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By Sean Douglas
Data analytics is big business across both the business and sporting worlds. The 2011 film Moneyball highlighted this trend, resulting in a great deal of speculation about the idea that technology may eventually replace sports managers. The film depicted the true story of Baseball manager Bill Beane. Faced with a tight budget, Beane reinvented his team by outsmarting the richer ball clubs. Joining forces with Ivy League graduate Peter Brand, Beane recruited bargain-bin players whom the scouts had labelled as flawed but had game-winning potential according to Brand’s computergenerated algorithms. The approach was based on two core concepts – firstly, computers are able to collate and analyse much more data than we could possibly analyse as humans, which allows them to better predict future performance. And secondly, computers are not biased by emotions, subjectivity or the many other biases humans suffers from, so their decisions are bound to be more rational than ours. In addition, at the core of highperformance coaching is a desire to identify, analyse and control variables that affect athlete performance. www.coachinglife. com.au
Therefore, an approach adopted by many coaches today is that of reductionism, which is an attempt to understand the functioning of the whole through an analysis of its individual parts.
There are multiple cause-effect links too complex to calculate. Sports analytics, computer-generated algorithms, and big data can certainly improve human decision-making in the field of competitive sports, but so long as the athletes are human, This approach provides a mechanistic technology alone will not improve guide, viewing behavior as their performance. measurable, causally derived and thus controllable. This approach fits Data can help us make better perfectly with the use of computers, predictions, but it will not make data and analytics. people more predictable than they already are. In theory, the reasoning and the data work reliably, every time. In a casino, So, what is the future of sports this is true. We know the odds, the coaching? payoff if we win, the rules about Conventional organizational studies what is allowed and when bets are have tended to define sports as a set paid. So, the data works, we can of highly heterogeneous physical, make better decisions. mental and cognitive activities within However, human performance is far which it is difficult, if not impossible, from sequential and straight forward. to find universal pedagogies for And social encounters like coaching, controlling those activities. consisting of non-linear relationships, are even more complex, defying such However, adopting a whole system approach, and exploring the concepts unproblematic representations. In of control, regulation and selfsport we don’t know the odds organization, it is possible for (similar situations can end up very coaches, managers and psychologists different), we don’t know what the to develop a better understanding of payoff will be (it’s non-linear). how a complex system works, and We know the “rules” and when the therefore, to more successfully game “ends”, but there are multiple manage and influence a team's “actors” in the scenario, who do not performance. act in completely rational ways, and whose actions affect the outcome in In the future, coaches will begin far more to challenge the simplistic interlinked ways (it’s a complex cause-effect assumptions, the selfsystem).
