Yale Professor to Lead Session at Sports Statistics Symposium at Harvard Later This Month

With the demand for data, analytical tools, and a competitive edge on the rise in professional and collegiate sports, the 2023 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports will feature new findings, applications, and insight into player performance and team success. The event takes place Saturday, September 23 at the Harvard University Science Center, Cambridge, MA.

It will be a meeting of statisticians, statistical researchers, and quantitative analysts connected with sports teams, sports media, and universities to discuss common problems of interest in statistical modeling and analysis of sports data.

The symposium format will be a mixture of invited talks, a poster session, and a panel discussion. The symposium will be held at Harvard University in Cambridge.  

Registration is now open and closes on September 9.  Same day on-site registration is not available.  The focus of the day will include the following: Advances in American Football, Explorations in Soccer, Individual Performance in Team Sports, and Novel Applications in Sports Analytics. 

“Players, coaches, and management know that better data can result in more precise insights, which then help them understand the ingredients that lead to greater probability of success,” said Mark Glickman, Sports Analytics Laboratory director and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Statistics at Harvard University. “Sports analytics has become an advanced science. This year’s event will add to the body of knowledge, providing statisticians, data analysts, sports teams, and sports media with new analytic approaches and perspective from experts who have thought deeply about the problems they will be addressing.”

The symposium will include a panel discussion, "Successful Outreach in Sports Analytics,” which will be moderated by Yale University’s Brian Macdonald, currently a Senior Lecturer and Research Scientist in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Yale University.

He was previously Special Faculty in Sports Analytics in the Department of Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University, the Director of Sports Analytics in the Stats & Information Group at ESPN, Director of Hockey Analytics with the Florida Panthers Hockey Club, an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at West Point, and an Adjunct Professor at University of Miami and Florida Atlantic University.

Panelists for the session will include:

• Michael Schuckers - St. Lawrence University, co-PI of the NSF-funded SCORE network

• Mike Lopez - National Football League, Big Data Bowl competition and Big Data Bowl mentorship program

• Tegan Bunsu Ashby - Philadelphia Phillies, Women in Sports Data

• Lawrence Clark - University of Maryland, PI on NSF-funded Maryland Sports Data Analytics Camps for Youth

The featured speaker will be Jim Albert, Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University, whose talk will be on the "Contributions of Carl Morris in Sports Analytics."

Research being presented spans football, baseball, basketball, soccer, hockey, volleyball, and track and field.  Symposium organizers note that students are encouraged to submit abstracts; a prize will be awarded to the best student poster as decided by a panel of judges.   

Presentations during the annual symposium are also scheduled to include sessions from practitioners from across the U.S. and international locations, including Austria, Canada, United Kingdom:

·         "A Weighted Curve Clustering Approach for Analyzing Pass Rush Routes in American Football" - Robert Bajons, Institute for Statistics and Mathematics, Vienna University of Economics and Business; Kurt Hornik, Institute for Statistics and Mathematics, Vienna University of Economics and Business

·         "Improving Medal Projections in Olympic Best Mark Sports" - Suraj Bhuva, United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee; Dan Webb, United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee

·         "Analytics, have some humility: a statistical view of fourth down decision making" - Ryan Brill and Abraham Wyner, University of Pennsylvania

·         "When Data Meets Reality: Augmenting Sports Videos with Visualizations" - Zhutian Chen, Harvard University; Qisen Yang Zhejiang University; Jiarui Shan, UC Berkeley; Tica Lin, Harvard University Johanna Beyer, Harvard University Haijun Xia, UC San Diego Hanspeter Pfister, Harvard University

·         "Contextualized Generative Ghosting Model as Benchmark for Evaluating Player Movement in Football" - Chaoyi Gu, Loughborough University, UK; Varuna De Silva, Loughborough University, UK; Mike Caine, Warwick University, UK; Ben Smith, Breakaway Data, UK

·         "How much does Home Field Advantage matter in Soccer Games? " - Guanyu Hu, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO

·         "A Bayesian two-stage framework for lineup independent assessment of individual rebounding in the NBA" - Nicholas Kiriazis, McGill University, Montreal, QC; Christian Genest, McGill University, Montreal, QC; Alexandre Leblanc, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB

·         "Estimating Knee Movement Patterns of Recreational Runners Across Training Sessions Using Multilevel Functional Regression Models" - Marcos Matabuena, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela; Marta Karas, Harvard University; Sherveen Riaazati, Nortumbria University; Nick Caplan, Nortumbria University; Philip Hayes, Nortumbria University

·         "Here Comes the STRAIN: Analyzing Defensive Pass Rush in American Football with Player Tracking Data" - Quang Nguyen, Carnegie Mellon University; Ronald Yurko, Carnegie Mellon University; Gregory J. Matthews, Loyola University Chicago

·         "Yellow fever: investigating referee consistency in the 'Big 5' men's European football leagues" - Pete Philipson, Newcastle University, UK

·         "Estimating individual contributions to team success in women's college volleyball" - Scott Powers, Rice University, Houston, TX; Luke Stancil, Rice University, Houston, TX; Naomi Consiglio, Rice University, Houston, TX

·         "Aiming for Competitive Balance: Developing Fair Handicap Systems for Darts using a Markov Decision Process" - Rachael Walker, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON; Craig Fernandes, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON; Timothy C.Y. Chan, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON

·         "Evaluating plate discipline in Major League Baseball with Bayesian Additive Regression Trees" - Ryan Yee, University of Wisconsin--Madison, Madison, WI; Sameer Deshpande, University of Wisconsin--Madison, Madison, WI

The conference will finish with a panel discussion on successful outreach in sports analytics. According to Mark Glickman, “There is a growing need for better outreach and inclusivity within the field, particularly towards women and under-represented minorities. By conducting targeted outreach, the field of sports analytics can become more representative and innovative, creating opportunities for those who may benefit from increased access to education and career pathways.”

The 2023 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports is sponsored by Big League Advantage, StatsBomb, and the Harvard Statistics Department.