The Warsaw Sports Business Club is thrilled to announce an increased focus on the growing medium of sports business analytics and the creation of a new subgroup, Warsaw Sports Analytics.

Formed by students with a primary goal to promote, accelerate, and evangelize data literacy broadly through sports analytics, members will interact with industry guests, lead and coordinate tutorials and training in relevant tools and mathematic concepts, and complete hands on activities in statistics, data science, and visualization. Success for the subgroup will be measured by its ability to increase the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center's competency and relevance in both business and player analytics, while providing members with opportunities to gain real-world experience that they can then apply to a career in the modern sports business industry.

Initial interest in the sports analytics subgroup has been overwhelmingly positive. Many students say they are initially drawn to player metrics or “money ball" analytics. Yet the majority of jobs in the industry are on the business analytics side—running ticket sales models and projections, optimizing marketing analytics, measuring business operation efficiency, and other applications.

The statistical concepts and the data science tools are similar in both business and player metrics applications, and students will get a mix of opportunities on both sides of sports analytics, as well as the nexus where player metrics and business analytics meet.

One intriguing tool for both player and sports business analysis is data visualization, and this spring the club will host a workshop on Tableau data visualization software. Plans are in the works for a number of additional events during the year ahead.