15  Maria Gharabaghi

I joined the Waterloo Warriors IST and was tasked with supporting the UW Varsity Swim team this season. As part of my responsibilities, I extracted and aggregated historical swim data across multiple events and provided real-time analysis during practices.

Projects

Top Swimmer Tracker

The University of Waterloo varsity teams compete in the Ontario University Athletics (OUA) association. For swimming, they follow standards set by World Aquatics, formerly known as FINA, which also has a points system for swims. In collaboration with the other members of the Swim IST, we used FINA scores as our primary metric for this project, as this grades the overall quality of the swim, allowing comparison between different strokes. We created a ranking system that combined each swimmer’s historical top 3 FINA average, their recent top 3 FINA average, as well as their attendance. The final rankings helped the coach make informed decisions about roster selection for the upcoming OUAs.

SwimRankings Scraper

Another project I worked on was web scraping the swimrankings.net site for all swim meets during the season. As advised by the coach, I organized the data in a spreadsheet, separating the data by gender and by stroke type to allow for clear communication. This approach allowed the coach to have a good idea of where Waterloo swimmer’s stack up in comparison to times set by athletes from competing universities. Ultimately, it helped the coach make informed decisions about the roster for OUAs.

Reflections

I enjoyed having the opportunity to work with my fellow team members and the swim coach. I am proud of the growth I made this season, getting more comfortable with communicating with athletes and coaching staff, to name one. In addition, I gained valuable experience with web scraping and Azure Functions. For next season, I would have liked to learn more about Azure Functions and to read more literature on how mathematical optimization methods can be applied in sports contexts. In particular, for swimming, I would have liked to do more research into swim medley selection.