Analytics Conference Delves Deep into the Data

Photo Credit: Great Lakes Analytics in Sports

The evolution of sports science in the last several years has spurred the creation not only of analytics departments within teams, but also at colleges and university programs across the country. This gradual, but radical, shift in the way we look at sports will likely test teams in new ways as they find new data and ways to implement it.

The Great Lakes Analytics Sports Conference, hosted by the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, gives us a peak into the new direction that analytics and data science may take sports.

Analytics has necessarily moved from teams bootstrapping Excel spreadsheets and small amounts of broad data to custom databases with enormous amounts of extremely specific data, managed by open-source programs like r and python.

This evolution shouldn’t undercut an important point; teams have been employing forms of “analytics” for decades. When Gil Brandt helped revolutionize the Dallas Cowboys’ front office through using workout data, he was using data to inform decisions.

Not only that, more subjective data can be subjected to rigorous data analysis—scouts that give quarterbacks a number for accuracy, arm strength, size, throwing mechanics and so on, and front offices will distill those subjective numerical judgments into an overall value that they order and put on a draft board.

At the same time, quality control coaches for NFL teams will chart formation, personnel, down and distance for teams, and craft coaching tips, gameplans and strategies based off of that information. That, too, is data analysis.

The Great Lakes Analytics in Sports Conference is an attempt to advance the movement of analytics in sports not just through sharing data and insights, but by inspiring a new wave of excited students who might advance sports data even further.

Scott Tappa, the organizer of the event, spoke about the insights that drove him into holding the conference.

“I get to go to a lot of student symposia,” he told me. “We were down at one in Madison last year, and we had several student research posters that were from the athletic training department. They were on things like data-driven studies on the peril of sports specialization. They reminded me a lot of a story I just read about a biology professor who had done a project with a student on genetics and what they had done was they had tested the genes of our sprinters and distance runners here on campus.

“And then we have the center for athletic scheduling here, which is students using advanced math and they schedule legitimate Division III football and basketball games. You start making these connections that we’re doing a lot of things here that would probably fall under the larger umbrella of sports analytics.”

At the same time, a local need was cropping up for graduates in the field of analytics with the expansion of local industries reliant on data insights, like agriculture and insurance. When Tappa was putting the event together, there wasn’t much local representation in the field of sports analytics.

“I looked around,” he said, “and at that point there hadn’t been anything done in the Midwest – there’s [MIT] Sloan, everybody knew about that, and there had been one in South Carolina at Furman University and from talking to those guys, I learned that there was one at Central College in Pella, Iowa last November that launched. I visited that and they did a nice job and we could do something very similar to that.”

Furman hosted the Carolinas Sports Analytics Meeting in 2016, but unfortunately did not have the capability to host one in 2017. In November, we’ll get to see the second annual meeting of the Midwest Sports Analytics Meeting in Iowa.

Tappa is confident that Wisconsin-Stevens Point will host more conferences on the subject. “This went well enough that I think we’re encouraged to do another,” he said. “I see it from a lot of perspectives. It’s good for our existing students, it’s good for our faculty, it’s good for our athletic programs. Our football defensive coordinator is in there right now trying to figure out how we can have our students to research that benefits our football team.”

He also has a personal investment in hosting more conferences.

“I just like this stuff; I’m the guy who would have my sons do shot charts of their basketball games for a science fair project or we chart every play of their peewee football season last year and did projects based on that. Very simple stuff, but stuff to help them engage in math and science to kind of trick them into liking that through what they really like, which is sports.

“Personally, I want my kids to not just forget about math and science as they get older like I did. No regrets or anything like that but they’re good at it and yet they don’t enjoy it. I think this could help them stick with it.”

The conference had a broad focus that should appeal to anyone interested in data science, across a number of sports. They hosted talks to introduce beginners, like ”Sports Analytics 101” by Rocco Perraco, an Assistant Professor of Sports Management at Newbury College to nitty-gritty stuff like the University of Pittsburgh’s Konstantinos Pelechrinis’ talk, “Sports and Fractals.”

Not only that, there was a variety of sports and subject matters covered by the talks. Discussions on football, baseball and basketball are par for the course, but there were also talks on hockey, soccer, lacrosse, marathon running and even a scheduled talk on e-sports.

The discussants made sure to cover not just ways teams can use data science to improve game outcomes, but how teams can improve the business side of their operations, how analysts need to formulate their communication strategies, the best ways to deploy analytics to avoid injury, how one should schedule a season, what fantasy players can do to maximize their wins and what data in sports psychology can tell us about players.

Participants could attend talks headlined by personnel from professional sports teams, academics in the field, third-party consultants, students with insights in the field and journalists covering the integration of analytics and sports.

This week, we’ll cover some of the insights gained from the conference and see what the future holds for analytics in sports coverage.

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