University of Notre Dame Sports Analytics Club
Author: Marshall V. King
A Growing Movement: Students Volunteer as Data Analysts for Athletics
Scott Nestler, founder of Notre Dame Sports Analytics Club
A growing number of students at the University of Notre Dame are becoming more than fans of the athletic teams.
They are taking on roles as volunteer data analysts to help the university’s coaches and athletes.
About 100 students are active members of the Sports Analytics Club, an extracurricular group focused on analyzing seven sports teams. Several hundred other students are on the group’s listserve.
The club started in 2016 as an outgrowth of the IT, Analytics, and Operations department in the Mendoza College of Business. Scott Nestler, then associate professor of analytics, was the founder and first sponsor. Martin Barron joined the university in 2020 and became the faculty sponsor.
Elevating Sports Analytics at Notre Dame
Martin Barron, current faculty sponsor of the ND Sports Analytics Club
Barron, now assistant teaching professor, had worked for a human performance organization for one and a half years. During his time at Kitman Labs, he worked with soccer teams in the English Premier League, German’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A, and Major League Soccer in the United States.
As he came to Notre Dame, he saw students passionate about learning how to utilize the growing array of data being tracked on the field or court. Students are using baseball pitch data to create scouting reports and player analysis. Eight or nine students a year help the Notre Dame football team as part of the club.
When the men’s lacrosse team marched toward a national championship this spring, Madaket Chiarieri was studying abroad in Madrid, Spain. As a student manager for the team several previous years and as a member of the Sports Analytics Club, she watched game film to tally stats and send her files to the team. When she returned, she joined the team and did both roles. This year, the senior from Glenview, Illinois, is president of the Sports Analytics Club. She has been an intern on the Business Strategy and Analytics Team for the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team after working with the Notre Dame hockey team. “My hope is to get a job doing this work,” she says.
Inspiring Commitment and Expanding Horizons
Madaket Chiarieri, current president of the ND Sports Analytics Club
Barron says he’s continually impressed at how committed students are to this work. “I almost took for granted that these students give up their free time to do the work that is often the arduous and challenging part of statistics. It’s data cleaning and so on. But they come out of it with a great set of skills that are applicable to any data type,” he says. “I’m always blown away with the dedication of the students here.”
Chiarieri helps oversee the logistics of the club and promotes student work. She’s arranging speakers who work in the industry as well.
With the arrival of John Wagle as Associate Athletics Director, Sports Performance, the role of students in the club is expanding. “Athletics is becoming much more involved this year and that’s a huge positive,” Barron says. “I think it’s going to be beneficial for both sides.”
Chiarieri says Wagle’s role may help students formalize their work and help even more find jobs in the growing field of sports analytics. Current students share their work with teams and the athletic department, but can also anonymize the data so that it can be shared more widely. She also hopes the sports using student analysts grows beyond the current list of football, baseball, hockey, volleyball, men’s lacrosse, men’s soccer, and women’s basketball.
Most of the club members are undergraduates who are passionate about sports. “The students love Notre Dame by the time they work on these things,” Barron says. “A lot of them were athletes, often at a high level, in high school. The idea of carrying out an analysis and seeing the result happen on the pitch, on the court, or on the field, is a really big thing.”
