The SAS Global Forum is a premier event for SAS professionals that offers educational and networking opportunities. Not only does SAS help bring intelligence to everyday businesses, their technology helps sports organizations understand fans and players. We are in attendance covering the sports topics news coming from the event.
Dallas, TX. — Alan Schwarz, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter at The New York Times, gave the keynote speech the morning of the first day of sessions, and he touched on the concussion issue with football in youth sports. He published more than 100 articles that brought the concussion issue to light and transformed in to more serious actions and studies about concussions in all youth sports, especially with the rise of CTE. In fact, he credits his research as the start of concussion testing.
"50 states have implemented concussion testing in youth sports since our research" Alan Schwarz NYTimes #SASEC15 pic.twitter.com/RTy9QdysSM
— SportTechie (@SportTechie) April 27, 2015
Also, we learned that SAS software “Visual Analytics”, allows for mapping statistical data in a visual way and developing prediction metrics to determine outcomes. SAS Visual Analytics is powerful tool that can provide 50 different reporting options for the data. In a case study about College Football, SAS Visual Analytics was not only able to replicate the fields that are seen on popular sites like ESPN and Yahoo, it can also go a step further to show trends in the past data then model predictive outcomes in the future based on those trends.
Most teams and leagues use some analytics software to measure their players and their customer success. Understanding how to utilize predictive data effectively will be the next step towards ascending the curve.
In fact, the Orlando Magic VP of Business Strategy Anthony Perez, reiterated how using these tools to gain predictive models and acting on them is critical to their business. As seen in our interview with Anthony Perez last week, the Magic utilize SAS Analytics to personalize their fans experience throughout their digital channels. And they are among the top teams utilizing business intelligence effectively. But as Anthony states during the conference, “it is a process. It takes a lot of effort to continue to optimize and do digital right.”
One of the more interesting sports-related sessions had to deal with the median age for young baseball pitchers to have reconstructive elbow surgery. Research has been conducted by Fair Health National Private Insurance Claims (FH NPIC), on the rate of reconstruction surgeries among young pitchers across America, using SAS software. The finding of the study shows how prevalent these surgeries are in cities with a big baseball culture compared to others. The median age for young pitchers to have surgery is 19. So kids are throwing out their arms frequently before they become professional players.
Tommy John Surgery has been growing in the professional rankings, but just like concussions translate to youth football, elbow reconstruction is rising with youth players in baseball. Technology around youth health in sports is still growing because of issues like these.
We will have more updates at SAS Global Forum tomorrow as we learn about the analytics usage in the NHL.