Keith back to the earlier work. This time he could use Hodgson’s 1939 paper directly. He also brought Jane Laurence and Jessie Falconer further into the historical picture.

The history moved because the evidence available to him had moved.

Keith compared early manual observation with contemporary video-based tracking, but the value of the comparison did not depend on pretending that the studies were equivalent. The rules of the game differed. The samples differed. The measures and technologies differed.

Instead, the return made a longer analytical problem visible: how people in different periods made performance observable, recordable and discussable.

Then, in February 2018, Keith had to revise the map again — this time because of something he had missed himself.

In Anna Espenschade: notating and analysing field hockey in 1936, Keith returned to a paper he had previously overlooked. He had discussed Anna Espenschade mainly through the basketball work; now he wrote: “I have no excuse for missing her 1936 paper”.

The recovered paper materially deepened the history. Espenschade had reported 500 positional-play records from 48 players. Research assistants Mildred Martin and Mae Moore tracked players in real time, tracing three-minute movement paths on onion-skin paper over a scaled field. The study included repeated measurement and explicit observer-agreement procedures.

Keith also kept his own inference separate from what the paper reported. Where the paper did not explicitly describe an intra-observer procedure, he marked that as his reading rather than silently converting it into a fact.

This is one of the strongest moments in the whole trail.

The missingness was no longer only in an archive somewhere else. It had been in Keith’s own earlier reconstruction.

A history capable of expanding had to be capable of admitting that.

Godmother did not mean one kind of relationship

The collective label can mislead if it makes all of these women look as though they occupied the same relationship to Keith.

They did not.

For Hodgson, Miner and Espenschade, the Clyde Street relationship was primarily historical and source-led. Keith encountered their work across publications and archives long after the studies themselves.

Celia Brackenridge was different.

In Celia, Keith wrote that he had known Celia since 1980. He remembered observing her in a practice match at St Mary’s College and discussing real-time observation with her, including the value of qualitative as well as quantitative performance tracking. Decades later he wrote that the conversation had stayed with him.

He also explicitly described Celia as “one of the godmothers of notational and performance analysis”. Her BRACstat system, her work with notation and early microcomputers, and her role in 1980s match-analysis conversations gave the word a much more direct professional and relational meaning than it had for the 1930s researchers.

Even here, ownership needs care.

Celia owned Celia’s notation, coaching and research. Keith owned his memory of their conversations and his judgement about what her work meant in the history he was constructing.

He also made one boundary unusually visible. He speculated that Celia’s love of music, the cello and movement education may have helped shape her feel for notation, while explicitly acknowledging that they had never discussed that interpretation.

A long relationship gave Keith evidence that an archive alone could not give him. It did not give him permission to turn speculation into Celia’s explanation of her own work.

From hidden history to public custody

By April 2016, in Gender Divided, Keith had begun placing the historical problem beside a contemporary one.

Jocelyn Mara was about to receive her PhD for research on elite female soccer players. Keith had also been looking at performance-analysis and sports-analytics gatherings that appeared overwhelmingly male, reading work about the scarcity of data on women’s sport, and exploring newly shared material from Celia’s archive.

He described Celia’s material as part of the hidden history of performance analysis.

The two questions now sat beside one another: who appeared in the profession, and who appeared in its remembered past?

Keith wondered about creating a formal network for women working in analysis and analytics. That remained an aspiration in the post, not evidence that such a network was built or changed the profession.

The archive itself, however, continued to acquire public form.

In ChangeMakers: Celia, Anita and Friends, Keith described a July 2017 gathering around Celia’s life and work, hosted by the Anita White Foundation, the University of Chichester and English Lacrosse. A website had been created to aggregate, curate and share her material. Lombe Mwambwa, Lucy Piggott, Elizabeth Pike, Anita White, Diana Woodward and others carried distinct parts of that work and its public telling.

This matters to the godmothers trail because it shows that historical visibility is not produced by one writer finding a name. It depends on people and institutions doing the slower work of preservation, description, curation and public access.

Keith was one participant in that process, not its owner.

After Celia’s death in 2018, he returned to her notational work in much greater methodological detail.

In Celia Brackenridge’s notational analysis journey, Keith reconstructed BRACstat from Celia’s own retrospective account: the hand-held dictaphone, the symbols, the seven or eight pages required to notate a lacrosse match, the extraction of passing and shooting patterns, and its use in coaching. He also traced its relation to John Alderson, Anita White and the 1984 pre-Olympic Scientific Congress.

