In the High Performance Centre (HPC) of Carleton’s athletics department, varsity athletes come to hone their craft and tune their bodies, often by lifting weights, doing exercises or going through physio treatment.
But deciding what athletes do to prepare for a game is increasingly being informed by data analytics in hopes of generating an increased likelihood of winning.
At the university, one man responsible for breaking down the numbers and turning them into success on the pitch for varsity teams is head strength and conditioning coach Nicolas Westcott.
“People are trying to do a better job of objectively looking at what is happening in sports so that you can get that edge on your opponents to be better [and] gain insight into different areas of the game,” said Westcott.
Wescott and other staff at the HPC try to bring a “holistic approach to athlete development”—an approach which now includes heaping amounts of data covering various performance statistics.
“We use tests or performance evaluations to evaluate each of the athletes on those key performance indicators,” said Wescott. These indicators vary depending on the sport.
“Then, given those tests, kind of can shape our programming in terms of how we’re trying to help them develop.
For Kwesi Loney, head coach of the men’s soccer team, the work that Westcott does with the athletes helps the team stay resilient on the pitch during matches.
“We want to make sure that we’re focusing on things like the tactical, the individual decisions, and not worrying about fitness, or the ability to turn quickly and accelerate your explosivity,” Loney said.
“What [Westcott] can allow us to do is really focus on and say, ‘Take out the fitness, take out the speed, and all the other physical attributes,’ and now we’re just focusing on [the] football side of things.
So they do a great job because they keep our athletes healthy, keep them fit.”However, convincing players that a deep dive into the numbers and extra training sessions would create better results during the game was a challenge when first introducing the HPC.
“A lot of athletes go to the gym, and it’s more just appearance, right? How I look as opposed to performance based. So they’re wrapping their heads around the performance base and understand that the things that they do in the gym will directly correlate … onto the field,” said Loney.
“But I mean, I think in the last three, four years, we’ve made massive steps [where] now all of our athletes are buying into it.”
Shirley Mills, a statistics professor at Carleton University and co-leader of the Carleton-Fields Centre for Quantitative Analysis and Modelling, explained how the advantages of having data from games and training sessions allows coaches to gain a greater perspective of the team’s performance and a player’s skills.
“Data is worth money now. I mean, everybody talks about the data as the new oil …we’re in the data age.” – Shirley Mills, statistics professor at Carleton University
“If you’re talking about from an advantage point, if you’re sitting in management, you want to know as much as possible.”
Breaking down the numbers and science behind an entire team or an individual athlete is used to analyze strengths and weaknesses, prepare teams for the future and, most importantly, generate a better chance at winning.
When looking at so many variables, sorting through heaps of information can be difficult, but data cleaning tools help clarify numbers and therefore generate quicker results for games.The importance, according to Michael Schuckers, a statistics professor at St. Lawrence University who focuses on sports analytics, is keeping the data comprehensible.
“Find[ing] methods of analyzing that data that will yield interesting and actionable conclusions and then finding ways to communicate the methodology and the conclusions to an audience that generally does not have sophisticated data analysis skills,” he said via email.
Compared to those previous years, where most analyses were done manually, the data analysts are able to comprehend and provide these data to audiences accompanied by the advanced technology and tools. This is another improvement that shows the sports industry is moving forward.
One of these tools is the “rule mining” algorithm which analyzes data for patterns. In sports, this means looking at an athlete and seeing what combination of variables makes them perform the best, and in turn, generating a better outcome for the team.
“From the world’s statistics, we have methods that can look into high-dimensional data and see patterns that we can’t … statistically, we can see any number of dimensions using mathematics,” explained Mills.
Luke Garcia, sport scientist for the Toronto FC, explains that using specific tools to help analyze the data and work on individual performance improvement is key for professional athletes. The strategic break down of a performance allows for further improvement to be at their very best and lowers the chance of getting injured.
For instance, Garcia uses GPS trackers and different wearable devices such as Catapult Sports, to keep track of the athletes’ daily performances on and off the field.
The devices also provide better insight to their health and conditions, and measures and collects information about the athletes’ deceleration, acceleration, speed, etc. Monitoring variables, such as injuries and stress levels, would be used to evaluate the players’ overall performances.
By using the same rule-mining algorithm, the coaches observe different patterns, discover more outcomes and possibilities, and understand the correlation and association between variables.
The Ravens soccer team recently started using a popular data analysis tool called InStat–also used in Major League Soccer—to help develop their game. Prior to this, the team only used handwritten notes and video review to break down performances.
“We’ve evolved from an analytical perspective,” said Loney.
“What happens is we film every game, we send it to InStat, and they break the whole thing down so we have it on a level where individual players will have the number of tackles, aerial duels, amount of possession … everything you can think about from a player’s perspective, we have it.”
Using such high level tools helps a player have multiple different perspectives on their performances and becomes “an efficiency perspective” for athletes to then take into the HPC when training.
“A player in the match itself doesn’t see right, doesn’t see the things you are able to see in the tape. And then from that point, you want them to be able to have the information they require at their fingertips,” said Loney.
“There’s no hiding from the numbers, and our players can see that and they can grow from that, and it sparks a lot of different dialogue which is great.”
Achieving higher stats and numbers is ideal, but seeing the result on the field, on the other hand, comes down to what an athlete is doing for the other hours of the day outside of training, in Westcott’s eyes.
“An athlete that is sleeping well, staying hydrated and doing all the little things outside of training is going to adapt a lot quicker generally, then someone whose lifestyle choices outside of training kind of don’t align with high performance.”
“But that’s part of our job … try to educate those athletes, especially student athletes who have a lot of other things going on, on how to mitigate and navigate the challenges of being a student athlete and make sure that their kind of lifestyle choices align with their goals from a performance standpoint.”
Feature image by Tim Austen.
