When the worldwide pandemic hit in March 2020, countless students found themselves battling with the uncertainty of the future. As in-person internships were no longer an option, some companies began to offer replacement virtual internships while others cancelled their programs altogether. Many students were left without internships and scrambling to find replacements.
Making the best of a discouraging situation, BYU IS Faculty Dr. Greg Anderson and Dr. Mark Keith created a new opportunity for students through a new sports analytics class. This graduate-level course allowed students to learn about sport analytics, participate in projects, and hear from big names in the industry during the spring semester.
Guest speakers to the class included professionals from the Denver Broncos, Utah Jazz, ESPN, Sacramento Kings, Colorado Rockies, Philadelphia Phillies, The Players’ Tribune, and more. Dr. Greg Anderson explained that the speakers “talked about the projects they do inside the sporting industry which I think helped some of our students understand what they could do and get excited about it.”
The class alternated between guest speakers’ presentations and time for students to work on projects they would present to their peers at the end of the term. Professors were available to discuss research ideas, help debug programs, and talk through certain pathways to explore. The purpose of these projects was to give students the confidence and skills to go and do other projects with real-world clients.
Dr. Anderson and Dr. Keith hired 10 of these students to continue as research assistants after the class ended to work with real-world clients. “This was the reason the class came about in the first place,” stated Dr. Keith. “Because of the pandemic, there were so many lost internships and students needed somewhere to go and something to do. These were our top students too. It’s not like they couldn’t get internships; the pandemic just randomly hit everybody.”
Dr. Greg Anderson proposed the idea to provide this opportunity to students and it was made possible through funding that the IS department had been saving to give back to students. Instead of the IS department faculty receiving royalties personally, when BYU Marriot students purchase MyEducator textbooks in IS classes, the money is saved to give back to students through employment as teaching and research assistants.
Dr. Keith stated, “We had been saving [this money] for something like this so as soon as the pandemic came up it was the perfect opportunity to give back. We looked at how much we had, put together a budget of how many RAs we could hire and then we created these positions specifically with that money. We gave our students something practical and useful that they could do to help them continue their growth and help them get better jobs.”
Below are some examples of current projects. These students meet once a week to give an update on their progress, with the aim of creating an academic paper for each project.
Esports: Eric Wurtzbacher and Jacob Metcalf have been researching esports. Although this is not the first thought people may have when thinking of sports analytics, these students have discovered that esports are rising rapidly in popularity. They have been looking at the relationship between diversity of a team (measured by country of origin) and that team’s performance in a tournament.
BYU Basketball: Chris Young and Christopher McLeod have been working on a project for BYU Basketball to predict the success of transfer players into the WCC. They have been collecting data from players on 353 teams to help BYU Basketball get transfers that are the best fit for the team.
BYU Football: Another team of students is working on a project for BYU Football, taking football game footage and dividing it into frames to identify where both teams are set. Then, they are automatically labeling the information and feeding it into a prediction model that will predict how many yards the team will gain on a certain play. This research can help BYU Football predict plays that will be the most productive.
Dr. Anderson explained, “Hopefully [this] is providing experience for our students whether or not they go into sports analytics. It is a good talking point [for] a job interview where they can say that they took a class and spoke with Paul Sabin at ESPN or Kiri Oler at the Philadelphia Phillies and then show the project that [they] worked on. The job might not be sports-related or even analytics-related, but any job where there is logic involved, this is going to be impressive to the person that is hiring and it is going to be something that helps them remember our students.” Dr. Anderson and Dr. Keith hope to continue this course in the future. They have continued to have meetings with the athletic department, BYU Football coach Kilani Sitake, and BYU Athletic Director Tom Holmoe who have seen the need for students to do these kinds of projects. They want to continue providing these opportunities to students.