In sport, score is an indication of relative performance in a discipline. It is generally measured in points and can be raised or lowered by events in competition. Many team sports determine a winner by the number of points accrued during a game or match. Other sports determine a winner by the performance of an individual competitor, such as the golfer with the lowest score or the athlete with the highest jump in a field event.

In association football, hockey and soccer the scoring mechanism involves putting a ball in the opposing teams’ net. These sports have the most variety in how points are scored. Baseball has a more solitary scoring method in which the player runs around all four bases without being caught out by the opposing team.

Some sports have scoring based on duration, which is augmented by penalty time for various events in the competition. For example, in biathlon the duration of an event is augmented by the time taken to ski a penalty loop for missing a target in the shooting portion of the competition. The duration of a sporting event may also be modified by adding or subtracting elapsed time from an official’s measurement, such as in boxing or wrestling matches.

The total scores of athletes in a particular sport are an important measure of their competitive ability, but they are not easy to calculate and present correctly. An article published in the journal Strength and Conditioning in 2019 describes an innovative approach to calculating the total score of athleticism in high-performance sports, capturing it in a way that is meaningful and actionable.