Want to be better at sports? Listen to the machines
A couple of decades ago, Jeff Alger, then a senior manager at Microsoft, was coaching statelevel soccer teams and realized that there was very little science to player development.
“There were no objective ways of measuring how good players are,” Alger said, “and without being able to measure, you have nothing.”
He said it offended his sense of systems design to recognize a problem but do nothing about it, so he quit his job, got a master’s degree in sports management and started a company that would use artificial intelligence to assess athletic talent and training.
His company, Seattle Sports Sciences, is one of a handful using the pattern-recognizing power of machine learning to revolutionize coaching and make advanced analytics available to teams of all kinds.
The trend is touching professional sports and changing sports medicine. And, perhaps inevitably, it has altered the odds in sports betting.
John Milton, architect of Seattle Sports Sciences’ artificial intelligence system, spent a week in October with Spanish soccer team Málaga, which plays in Spain’s second division, capturing everything that happened on the pitch with about 20 synchronized cameras in 4K ultra high-definition video.
The system, ISOTechne, evaluates a player’s skill and consistency and who is passing or receiving with what frequency, as well as the structure of the team’s defense. It even tracks the axis of spin and rate of rotation of the ball.
“It’s a matter of whether that player’s movements and what they do with the ball correspond to the demands that they will have on your particular team,” said Alger, now the president and chief executive of Seattle Sports Sciences. He said, for example, that his company could identify a player who was less skilled at other phases of the game but was better at delivering the ball on a corner kick or a free kick — a skill that a coach could be looking for.
Some systems can also detect and predict injuries. Dr. Phil Wagner, chief executive and founder of Sparta Science, works from a warehouse in Silicon Valley that has a running track and is scattered with equipment for assessing athletes’ physical condition.
“Athletes don’t recognize that there’s an injury coming or there’s an injury that exists,” said Wagner, adding that the system has a proven record of diagnosing or predicting injury. “We’re identifying risk and then providing the best recommendation to reduce that risk.”
Tyson Ross, a pitcher competing for a roster spot with the San Francisco Giants, has been using Sparta Science’s system since he was drafted in 2008. He visits the company’s facilities roughly every other week during the offseason to do vertical jumps, sway tests, a single leg balance test and a one-arm plank on the plate, blindfolded.
“Based on the data that’s collected, it tells me how I’m moving compared to previously and how I’m moving compared to my ideal movement signature, as they call it,” Ross said. Sparta Science then tailors his workouts to move him closer to that ideal.
The Pittsburgh Steelers, the Detroit Lions and the Washington Redskins, among others, use the system regularly, Wagner said. Sparta Science is also used to evaluate college players in the National Football League’s annual scouting combine.