Again, the layers of the account are different. Celia owned the method and her retrospective description of it. Keith owned his later judgement that her work was a vital contribution to notational analysis. His suggestion that it modelled disciplined inquiry for later female analysts was an evaluative historical claim, not evidence that a direct line of influence had been demonstrated.

The map kept acquiring people

The wider Clyde Street corpus makes the same problem visible beyond the women Keith explicitly called godmothers.

In April 2018, Ben Mayhew’s visualisation work led Keith to Jenny Cann and the visual league tables she had published online from the late 1990s. Keith found it difficult to recover much biographical information. A web archive preserved traces of The Clock End; a possible later identification remained explicitly conditional: “If this is Jenny”.

In Netball observation and analysis connections: Sheffield City Polytechnic, Keith used a meeting with Nicky Fuller after Celia’s memorial to recover Fuller’s 1992 MPhil on computerised netball analysis, its use of a BBC microcomputer and modified keyboard, and its place in the Sheffield game-analysis group.

Neither post proves a simple lineage of women analysts leading one to another.

They do something more useful for this history. They show how easily a contribution can become difficult to locate once the person, platform, institution or paper slips out of routine professional memory — and how recovery can remain provisional even after a trace has been found.

From recovering the past to leaving provenance

In February 2020, Keith returned to the problem from another direction in Grandmothers and Godmothers in analysis and analytics.

Namita Nandakumar had announced a career change in a public tweet. Around the same time, Keith encountered Anastasia Miari and Iska Lupton’s Grand Dishes project, which used cooking with grandmothers to preserve recipes and the life stories that travelled with them.

Keith did not treat a cookbook project as evidence about analytics history. He used the juxtaposition to ask a preservation question.

How might analytics recognise women who had established practices before the present generation? How might it notice women transforming current practice? How might career changes and public traces be gathered so that future readers had something more durable to work with?

He described the possibility of building “a record of our provenance”.

That wording changes the direction of the problem.

In 2015, Keith had been looking backwards into an archive and finding gaps.

By 2020, he was also asking what people in the present might leave behind.

A history that knows it is incomplete

There is a tempting way to tidy this trail.

It would say that Keith recovered the forgotten women who founded performance analysis and restored them to their rightful place.

Clyde Street does not support that sentence.

Keith recovered important work. He widened the historical picture he had been building. He made methods and publications more visible. He revised his account when a previously inaccessible source became available. He admitted when he had overlooked a primary source. He connected historical recognition with contemporary questions of professional visibility and, later, with the problem of leaving provenance for the future.

He also kept encountering what he could not establish.

He could not find the earlier primary sources he had hoped to find in women’s hockey. Some original analytical artefacts could not be located. Citation did not establish personal connection. His direct relationship with Celia could not be projected onto women he knew only through their historical work. His interpretation of Celia’s musical influences remained explicitly speculative. Jenny Cann’s biographical identity remained uncertain. Historical and contemporary methods could be compared without being made equivalent. Greater visibility of women in analytics did not prove that gender equity had been achieved.

Nor does Clyde Street show that Keith’s recovery work changed the profession’s collective memory.

Those limits are not incidental to the story. They are the intellectual stakes of it.

The trail shows a history being made in contact with an uneven archive. Names appear. Sources disappear and reappear. Methods become visible. A living relationship can supply one kind of evidence; a paper or archive supplies another. Public institutions can preserve and curate work beyond Keith’s individual recovery. A later source can correct an earlier reconstruction.

And the women whose work Keith was trying to recognise remain the owners of that work.

Recognition is not possession.

Keith’s contribution here was not to turn a heterogeneous group of women into one lineage of influence. It was to keep widening the history he was willing to tell — and to leave the gaps visible when the sources still failed him.

Question to carry

Every professional field has an archive, even when nobody has designed one.

It is made from the papers that survived, the records somebody kept, the people who were cited, the websites that stayed online, the careers that left public traces, the memories living people can still correct — and the silences in between.

When that archive is uneven, what would it mean to make the missingness part of the history rather than silently writing around it?

Source and ownership note

The women, researchers, archivists and institutions named in this case retain ownership of their work, records and interpretations. Keith owns his acts of search, recovery, comparison, revision and public historical judgement. Archival absence is not treated as evidence of historical absence, and later source recovery does not turn the resulting map into a definitive origin story.