Reporting hip range to the nearest degree is false precision

Handheld measurement of joint angle carries several degrees of disagreement, which is larger than most reported changes.

The form says 42 degrees. It has a box for one decimal place, and somebody has used it.

Here is what produced that figure. A clinician positioned a limb by feel, decided when the end range had been reached by feel, aligned a plastic arm with a bony landmark located by feel, and read a scale. Every one of those steps carries a few degrees of slop. Repeat it with a second clinician and you will commonly find differences of five degrees or more on the same joint in the same minute. Repeat it with the same clinician an hour later and you do better, but not by as much as anyone would like.

Against that, look at what the screening is trying to detect. A four-degree loss of internal rotation since preseason. A three-degree side-to-side difference. These sit comfortably inside the measurement error, which means the paperwork is recording a difference between two clinicians, or between one clinician on Monday and the same clinician on Friday after twenty-eight assessments, and calling it a change in the athlete.

The decimal point is not a harmless flourish either. Precision in print reads as confidence. Write 42, and a reader treats it as roughly forty. Write 42.5, and the same reader believes the true value is somewhere near 42.5, which nobody has any grounds to believe. The formatting of the number has changed what people think the data can support, and no method note anywhere in the file corrects that impression.

What I would keep is the direction and the size of the gap when it is big. A twenty-degree asymmetry is real, and you do not need a protractor to see it. Bands would serve better than numbers: clearly restricted, borderline, fine. Ugly on a dashboard. Honest about the instrument.

And if you must keep degrees, keep the assessor's name in the record and never compare across assessors without checking them against each other first. Two clinicians in the same room measuring the same ten hips is an hour's work, and it will tell you whether your season-long trend belongs to the athletes or to a change in staff.

Most squads have never run that hour. The trend goes in the report anyway.