Words & Photos from Divyesh N. - Sports Analytics Cohort
In the Sports Analytics Cohort, we started off our day with a wonderful presentation from our very own, Mr. Aaron Takel. Mr. Takel was involved as an analyst with the Canadian national rugby team. He spoke to us about the program he used to record game data so that it could be pulled up after a game as points of discussion and improvement. My favourite part of the presentation was learning about SportsCode, a software that allows an analyst to record play-by-play information with video footage to match!
After the fascinating presentation, the team really got into our day with an analysis of the epic Monday Night Football matchup between the Los Angeles Rams and the Kansas City Chiefs. We looked into the statistics of the starting quarterbacks and calculated their NFL and NCAA ratings with some serious number-plugging on Excel Spreadsheet. After this intense, interesting session, we settled down and had lunch.
After lunch, the Sports Analytics crew was ready for the apex of the day. We were going to go to Golf Town! At Golf Town, we were divided into two groups. My group started out on the practice putting green. For the sake of gathering some statistics, we were each instructed to putt five balls from 3 ft, 6 ft, 9 ft, and 12 ft, respectively. This was many people’s favourite part of the day as we were able to get into some healthy competition with each other. After we settled a 3rd place tiebreaker between Liam, Theo, and Robson, we moved to the golf simulator. There, we got to practice our golf form and gather data. We all had some solid hits, but none of them were a match to Mr. Geddes’ swing that moved the ball over 250 yards! I feel that the trip to Golf Town served as a source of balance in our cohort as we could not call ourselves a sports cohort if all we did was talk about sports! In other words, we cannot collect sports data if people do not go out and create the data.
Overall, we had an exciting day with an eye-opening presentation on how the the Canadian national rugby team uses sports analytics, a review of football statistics with a record-breaking football game, and a trip to Golf Town. I not sure about everyone else, but I sure know that I am eager to see how our golf statistics compare to those of professional golfers during our next expedition.
