Jun Yan

The third UConn Sports Analytics Symposium (UCSAS) was held virtually on October 9, 2021. Among the 300+ registrants, more than two-thirds were graduate, undergraduate, or pre-college students and about one-third registered through our international hubs.

The program featured the following keynote presentations:

• Eric Tulsky, Assistant General Manager, Carolina Hurricanes, “No Stone Unturned: Leveraging Public Domain Analysis”
• Justin Jacobs, Principal Research Statistician, Sandia National Laboratories, “A Square-Integrable Methodology into Play Registration for NBA Tracking Data”
• Sarah Bailey, Manager of Analytics and Data, Los Angeles Rams, “Sports Science in NFL: An Overview of How Analytics and Performance Can Work Together”

All keynote speakers answered questions from the audience.

A panel discussion on careers in sports analytics featured four female sports analysts. The discussion was moderated by Alison Lukan, Seattle Kraken contributor and television analyst for Root Sports. The three panelists were Jessica Hensley, data analyst for the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee; Kelsey Roberts, database/basketball analyst for the New York Knicks; and Sara Ziegler, sports editor for FiveThirtyEight.

The virtual poster session included 15 posters, 12 of which were presented by students. Each presenter had a virtual room for viewers to drop by. Also, each poster was uploaded onto Twitter several days before the event.

A poster award committee led by Jeremy Abramson of the University of Southern California judged the student posters, and the Student Poster Award went to Quang Nguyen of Loyola University Chicago for his poster, “Concerns Regarding Sport Climbing Competition Format and Scoring System: Who’s Suffering?”

The following six training workshops were each 50 minutes and well attended:

1. Introduction to R by Tuhin Sheikh
2. Introduction to Python by Surya Eada
3. Hockey Analytics with R by Meghan Hall
4. Basketball Analytics with R by Jackson Lautier
5. Web Scraping for Sports Data by Lucas Godoy
6. TensorFlow with Applications in Sports Analytics by Jun Jin

The workshops on hockey analytics and TensorFlow are new additions to the archived workshops.

The symposium was supported by the UConn and sports analytics communities. Welcoming remarks were delivered by Andrew Agwunobi, UConn interim president; Paul Caddy, UConn head coach of field hockey; and Seth Partnow, special adviser to the CEO at StatsBomb.

The organizing committee consisted of Alison Lukan, Brian MacDonald, Greg Matthews, Lauren Poe, and Jun Yan.

The event was hosted by the UConn Statistical Data Science Lab, and sponsors included the ASA New York City Chapter, CluBear China, UConn Data Science Lab, UConn Department of Statistics, and UConn Sports Management Program.

View recordings of all sessions (except the workshop on web scraping).