Hackathon

Next batter up. Compete for $10,000 in total prizes and a chance to present on stage at Women in Sports Data 2024

Overview

The Women in Sports Data Hackathon is a project-based data competition open to women and non-binary individuals who have never worked full-time in professional sports, offering the opportunity to work with exclusive tracking data sets typically unavailable to the general public and tackle real-world problems with guidance from industry professionals. Previously we've played with soccer and basketball data. This year, we're throwing up the bat signal...

⚾️ 2024 Theme: Baseball Bat Tracking

Bombs away: it's time to swing for the fences. We love a good dinger. This year, we're investigating the fundamentals of hitting using bat tracking data. Is all bat speed created equal? How might the position of the bat on contact affect bat speed (since bat speed is measured at contact). How do players make the most of the bat speed they do create?

Your challenge is to submit a project geared toward making a recommendation for a baseball front office or coaching staff using provided bat tracking data, in the form of functioning application prototype or an analysis notebook. This year's competition features anonymized bat tracking data from Phillies Minor League affiliate games. Participants are also encouraged to use MLB's recently released subset of public bat tracking data, as well as any other publicly available data set, such as biography data, to enhance your projects.

The top three submissions will receive an invitation to present their work at the 2024 Women in Sports Data Symposium at Citizens Bank Park on September 7, including travel and two nights stay in Philadelphia, where they will compete for $10,000 total in cash prizes.

Participants must register for the competition as individuals, but may compete either alone or in teams of up to four (4) people. After registering for the hackathon, you will then be invited to join a Slack community, where you can meet fellow contestants and mentors, form teams, and engage in related hackathon programming.

Timeline

  • May 20—June 16

    Registration & Team Formation

  • June 17–July 28

    Build Period

  • July 29–August 11

    Judging

  • August 12

    Finalists Notified

  • September 7

    Finalists ➡️ Philadelphia