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
Project Guidelines
Bat tracking data consists of swings, sampled at a rate of 30 frames per second, resulting in hundreds of frames. For each swing over time, we sample location data for the bat head and handle, as well as the ball, at the frame level. In addition to location data, each swing has a frame labeled with the contact event, and every swing is associated with metadata about the entire play (e.g. pitching: pitch speed, pitch type; ball: exit velocity, launch angle.)
Here are some questions and project prompts to spark your creative process:
- What makes a swing "good"?
- What physical factors impact a player's bat speed?
- How can we measure contact quality with bat and ball positions?
- Can we learn anything about the pitcher based on the swings that hitters take?
Example project prompts include, but are not limited to:
- Develop metrics to assess swing quality and how they relate to performance (e.g. exit velocity, launch angle, swing and miss percentage)
- Create an interactive visual for a coach or analyst to compare two swings (including swing characteristics and evaluation)
- Engineering challenges with tracking data: develop an ETL pipeline mapped to publicly available data, build an API interface
Requirements
The only hard requirement for project submissions is that you must use the provided tracking data set.
Projects should take the form of:
- A functional minimum viable product (MVP) deployed as an interactive website (e.g. React, Svelte, Dash, Shiny), AND/OR
- A data science project or notebook with targeted, actionable recommendations based on analysis (e.g. Jupyter notebook, R Markdown AND slide deck, PDF)
Be creative! In addition to being technically innovative, projects should consider the decision-making needs of a non-technical front office or coaching audience, especially in the final presentation.
Participants must register for the competition as individuals, but may compete either alone or in teams of up to four (4) people. Previous finalists have typically submitted projects as individuals or teams of two.
Eligibility
The purpose of this hackathon is to promote gender diversity in sports analytics by offering amateur sports data enthusiasts an opportunity to tackle real-world problems with guidance from professionals. The hackathon offers the chance for amateur sports data enthusiasts to tackle real-world problems with guidance from professionals.
You MUST fit the below criteria:
Are a woman (cis or trans) or non-binary individual
Are at least 18 years old.
Are a resident of the United States or Canada.
Have never been employed full-time in a technical role for a professional sports organization or sports data company where you may have worked with player location data.
Exceptions include:
Previous internships, either team-side or business-side
Professional sports organization business-side employees (e.g. ticketing analytics) who have never worked with player location data