Women in
Sports Data

Hoop there it is

Hackathon: NBA Tracking Data

This year, we're balling. Participants will work on projects featuring an NBA player tracking data set over a six-week virtual sprint period. During this time, they must build a functioning application prototype OR submit a data science project or notebook with recommendations geared towards a front office or coaching staff. Participants must use NBA tracking data provided by Sportradar, to develop their projects. Participants may also use any other publicly available data set to enhance their projects, such as biography data.

The Women in Sports Data hackathon is a project-based data competition open to women and non-binary individuals with no pre-existing employment in professional sports. Upon registering for the hackathon, they will be invited to join a Slack community, where they can meet fellow contestants and mentors, form teams, and engage in related hackathon programming. The top three (3) projects will be invited to Philadelphia to present during the symposium and to compete for $10,000 in cash prizes.

Timeline

  • May 24—June 18

    Registration & Team Formation

  • June 19–July 30

    Build Period

  • July 31–August 6

    Judging

  • August 7

    Finalists Notified

  • September 16

    Finalists ➡️ Philadelphia

$10,000 total for 1st through 3rd place

$10,000 total for 1st through 3rd place

Projects highlighted on our website

Projects highlighted on our website

Slack community for participants

Slack community for participants

Mentor-matching & networking

Mentor-matching & networking

Rich player tracking data sets

Rich player tracking data sets

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:

  1. Are a woman (cis or trans) or non-binary individual

  2. Are at least 18 years old.

  3. Are a resident of the United States or Canada.

  4. 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

Project Guidelines

Participants must register for the competition as individuals, but may compete either alone or in teams of up to four (4) people.

Projects should take the form of:

  1. A functional minimum viable product (MVP) deployed as an interactive website (e.g. React, Svelte, Dash, Shiny), AND/OR
  2. 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.