Part of the team: Undergraduate combines love of soccer and data analytics - The Pennsylvania State University
By Google News Sports ·
Undergraduate Maxwell Gerhart combines his love of soccer and data analytics to help the Penn State men’s soccer team. Credit: Provided. All Rights Reserved.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — “I started playing soccer when I was five years old and I’ve pretty much been all about it ever since,” said computational data science major Maxwell Gerhart, describing his love for the sport. “When I was younger, I’d spend hours playing soccer outside with my neighbors, come inside, and jump straight onto the FIFA video game.”
As he got older, Gerhart became interested in mathematics and, after taking a class in high school, programming.
“I really loved studying mathematics and programming, but at the same time I was spending a huge amount of time on a website called Sports Reference, which has stats on basically every sport,” he said. “I was always looking at the soccer data. Eventually I just connected the dots: I could use my programming skills to analyze stats from soccer and could do this as a job one day instead of just for fun in my free time.”
Gerhart, who is also pursuing a minor in Economics, began his studies at Penn State Harrisburg in 2023 and transferred to University Park in his third year.
“As soon as I came to University Park, I got connected to a student who worked as a student manager for the soccer team, and through him I was able to connect with the coaches of the Penn State men’s soccer team,” Gerhart said. “They gave me access to the data and free reign to analyze it however I saw fit.”
Gerhart immediately got to work writing code and building dashboards highlighting player and team stats for the coaching staff. He also built a player rating system that allowed coaches to estimate the performance of players, giving key insights into future training regimes and…
Originally published by Google News Sports
