PORTLAND, OR — Witnesses at Friday night open mat at Pacific Crest Jiu-Jitsu described a “deeply uncomfortable” scene when two-stripe blue belt Derek Poole, 31, arrived carrying a clipboard, a mechanical pencil, and a laminated color-coded tracking sheet he described as “a performance analytics framework I developed over the last few months.”
Poole had reportedly spent the prior three weeks building a spreadsheet to log his rolling statistics, including submission attempts, successful sweeps, time spent in dominant positions, and a column labeled “PDQ” that several training partners confirmed stood for “Positional Dominance Quotient,” a metric Poole invented and has not fully defined.
“He wanted us to tell him when he passed our guard,” said purple belt Caitlin Okafor, 28. “So he could log it. In real time. He asked me to say ‘mark’ when it happened. I said no.”
Poole’s data collection efforts were complicated early in the session when visiting brown belt Thomas Park, who was unaware of the project, caught Poole mid-clipboard annotation and took him down directly onto the laminated sheet. The sheet did not survive. Poole’s nose, which was briefly between Park’s forearm and the mat, is also reportedly “a situation.”
“The data is compromised,” Poole said after the session, holding ice to his face. “I got maybe forty minutes of clean data before the incident. The submission attempt column is basically worthless now.”
Poole said he planned to return next Friday with a revised version of the framework that accounts for “data loss events” and a sturdier clipboard. He also confirmed he is considering a wearable option — a heart rate monitor and potentially a GoPro mounted to his headgear — to reduce the manual logging burden.
Head coach Jerome Bates said he has not reviewed Poole’s data but that he is open to it. “If the data says he needs to stop dropping his elbow on the bridge pass, I’m for it,” Bates said. “I’ve told him with words. Maybe numbers will work.”
Poole’s nose is probably not broken.
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