George Baldini, Elise Edman, Jack Shumway, Kendall Thomas
Faculty Sponsor: Dr. Mendes
One of the challenges professional statisticians in the sports broadcasting field face during games is to quickly get relevant statistics during a game. Typically, they would have to manually track certain statistics during the game that they think would be of interest. They could also ask a team’s sports information director (SID) or search the Internet themselves. Regardless, should the process of searching for these metrics take too long, the opportune moment in the game to share it with the audience could pass. Our solution to this problem is to create a user-oriented web tool to allow any user to perform simple, flexible, and rapid queries to find relevant statistics during a game. Our quierable database contains data from the past Davidson men’s basketball season that enables users, announcers, statisticians, or fans to flexibly explore complex questions about player performance by applying customizable filters to our website. Website users can easily perform complex queries about players by applying various situational or statistical filters, such as player, shooting percentage, game time remaining, half, opponent, or score differential. This query then returns the desired information to the user. It also allows the user to add additional queries to compare multiple players, seasons, games, plays, etc. Below each query, we have a button to add another, which duplicates the query fields and enables the user to easily create a similar query for another player. For example, if the user wants the close game statistics for Kellan and Jon Axel, (s)he first queries for Kellan, click to add another, and then filters for Jon Axel. Being able to retrieve statistics almost immediately enhances the ability of announces to provide pertinent insight to fans that helps to improve their understanding of both the team and sport. It also engages fans by offering a tool with which they can become more familiar with their team and its plays against different types of opponents by posing their own questions.