5  Shamar Phillips

This is my second year in the IST program, and it has been a great experience so far. I joined because David is the goat, and I was really impressed with his initial work with the Women’s Volleyball team. Once I heard he was looking to build this out with more teams and students, I took up the opportunity.

Projects

perfbook Scraper

The first project I worked on this term was improving and extending the existing perfbook scraper. This powered the men’s and women’s volleyball dashboard, which was used for scouting. I updated the actions script to output the data following the medallion architecture. This reduced the dashboard’s load time, since it no longer needs to pull the full dataset, only what’s required. The scraper runs on actions after every match week, so stats are updated by the following Monday.

Usportsmuse

This is a side project that Rithika Silva and I built using the usports data that Pierre has been maintaining. It uses AI agents to interact with usports data and lets users explore the data through natural language. The goal was to kick-start the data investigation stage and reduce the toil of getting started with the package.

Horus (KIN472 project)

My final project for KIN472 was a dashboard containing the data of all athletes who are interested in joining the Men’s Volleyball program. The goal was to reduce the number of emails sent to Shanye and centralize all of the data so that it isn’t scattered across various sources. The app also lets coaches write notes on athletes, keeping any thoughts in one place. On top of that, the dashboard accepts uploads of movements such as squats and lunges, letting us evaluate an athlete’s physical abilities without requiring them to visit the school.

Reflections

Overall, I’m very happy with my time as a data solutions IST member; we have laid a lot of foundation and can begin doing even more great work!