I have been busy ever since I started working for the Seattle Sounders about a month ago. It has been great so far. We are less than a month away from the season kick-off. I am very excited, to say the least.

Coming up in a few weeks is the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. Last years conference had a profound impact on me. More about that in another post.

This weekend I participated in the 1st ever Sports Hackday in Seattle. The idea of learning something new, meet like-minded people and a chance to avoid the endless Superbowl pregame show were enough motivation to sign-up. The Hackday was very well-organized. Kudos to the organizers and sponsors. We started off Friday night with introductions and forming teams. Our team “Submarino” constituted of Sarah, Adam, Matt and I. We had a few ideas going into the Hackday. After a brief brainstorm we decided on looking at the impact of injuries to soccer clubs.

Sunday morning during the integration phase a few hours before the demo

One of the coolest things about Sports Hackday was  that data providers like Sports Data LLC and platform companies like Google, Cloudant, Twilio etc., provided tools that ensured that we spent most of our time implement our idea and not worry about basic infrastructure and plumbing.

We used the Sports Data LLC‘s API to extract the injury information of English Premier League and broke them down based on teams, types of injuries, # of games missed due to these injuries. We built a fully working model of our idea using real data. It helped that we had an awesome team and that we did a very good job of decoupling the Frontend UI pieces and the backend database work which enabled us to work almost parallely. We had our hairy moments during the integration phase with the clock winding down to Noon, Sunday (the deadline for code-complete). However we were able get done most of what we wanted to do.

We did this cool  interactive visualization illustrating the breakdown of injuries in a team by category and the players. The thickness of the arcs depict the # of games they missed due to a particular injury.

We had 3 minutes to demo and it went well, although all of us were a bit nervous and very tired. We won two prizes. “Best data visualization” and the “Best overall data hack of the Hackday”.

Here is a piece on the Sports Hackday on Geekwire.
Local TV King 5‘s coverage of the event

Frankly, I did not expect to win the overall prize. We ended the evening very happy and very very tired.

Visuals

Manchester United had the highest # of player-games missed due to injuries so far this season. The 2nd visual highlights that muscle injuries is a team-wide issues and not just Nani who missed the most time due to muscle injuries.

This poses a new question : Is there something in the training regimen of Manchester United that is causing this? 

PS: I couldnt get the interactive part working on the blog due to javascript issues, if I ever figure it out, I will update.