9781422285237 - Analytics: Sports Stats & More

into various categories. Amazingly, ShotLink features 58 stats for tee shots alone. Someone has to gather that data, analyze it, and prepare reports. Experts travel with the tour, which goes to a different place each weekend for nearly 10 months. In fact, pro golf is played somewhere around the world year-round. There are no off-season breaks for golf stat analysts. Major League Soccer (MLS) has also joined the analytics world. Seattle Sounders head fitness coach Dave Tenney explained his situation to Grantland.com. “As time has gone on, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of it, but the sports science pretty much consisted of me, my laptop, an Excel spreadsheet, and an external hard drive. Now, we have match analysis data and more in-match data as well. It reached a point where we are getting more data, and we have more questions. We have outgrown the system we had in place because of the amount of data that we are collecting on a daily and weekly basis.” Tenney hired Ravi Ramineni, a former Microsoft engineer, to help sort through all the data on another level. “Where I step in is to help the coaching staff mix and sort this data so they can use it in their decision making,” Ramineni says. “The data has been collected, but coaches need it in a way where they can visualize it better or have the statistical analysis done.”

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R ealities of the W orkplace