Jeffrey Heath, Centre College – A Division III Sports Analytics Program

The Academic Minute

On Centre College Week: Data have made a big splash in sports recently.

Jeffrey Heath, David and Marlene Grissom Professor of Mathematics and Data Science, details why.

Jeffrey Heath is the David and Marlene Grissom Professor of Mathematics and Data Science at Centre College. His scholarly work focuses on sports analytics, and he leads the Centre Sports Analytics team, a collection of students who manage and analyze Centre athletic data to produce insights for the coaching staffs. He received the 2020 Distinguished Teaching Award from the Kentucky Section of the Mathematical Association of America.

A Division III Sports Analytics Program

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If you are a sports fan, you have likely noticed the increased use of the word “analytics” in the broadcasts of your favorite sports teams. It is not unusual to hear commentators and analysts say, “The numbers suggest that they should go for it on this 4^th down” in football, refer to the creation of “expected goals” in soccer, or comment on a player’s “plus-minus” in basketball. The analytics underlying these statements are derived from historical data using techniques from probability, statistics, and machine learning. Sports analytics can help coaches make data-driven decisions and offer them additional insight into game play that a traditional box score doesn’t provide.

In the spirit of “Moneyball”, the Centre Sports Analytics team began in 2021 by providing baseball pitch sequencing analysis to our baseball coaching staff. Since that time our team has expanded to include another faculty member and over two dozen students who write code that produce analytics and interactive dashboards for not only baseball, but also our football, volleyball, soccer, basketball, track and field, and lacrosse teams.

We have analyzed spatial data from our women’s soccer team to determine the zones where our players most effectively translate crosses to goals. In basketball we are processing play-by-play data to determine the most efficient combinations of lineups on both the offensive and defensive ends. And in football we developed an expected points model and a dashboard so that our coaches can easily discover the “expected points gained” when using various formations and play calls in different game situations.

The Centre Sports Analytics program has proven to be an excellent opportunity for our students to not only strengthen their programming and data visualization skills, but it has also emphasized the importance of communicating their analyses to provide clear and actionable insights.

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