Thoughts About Player Location Metrics
A presentation to college sports analytics students
This week, I had a chance to present to a sports analytics class at the University of Colorado. I have worked with the professor of the course in the past, which led to this opportunity. He asked me to talk about player location metrics. I could have spent my time telling complaining to the students about how far behind volleyball is compared to football and other sports. Instead, I chose to talk about a lot more than just metrics. I titled the presentation
(Things to Think About Before, During, and After You Think About)
Player Location Metrics
I thought I’d share it here for those that are thinking about location data. A few notes about the talk…
The 50/50/50 club in the first plot (slide 4) is an idea that originated with Andrew Clark. The 50s are percentages: kill percentage, good pass percentage, and serving knockout percentage. A player joins the club by having greater than 50% in each of those metrics in a single match. Think of it kind of like a triple-double, but harder to do. Only 8 LOVB players have 50/50/50 matches this season.
The “Multiplicative Idiocy” drawing (slide 21) is from The Oatmeal. While I think the comic puts it rather harshly, I really like the main point, that combining ideas is multiplicative rather than additive. I see it constantly in brainstorming meetings, people trying to marry ideas together and ending up with a result that is less than the original separate ideas. I think it’s important to consider that not all ideas should end up together. Sometimes, some ideas should lose.
If you don’t remember it, the weight room controversy (slides 23 & 24) was a very public display of a systemic issue that can affect how support staff can be affected along with teams. Factors outside your control can severely hamper what’s possible.
As I mentioned, I love Sankey diagrams (slide 27). Visually, they can be amazing. I think there’s so much in sport that works well with flowing visuals.
Here’s a link to the slides: Google Slides link
Here’s the video: