Multiple character stats

Hello, greetings, first time asking. Please forgive for the lack of ethics...

Me and my friends are making a game, a sort of 3rd person view fighting game. I'm the newb programmer, he's the artist.

So, since we will call our character models as game objects into the game, how should we assign the script for their statistics to each character? since the objects are called after the initialization of the arena, so i am not sure if i should put them in the arena, and then activating the unit after the game begins... it seems like working back and forth and consume unnecessary space.

And also, each unit will have their own movspeed value and collission size but similar basic control scheme, so do i make like different scripts for different characters? Raptor1spd.cpp Raptor2spd.cpp Mikestats.cpp and so on?