Madeline Byrd Sports Analytics

I had the chance to spearhead the creation and development of an analytics team working with Samford’s Men’s Tennis Team. And what a year to join the team! The team not only ended regular season as SoCon Champions (for the second season in a row), but they advanced to play Wisconsin in the First Round of the NCAA tournament.

My role in all of this has been very heavy on the trial and error. As a freshman, I have not done a lot of work in collegiate athletics and I especially have not done analytics for a team before. However, I soon learned how to manually collect requested data during matches and analyze them. After each match, I would present the collected data along with my thoughts to our head coach.

This allowed our players to not only see their personal stats, but focus their practices on what they were struggling with come match day. I worked closely with Coach Reynolds to portray the most helpful information for each player, each set of data personalized and thoroughly analyzed before their next match.

Throughout the season, I gained a deeper understanding of advanced data collection and the use of Excel to keep track of data. Oftentimes, tennis players would see me standing above their matches with my iPad, keeping track of their stats on the Notability app. While this is a very basic way of keeping track of data, it is effective for keeping track of player’s progress and improvement during the semester.

What is more exciting is the continued development of this program next semester. I cannot wait to share more!