A practice field contains efforts that the official season will never count.

Most of the effort happens where nothing is counted. The hours on a practice field never appear in a record, and they are the great majority of the work and the place where almost all the improvement occurs. What gets measured is the thin visible layer on top of a much larger uncounted one.

So be careful about deriving your sense of progress from what is officially recorded. Keep some private account of the uncounted work, because otherwise long stretches of real development will feel like nothing happened. And when you assess other people, remember you are usually seeing only their season and none of their field.