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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