Sports Performance Measurement and Analytics

This is the first real-world guide to building and using analytical models for measuring and assessing performance in the five major sports: football, basketball, baseball, soccer, and tennis. Unlike books that focus strictly on theory, this book brings together sports measurement and statistical analyses, demonstrating how to examine differences across sports as well as between player positions. This book will provide you with the tools for cutting-edge approaches you can extend to the sport of your choice.

Expert Northwestern University data scientist, UC San Diego researcher, and competitive athlete, Lorena Martin shows how to use measures and apply statistical models to evaluate players, reduce injuries, and improve sports performance. You’ll learn how to leverage a deep understanding of each sport’s principles, rules, attributes, measures, and performance outcomes.

Sports Performance Measurement and Analytics will be an indispensable resource for anyone who wants to bring analytical rigor to athletic competition: students, professors, analysts, fans, physiologists, coaches, managers, and sports executives alike.

All data sets, extensive code, and additional examples are available for download at http://www.ftpress.com/martin/

What are the qualities a person must have to become a world-class athlete? This question and many more can be answered through research, measurement, statistics, and analytics.

This book gives athletes, trainers, coaches, and managers a better understanding of measurement and analytics as they relate to sports performance. To develop accurate measures, we need to know what we want to measure and why. There is great power in accurate measures and statistics. Research findings can show us how to prevent injuries, evaluate strengths and weaknesses, improve team cohesion, and optimize sports performance.

This book serves many readers. People involved with sports will gain an appreciation for performance measures and analytics. People involved with analytics will gain new insights into quantified values representing physical, physiological, and psychological components of sports performance. And students eager to learn about sports analytics will have a practical introduction to the field.

This is a thorough introduction to performance measurement and analytics for five of the world’s leading sports. The only book of its kind, it offers a complete overview of the most important concepts, rules, measurements, and statistics for each sport, while demonstrating applications of real-world analytics. You’ll find practical, state-of-the-art guidance on predicting future outcomes, evaluating an athlete’s market value, and more.

Author Lorena Martin is a lifelong athlete, she brings a combination of expertise in applied behavioral science, quantitative methodologies, and exercise physiology. This book shows you how to think critically about athletic performance assessment, and helps you interpret a wide spectrum of measures and models in sports.

All of the data and programs from the book are available on the book website at http://www.ftpress.com/martin.

Build, use, and assess models for 5 major sports:

Football, Basketball, Baseball, Soccer, Tennis

LORENA MARTIN is an applied behavioral scientist, quantitative methodologist, and exercise physiologist. She specializes in the use of statistical methods in health behaviors, epidemiology, and sports.

Dr. Martin is an active researcher and analyst in health and exercise physiology, where she makes extensive use of both traditional explanatory methods and predictive models. She is also a former tennis player who competed at the collegiate and professional levels.

An experienced professor of statistics and avid user of the R software environment, she holds a doctorate in exercise physiology from the University of Miami. Lorena Martin is also a faculty professor of statistics and sports performance measurement and analytics at Northwestern University.

Consulting Editor THOMAS W. MILLER is faculty director of the Predictive Analytics program at Northwestern University, and author of several books in the Modeling Techniques in Predictive Analytics series, including Marketing Data Science; Web and Network Data Science; and Modeling Techniques in Predictive Analytics with Python and R: A Guide to Data Science. He is also author of two books on sports analytics, including this book’s companion volume, Sports Analytics and Data Science: Winning the Game with Methods and Models.

Find additional content and tools at http://www.ftpress.com/martin.