Data isn’t just important in the corporate world; it’s a tried-and-true element of professional sports, boasting the power to enhance player performance, protect athletes from injuries, increase fan engagement, and ensure well-informed decisions. Sports organizations have been front and center of the data collection sphere for years, thanks to its transformative ability.
Mike Golub explains that as technology advances, sports analytics will undoubtably increase its impact on teams and events, helping more coaches and their players increase their chances of winning when it matters most.
Boosting Athlete Performance Through Data-Driven Insights
Data analytics help athletes enhance and manage their performance. By wearing trackers and placing sensors/cameras around the field, teams can easily see improvement areas and coaches can craft regimes that target these points.
Whether shooting precision, speed, marking, or something else, teams (and individual players) can realize their maximum potential by focusing on their weakest skills. Sports analytics brings these ever-enhancing performances in the short and long term.
Protecting Players from Injuries
Perhaps the most sought-after information in sports is when conditions can heighten injury risks — and data can give teams and players exactly that.
From the team’s perspective, injuries have a financial impact on revenue due to recovery, sponsorships, medical expenses, ticket sales, and losing early-stage competitions. So, injury predictions are more of a money-saving mechanism.
For players, however, this information can extend their careers, increase their valuation, and boost earnings. On the surface, it’s also a money-saver, but it can have a profound impact on their mental health and, of course, on their physical health.
Effective injury prediction requires measuring the balance of exertion and strain with recovery, sleep, and nutrition. Teams often use logistic regression models supported by binomial distribution to help determine players’ reactions to certain training stimulus and figure out injury likelihood.
Depending on the budget, teams also obtain neuromuscular data through motion analysis software and force platforms. It shows how every play uses their muscles, any weak points, speed, and reaction time.
Posture analysis falls into this category too, giving coaches otherwise-untapped access to how athlete posture can impact players’ injury risks. Deep learning algorithms like CNNs can be constructed to understand any deviation in posture and technique, too.
Ensuring Smart, Well-Informed Decisions
he positive impact of data-driven decisions can be seen across all injuries, but particularly in sports. The right data and interpretation ensures training schedules, player registration, and game plans are created with the highest probability of winning.
Whether personal player stats or team numbers, coaches and managers can use a plethora of insights (particularly their competitors’ weak spots) to give themselves a competitive advantage.
Sky-Rocketing Fan Engagement
By accessing fan information, teams can retain fans’ enthusiasm and even increase their following.
As industry participants mention, retaining season ticket holders is much easier and cheaper than getting new ones, so they use sports analytics to predict churn. Such models use logistic regression to identify the specific holders who’re likely to churn. With this information, managers can implement strategies to increase engagement, like promotions and campaigns, limiting the chances of churning.