How YOU Can Land a Sports Analytics Job

Key Takeaways

hello everyone can hear today I'm going to give you seven recommendations that can help you land a sports analytics job sports analytics is an absolutely fascinating field but it could be a little confusing to get started at I've been working in this field for around four years and through my work I've met some very interesting people a lot of whom were responsible for hiring decisions I took the opportunity to pick their brains about things that they look for in candidates and if they had any recommendations for what you should do to actually get your foot in the door this video is about passing on that message to you if you enjoy the content please hit that like button it really helps me out to grow my channel and if you want to see more content that's related to data science and sports analytics right around where they intersect I'd consider subscribing to this channel I have a lot of video similar to that if you're interested in the written version of this video you can check it out on our medium publication called playing numbers it is linked in the description below my first recommendation is to read absolutely voraciously there's so much sports analytics content out there either online or in books etc that you should just steep yourself in that knowledge read two to three articles a day try and get a feeling for some of the terminology at the common themes that you see across a lot of sources I would start your you're learning and you're reading in a book called mathletics by Wayne Winston this book does a great job of explaining the basic concepts around the three major sports basketball baseball and football it goes into some fairly complex math but he does a great job explaining these concepts this book is linked in the description below there's also a wealth of knowledge online through blogs through podcasts or any of these things and I've linked a couple of my favorite ones again in the description below my second recommendation is to learn the necessary skills and tools so 5 10 years ago all sports analytics used to be done on an Excel spreadsheet that isn't the case anymore we have so much information we have so many data points that we need to use more flexible and larger scale tools so I would really recommend that you either learn Python or R or both of these programming languages because these are what are being used every day in these organizations now I would also recommend learning some of the visualization tools that are out there as well so you have power VI of tableau I think google has a tool now that that they use and these are extremely important especially in sports so in sports you're not always presenting information to a business person or someone who really has a solid foundation in statistics you're presenting your information to coaches or to decision-makers that might not have a ton of analytic aptitude so the more visual you can make it more graphs you can use the more you can show trends in a visual way the better my third tip is that you should engage with the community around sports analytics as well as professional sports teams when they offer you the opportunity to do so so there's great opportunities in the conference's MIT Sloan sport analytics conference is a great place to meet people to meet a lot of decision-makers in sports organizations you also have the Sabre conference if you're interested specifically in baseball analytics if you're a student these conferences usually offer a free or discounted rate for you to show up something else that are becoming increasingly popular and ways to create a good touch point with organizations is through hackathons I know that the NFL hosts one and the NBA recently started hosting big data hackathons on a website called catechol I've links to those in the description and all the conferences and the hackathons but these are a great way to show what you can do with a fairly unique data set that they provide you so if you do well in these this is one of the main channels for recruiting for a lot of the NBA teams and potentially the NFL teams in the future now if you go and actually win one of these competition you're all but guaranteed a job in the sports analytics field this fourth recommendation is for those of you who are still in school if you're a undergraduate student or graduate student I recommend trying to work for any of you universities sports teams this can be either as an analyst or you know as a in the backroom and the equipment room any of these things as long as you have a foot in the door with that organization larger sports teams are looking for people that understand how high performing sports organizations work and that knowledge if you carry it on is really important to them it shows that you have at least some exposure to what high level athletics are like and what the hierarchy in the locker room are within the organization is like the fifth recommendation that I have is that you should do projects this is in my opinion the single most important thing that you can do to put yourself in a good position to get one of these sports analytics jobs projects help you get familiar with the tools that you use on the job like Python and R and they also help you build out your resume if you are ready doing projects that can create value for teams they might actually reach out to you and offer to hire you so they have access to that research you're creating value even before you'd be working for those teams that to me is something that is extremely appealing they're also getting a flavor for what your work is like when they see these in whatever medium you post the moment the sixth thing that you should do is to produce content and to share your work I'm probably one of the few people that actually recommends that you use social media and you tweet more you should be sending out your projects your insights to the world for them to see you should be posting all of your code all of your projects on github or Kaggle and you should tweet out cool insights Instagram them if you want put them on Reddit etc when you put your projects out there you never know who's actually going to see them you could get someone that actually loves what they see and just calls you up and offers you a job it's very rare but it potentially could happen also by making them public you get a little extra pressure and all extra scrutiny so you make sure that your like at work this helps you improve your skills a lot faster in my opinion I recently started this medium publication called playing numbers the contact information about that is linked in the description below but this is also a good place for you to actually get your sports analytic projects published you can reach out to me myself and my team will edit them and you'll get full credit and potentially could get paid for the projects that you do we can't publish everything but at the very least our editors will work with you to improve your analysis for the next time my final recommendation is to reach out via Twitter or via email to people that might be interested in your analysis if you've done a project and you think it could help a specific team or you think a specific you know personality might find it interesting you should absolutely share it you never know who's gonna read these emails who might whose interest you might be when doing this I would absolutely recommend that you target your analysis or target your email to a very specific person you know if you do an analysis make sure it's specific to the team that you're reaching out to definitely don't send a very high level thing or something that is not customized you really want to take your time in these communications even if you might get a semi low response rate thank you so much for watching I hope that you found this video informative and useful if you have any questions please leave them in the comment section below and again definitely check out the playing numbers blog as usual good luck with your sports analytics journey