1  Lillian Mo

Projects

Second Ball Offense

The first project I worked on was second ball offense. Richard Eddy, our head coach, wanted to know how efficient our team was on the second ball (or first transition opportunity) to see if he needed to direct his training towards different priorities. I cleaned the data and was able to filter for just second ball offense. I provided this data both for our team and the opposing team, but Richard, David, and I noticed that we simply weren’t getting many second ball opportunities - we either won or lost the point on the first offensive opportunity. While it was disappointing to find out that my project probably did not have as many applications as I thought, at the same time, I was happy that we were able to draw conclusions, even if they were not the ones we expected.

Serve Run Analysis

The biggest project I worked on this term was a serve run analysis. Serving refers to the beginning of a point, when one team puts the ball into play. Sometimes, the coach will want to put in another player to serve if they think they will have a better serve: this is called a serving sub. Our challenge was to formalize when it was advantageous to put in a serving sub, as well as which players would be best to be subbed in for, or subbed out for. Although I ran into some erroneous or poorly labeled data, with David’s help, we were able to clean it up and separate out the serves based on their position in a run, simply by filtering out every single serve, and doing our calculations based on that. This project taught me that sometimes the best solution is the simple one.

DRP

Along with fellow UWAGGS members Maria and Victoria, under the tutelage of David, prepared a presentation of our work as part of Women in Mathematics’ Directed Reading Program. We did a short literature review on articles about coorperation between statisticians and other experts, and presented the projects that we worked on as part of IST.

Reflections

I had a great time working with the staff and also with my fellow IST members Austin and Bennie. I felt like I learned a lot about working in a sports team, as well as collaboration with people from different fields in general. Furthermore, I developed patience and creativity when it came to working with data; I realized that data in real life is very different from the idealized datasets you may see in your classroom, which forced me to think outside of the box. Looking back on my time with IST, I am proud of the projects that I completed but would like to have done even more, as well as added more statistical rigor to the projects that I did complete. There are a lot of ideas we discussed that I didn’t get to execute on, and I would love to see these ideas realized next season.