At Spring-Ford, a computerized assistant coach

As the public-address announcer informed a packed Spring-Ford gym of the home team's starting lineup Wednesday night, assistant coach Randy Doaty, seated at the scorer's table near the Spring-Ford bench, selected the button corresponding to each girl on his computer screen.

The icons for Brittany M., Courtney H., Sammy S., Mariah T., and Sarah P. turned red, the only color on an otherwise gray template. Beside the girls' names were 14 rectangular icons with labels such as Smart Pass, Tip/Deflection, Trap Assist, and Special 1 pt.

"Tonight's Special 1 is outstanding boxout," Doaty told spotter Lauryn Hart and software engineer David Bressler seated next to him. "In this game, we're really pushing rebounding."

On the first play of the Rams' Pioneer Athletic Conference title game against Methacton, forward Sarah Payonk ripped the ball away from a Warrior and shoveled it to guard Courtney Hinnant, who found Sammy Stipa under the basket for two points.

"Steal, Sarah; smart pass, Courtney," Doaty recited as he punched in the data. With that, the BIMPS program was up and running, and the Rams were on their way to the PAC-10 championship.

Doaty's copyrighted, 18-year-old Basketball Intensity Measurement Point System assigns value to the "momentum-generating events" players can perform in a basketball game, including rebounds, tie-ups, forced turnovers, and charges taken. It awards points for hustle and smart play, mainly on the defensive end, and detracts points for committed fouls and missed foul shots.

A complicated mathematical formula weighs the plays and churns out an overall "horsepower" number, indicated in the Team Intensity Index box in the top-left corner of Doaty's computer screen.

According to Doaty, teams need a horsepower between 140 and 150 to win consistently. The 22-2 Rams, who have won their games by an average margin of almost 29 points, typically reach horsepowers between 160 and 200.

BIMPS informs head coach Jeff Rinehimer of the intensity of each of his lineups and each player, allowing him to adjust his substitution patterns. At times, he still uses his gut, but the system has turned his team into a deep, well-oiled machine.

Doaty must have quick fingers and a sharp mind to keep up with Rinehimer's high-octane, in-your-face attack. He likens himself to a flight engineer relaying information to Rinehimer, his pilot.

"They watch that ball like a cat watches a mouse," Doaty said of the players' full-court press, which Phoenixville simulated in practice by playing 7-on-5 before losing by 38 in a Feb. 10 semifinal.

Guard Jaida Burgess received BIMPS points by tipping a ball out of bounds with less than a minute left in the first quarter. It was 25-0, Spring-Ford, and the press was still on.

"You don't practice for the Indy 500 by going 50 miles per hour," Doaty explained.

He might look like a mad scientist perched behind a technology hub straight out of Star Trek, but he is not strictly a number-crunching statistician. In fact, Doaty's official team title is "Focus and Attitude Coach."

He uses his system as a teaching tool for his broader curriculum, the mental side of the game: that you are only as good as your last two minutes, that each player has a "menu of opportunity" to contribute to the team, and that while skill varies, focus and attitude should persist.

"I didn't make you as good as you are and I won't make you better," Doaty tells the players after giving them a 10-page guide to BIMPS each year. "But I can help you access the athlete that you are."

The man behind Spring-Ford's curtain never touches a basketball, never played basketball, and doesn't particularly enjoy the game.

Instead, he savors the challenge of finding success through outside-the-box thinking. He created AMPS, Activity Management Point System, to enhance a real estate career that has lasted for 22 years, and founded Glass Tears Inc., which manufactures teardrop figurines used as sympathy gifts, in 2004.

Both Bressler and Rinehimer first knew Doaty as a Douglass Township police chief in the 1980s. When Rinehimer took the Spring-Ford job in 1995, he remembers Doaty, fresh off a summer of experimentation with the Boyertown girls' team, notifying Rinehimer's mother, "I think I have something for him."

"He drew up the process of what's playing hard," Rinehimer recalled. "It's an abstract thing. It's trying to turn the abstract into reality."

The vision first came to life on paper. Doaty painstakingly calculated the team's intensity by hand every two minutes, and didn't go over the results with Rinehimer until after the games.

After continual recalculation and the addition of Bressler, BIMPS became computerized in 2003. The ability to track games in real time unlocked an array of possibilities.

Now, the system reveals how each of the 250 possible lineups in Rinehimer's eight-player rotation performs - a group of five is recognized as a "squad" after 30 seconds of play. It assigns a green light to individuals performing at an adequate intensity level and a yellow light to those who are struggling.

"Am I in green?" Payonk asked Doaty after she posted a through-the-roof individual horsepower in the first quarter.

"You're in dark green," he told her.

After each game, Rinehimer receives a copy of "The Doaty Report," broken down into Playing Time Investment Analysis and comments/concerns.

Doaty said that the numbers this team, seeded third in the coming District 1 Class AAAA tournament, has produced compare favorably to those from 2005-08, when Spring-Ford last won three consecutive titles.

The Rams went 48-30 and failed to win a title from 2008-11, when Doaty spent two years testing BIMPS with the Alvernia College women's team and one year reconfiguring the formula.

"We're not thinking, 'We've got to get our BIMPS score up,' " Burgess explained. "We're thinking, 'We've got to get this tip. We've got to get this steal.' "

When the final buzzer of Wednesday's 62-33 win sounded, three players had yellow dots next to their names, compared to seven with green. The team finished with a 137 horsepower after a casual second half.

As the girls gathered at midcourt, dancing to Queen's "We Are The Champions," Doaty discussed with Bressler how the system ran on the iPad, part of BIMPS' latest upgrade. He unplugged his computer and packed his bag.

"My wife tells me I don't have a proportional level of excitement about wins," Doaty said. "I say, 'Honey, it's about the math!' "

Minutes later, Rinehimer found Doaty and brought him over to the ladder beneath the basket. Doaty climbed and cut a short line of netting, then walked back to the scorer's table.

"Another one," he said, placing the nylon inside his bag.