3  Eric Wei

Author

3rd Year
Economics
Men’s Volleyball (MVB)

This is my first year joining the MVB IST team and overall it has been a great experience. Coming into the season, I didn’t really have experience with data science or data engineering technologies/projects but I really wanted to join the IST because of my passion for volleyball. I can confidently say that learning more about sports analytics and being able to contribute directly towards the men’s volleyball team has been an enriching and rewarding opportunity and I look forward to seeing how the IST team and I personally grow next year.

Projects

RPE Dashboard (later “Athlete Monitoring Dashboard”)

The athletic therapist was interested in tracking many wellness metrics throughout the season including RPE (rate of perceived exhaustion) which resulted in the RPE Dashboard project. I designed and implemented the required metrics and threshold highlights into the dashboard shown below. For this project, the data would be collected through a google form submitted at the end of each practice. Other IST teams were simultaneously in the process of creating dashboards for other wellness related metrics so we later aggregated all the metrics into one dashboard for each varsity team. We migrated the survey process and old data from google forms to qualtrics surveys and the rest of the IST team set up automations to update the dashboard from github actions weekly.

Volleyball Statistics Dashboard (individual analysis + game flow tabs)

I took on the Volleyball Statistics Dashboard project over from Kyumin later in the season. I implemented two new tabs that allowed users to explore individual athlete analysis as well as to visualize game flow. The latter was created from desire to visualize the general shape of each game as well as 3+ point runs and the scenarios that they occurred in.

The individual analysis page further builds upon Kyumin’s game analysis tab by allowing for exploring of athlete-specific statistics. Because our data from perfbook is so much more granular than the publicly available data this tab can be used to determine context dependent statistics of each player (e.g setting stats for sets to “x” location in “x” rotation by “x” player) this can be directly used to help game strategy.

Both of these projects have lots of room to grow. Shayne (head coach) has expressed interest in many different ideas that can be achieved through adding features or continuing these two tabs (e.g directly making more conclusions rather than creating a medium for the user to explore and come to their own conclusions).

Other

Outside of the two main projects mentioned above I also helped the IST sports scientist with data collection for her serve speed project in person during practices. In addition to data collection I helped her determine the method in which we would collect the data and which metrics might be useful for future projects. Lastly, I also worked with Jacqueline Schwartz (athletic therapist) near the end of the season to supply her the data needed for her to write up end of year reports for the MVB and WHKY team.

Reflections

  • My team was very supportive and capable but most of my work was silo’d off and so I ended up doing a lot of decision making and working alone throughout the season. This was probably exacerbated by the fact that I was the only in-person member on my team the whole year. I probably could have and should have looped my team in as I worked throughout my projects more.

  • Piggybacking off the previous point, I found myself thinking about which features or design choices would be the highest leverage use of Shayne’s time and trying to distill a ton of possible ideas I was given into ones that I thought were worthwhile and not a waste of time. If the ist team had weekly or biweekly meetings with Shayne and I focused more on producing more prototype dashboards and minimum viable products for Shayne to see perhaps that would have been more effective. I definitely could have also improved on this just by looping my teammates in more as well though.

  • finding a reason to go in-person for practices halfway through the year (helping sports scientist with her work irl) really helped me stay more engaged with IST work and was something I should have focused on earlier in the year. I get that every sport and coach is different but if there was a more formalized process for how to get more involved with the coaches and practices that could have been helpful.

  • I had a few unfortunate incidents happen throughout the year that influenced my timeliness but overall could still improve a lot in terms of communication and time management.

  • Overall directly impacting the team with my projects has been super rewarding but I feel like I could have done much more this season both in workload and communication and am looking forward to next season especially as I grow more comfortable in the role.