Modern sports are all about the data. University of Utah students proved their potential as future sports analysts by winning the SportsMEDIA Technology 2024 Data Challenge, a competition that gives aspiring analysts a chance to show their talent and network with industry leaders. Competing against 232 participants from six countries, Kendall Ruth, Josh Southwick and Douglas Fenwick won the graduate student category by using real-world minor league baseball data to provide innovative insights into the game.

The team studied detailed pitch-by-pitch information from the moment the ball left the pitcher’s hand to the conclusion of each play. They developed a method for creating “scouting reports” for batters—analyzing tendencies in their swing and identifying competencies…or lack thereof. Their goal was to use raw data to support player training and development by creating specialized recommendations for each batter.

The winners are pursuing a Professional Science Master’s (PSM), a program that emphasizes practical skills and professional development for people to advance their careers in STEM fields. PSM offers four key career development avenues, including biotechnology, Earth resource management, environmental science and computational and data science—the area of interest for the winners. This team’s win is a testament to their talents and the skills they’ve honed through the program.

The team discussed their win and their participation in PSM below.

What is your background and why are you involved in PSM?

Josh Southwick: I graduated with my bachelor’s in chemistry and got a job at bioMérieux Salt Lake City. A lot of my peers and coworkers had done the PSM program, and I figured it’s time for me to enhance my education and add on big data and coding skills by getting a Master’s in Data Science.

Kendall Ruth: In 2023, I got my degree in computer science, and I wanted to continue my education. I thought [PSM] would be good for me to continue to grow my data science skills. I’m the one on the team who’s the most interested in sports data science, which is why we did this [SMT] project.

Douglas Fenwick: I’ve worked as a data scientist with the Air Force since 2018. I decided to get my master’s with the PSM program because the combination of data science expertise with professional expertise really attracted me. Data science is fun if you like working with data, and if that data matters at a very high level.

Why data science?

Ruth: Most of my interest came from sports. I’ve always watched sports, played a bunch when I was younger, and realized my first introduction to data science in sports was through the movie Moneyball. I think I have a very analytical mind that’s built to look at numbers, find trends and create models.

Fenwick: I originally got into statistics, which is pretty close to data science. It seemed very useful in a number of fields, and that appealed to me quite a bit. Once I started working, I began to see data science as an application of statistics.

Southwick: With my science background, I’ve always liked very structured things, but I also like that element of the unknown. So when I get a complicated dataset, it’s almost like trying to solve a puzzle. How do I piece this all together to make intelligent inferences?

How did PSM help you win the competition?

Fenwick: PSM shines because of how we learned to communicate. Whether that’s in written form or in a presentation. Part of our success [in SMT] is definitely owed to the fact that we took classes together on how to present and communicate effectively.

Southwick: That’s a big reason why we won. We have this combination of soft skills with the technical skills, and we communicated [our ideas] better than the other teams. That was a big leg up for us.

Ruth: We did our presentation to an audience that wasn’t in the sports industry. Part of what PSM taught us is how to present the scientific findings to people from many backgrounds, so that everyone could understand.