Posts

Introduction Like the shameless bandwagon-er that I am, I set aside my usual allegiances as an Australian, voluntarily woke up at an unmentionable hour in NZ time, and found myself cheering loudly for England as they brought home the Euros. Shortly after this momentous occasion, StatsBomb released a treasure trove of free data from the Euros tournament! Here are a few different ways I explored the data: Shot outcomes by team Code here: https://github....

Introduction On Tuesday, I launched the alpha version of the wnblr package, yahoooo!! (Guess I better write a blog post about that sometime.) wnblr currently contains live stats recorded from WNBL games played from 2014 to 2020, inclusive. You can find it here: https://github.com/jacquietran/wnblr Over on Twitter, I flagged down Paul Flynn (Assistant Coach, Melbourne Boomers WNBL) to take a look-see, and he asked for some specific advanced stats that can be derived from the standard game stats that are typically recorded (e....

Introduction On Tuesday, I launched the alpha version of the wnblr package, yahoooo!! (Guess I better write a blog post about that sometime.) wnblr currently contains live stats recorded from WNBL games played from 2014 to 2020, inclusive. You can find it here: https://github.com/jacquietran/wnblr Over on Twitter, I flagged down Paul Flynn (Assistant Coach, Melbourne Boomers WNBL) to take a look-see, and he asked for some specific advanced stats that can be derived from the standard game stats that are typically recorded (e....

Introduction It’s been a thrilling #WBBL07 so far - the competition seems well-balanced, with every team boasting world-class athletes alongside the young guns who are the next wave of Australian talent coming through. Coming off the back of the hotly contested Australia vs. India series, I have been glued to the TV. I thought I might as well turn my attention to another screen instead - my computer screen - and take a closer look at some key performances so far this season....

(source: Wikimedia) I shifted across the ditch early in 2018 to take up a role with High Performance Sport New Zealand. Remarkably, the one-year anniversary of our arrival here is right on the door step; I’ve learned so much in that time, particularly around qualitative methods and analyses. I enjoy the richness of insight that can be drawn from analysing text data, but a part of me does miss getting to work with numbers as much as I used to....

Introduction This post is the third in a series - to get up to speed, have a read through the first post and the second post. In this series, I will show how I created the plots that Aiden published on Twitter here and here, alongside some commentary about the choices I made throughout the process and my own interpretations of the results. Getting started Load up the data and the libraries as we’ve done before....

Introduction This post is the second in a series; click here to read the first post if you haven’t already done so. In this series, I will show how I created the plots that Aiden Oakley published on Twitter here and here, alongside some commentary about the choices I made throughout the process and my own interpretations of the results. Getting started We’ll load the cleaned data in and load the necessary libraries as we did in the first post....

The backstory It’s a touchy subject for many. Yet this question—how much do you get paid?—is at the core of the online questionnaire that was recently administered by Aiden Oakley (@ajoakley on Twitter). And it is a question that was willingly answered by over 100 sport scientists and strength & conditioning coaches who currently work for football (soccer) clubs in the UK. Why? This job advert says it all…...

I often get asked questions about how long I’ve been coding for, how I got started, whether I have completed any formal studies in programming / computer science, and so on. The reality is that my path is far from linear. Most of what I’ve learned to date has been more opportunistic than strategic, curiosity-driven rather than being part of a master plan to acquire professional skills for the workplace. To illustrate, it might help to go back to the beginning, to tell my coding origin story…...