Fairfax Co. high schoolers use sports to teach students data analytics tools

Students with the Youth Sports Analytics Forum at Chantilly High School in Fairfax County huddle around a laptop.(Courtesy Advaiit Iyer)

During their sophomore year at Chantilly High School in Fairfax County, Advaiit Iyer and Nitish Shah launched a sports analytics club.

They asked their Spanish teacher to be the sponsor, and suspected it would be a great opportunity to play fantasy sports together or just chat about sports trends with their peers. Analytics would come up too, and eventually, the conversation shifted to establishing a new mission.

The group wanted to teach others the tool they’d become familiar with, with the hope of helping underserved groups have more access to careers in the data sciences.

It’s a concept they focused on during the summer before their senior year, and it led them to establish the Youth Sports Analytics Forum.

“We’re just seeing right now, so much of the future technology is going to be based on these tools like artificial intelligence, machine learning,” Shah said. “But there’s so many groups in the United States and in the world, in general, that are underrepresented in these fields.”

The organization hosts free competitions with universities and university sports teams, with the goal of using team data to create models. The group’s first competition, through a partnership with New York University’s sports business club and men’s basketball team, encouraged participants to compile a two-page report on what statistics were used to predict the outcome of the five remaining games in the regular season.

During summer sessions at the University of Central Florida, meanwhile, the group discussed libraries that could be downloaded to help analyze data.

“We just give them a piece of data, and we just tell them, ‘You have full creativity to look at what stats you think will correlate to wins, what you think will correlate to losses, and just try to figure that out,'” Iyer said.

The next competition will be based on Duke University’s football season, with participants expected to be tasked with putting together a report on how the team can improve heading into next year.

The competitions are open to both high school and college kids, and “anyone that’s willing to open their mind to this, to learn a little more about these things,” Shah said. Some have gotten involved from other continents.

The competitions include looking at submitted code, running the code and learning about the insights the code had, Shah said. After participating, one student said the activity encouraged them to enroll in an Advanced Placement (AP) computer science course.

“Even if you don’t want to do computer science, data science in the future, it’s completely fine, but we want you to just at least try,” Iyer said.

More information about the group is available online.

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Scott Gelman

Scott Gelman is a digital editor and writer for WTOP. A South Florida native, Scott graduated from the University of Maryland in 2019. During his time in College Park, he worked for The Diamondback, the school’s student newspaper.

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