MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference Demonstrates Influence of Statistics

 

Upper School Statistics teachers John Adams and Christine Fitzgerald were joined by juniors Jake Fischman ’18 and Andrew Sullivan ’18 at 11th annual conference on March 4. Jake and Andrew were inspired to learn more about sports analytics through the Sports Analytics Club, that they helped start last fall. Mr. Adams saw an opportunity to engage his students’ curiosity and hear from some of the leading voices in the sports and statistics industry right in Rivers’ backyard. He simply couldn’t turn it down.

 

“I was doing research on real-world applications I could work into my statistics class and the club and in my research I came across the MIT conference,” Mr. Adams said. “While at the conference, we tried to divide and conquer since there were five or six roundtable conversations happening at the same time, but we ended up gravitating to the same ones because there were some real heavy hitters there.”

 

Draft Kings, Fanatics, Nike, and ESPN represented major sports brands leading discussions, while individuals from successful sports franchises like the Golden State Warriors, Houston Rockets, and Dallas Mavericks spoke about how they use analytics and statistics to inform their player development and business decisions.

 

A newcomer to the MIT conference was Bobby Kotick, the CEO of video game and E-Sports giant Activision Blizzard, who spoke on a panel with Bob Bowman of Major League Baseball Business and Media, New England Patriots President Jonathan Kraft P’17, the CEO of Draft Kings, and Executive Editor of the Sports Business Journal about how they use statistics to improve a fan experience delivered almost entirely through internet streaming.

 

“Kotick was really interesting because he spoke about how E-Sports is learning best practices for how to run a league from the various other professional sports and described how their online platform benefits them, in terms of personalizing their in-game advertising because they are able to gather data about exactly who is watching,” Adams said. “We were able to hear from the business side as well as the team-building side, and then there were also several pro athletes who gave some insight on how they use analytics to improve their game.”

Ms. Fitzgerald was most impressed by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and ESPN's Nate Silver, founder of 538.com.

"It was fascinating to listen to Mark Cuban and Nate Silver talk about how forecasting in politics relates to sports forecasting and analytics," Ms. Fitzgerald said. "In both situations, we can do our best to predict possible outcomes, but we need to remain aware of the fact that there is always underlying uncertainty. These are the reasons why this industry is starting to attract the best and the brightest."

 

Moving forward, Mr. Adams would like to build upon existing statistics projects by incorporating ideas he found at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. One particular project would build on an existing one that charts the frequency and success of basketball shots in a “heat map,” but could instead be applied to volleyball, a sport that was new to Rivers in 2016.

 

The opportunity for older students to see how much statistics are affecting the games they love is valuable because it gives them another way to look at the application of statistics outside of the classroom. By engaging in conversations about marketing, athlete development, and fan experience, students can gain a whole new appreciation for numbers and see ways they can combine those numbers with their passion as they go on to college and beyond.