Carnegie Mellon University
March 24, 2015

Like Sports Analytics? You’ll Love This New Student Club

Like Sports Analytics? You’ll Love This New Student Club Call it the “Moneyball Effect,” referring to how the Oakland Athletics famously used statistics to build a successful baseball team, but more and more professional sports teams are using and relying on analytics to gain a competitive edge.

It’s no surprise that Carnegie Mellon University – home to one of the world’s best and fastest-growing Statistics Departments – is flush with sports-related statistical activity. Statistics Ph.D. candidate Sam Ventura and Andrew C. Thomas, a former assistant visiting professor, co-founded WAR-On-Ice.com, a new site for traditional and modern hockey statistics, and co-hosted the Hockey Analytics Workshop at CMU last fall.

And, junior Maksim Horowitz, an economics and statistics major with a minor in business administration, came up the idea for the new Tartan Sports Analytics Club. The student-run club has 20 founding members and uses in-depth quantitative data to develop an understanding of sports analytics, strategies and management. They have a membership development plan to help teach the club’s members how to work with and analyze data.

“I love sports and the idea dawned upon me last year that I could share this passion with many other students at CMU, so I started our club,” Horowitz said. “We focus on each and every sport. We have members who write about the big 4: baseball, basketball, football and soccer. But we also have members who write about e-sports and mixed martial arts (MMA).”

The club is open to any CMU student interested in sports or in pursuing a career in sports.

"The CMU Tartan Sports Analytics Club is a great opportunity for students to see first-hand how the statistics methodology they learn in the classroom can be used to solve exciting, challenging problems in sports,” said Rebecca Nugent, associate teaching professor of statistics and the club’s faculty advisor. “While these types of applications might be seen as ‘just for fun,’ the world of sports analytics is quickly growing; our department is regularly contacted by professional sports teams looking for interns and recent graduates.  Even if a student is not planning on working in sports, experience in learning how to solve real-world problems is invaluable and easily transferable to all fields."

Students interested in joining the Tartan Sports Analytics Club should contact Horowitz.

For more information, visit the club’s website and Facebook page.