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Allison Kothari
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Allison Kothari is a rising senior at the University of Michigan, where she is pursuing a degree in Statistics and also competes on the women's lacrosse team. Kothari first became interested in data analytics in sports after her freshman year, when she tore her ACL and began to learn about wearable technologies and their efforts in injury prevention. Since then, she has taken more statistics classes, which have shown many other applications of statistical analysis in sports, and she is now applying those to tennis. Kothari is working with Player Development this summer as a data analytics fellow and is sharing her experiences in a blog she is writing. Here is her first entry.
By Allison Kothari
My first few weeks as the data analytics fellow at USTA have been great. While Dave was working at Wimbledon, I learned a lot about the coaching philosophy, which is way more in depth than I would have thought. Although all coaches have their own styles, the general philosophy is constant throughout the USTA.
We had meetings with each department (nutrition, strength and conditioning, athletic training and sports psychology), which were all very insightful. Dave also left me with some resources to get familiar with the basics of sports analytics that gave a great overview.
Since Dave’s return, I’ve been working with him in the lab on a number of projects. I’ve spent a lot of my time in the last week working on a project that uses artificial intelligence to tag matches. Specifically, I learned how to attach data to match video using Dartfish. After that, I went through the data looking for mistakes that could possibly expose bugs in the technology. This has been an insightful project because I now have a great understanding of the impact AI will soon have in sports analytics.
I have been introduced to the processes of using Dartfish and Hawkeye to make in-depth scouting reports for players and their coaches, which play a large role in developing game plans. I’m excited to learn more!
Alli