Gemini Sports Analytics - December Newsletter
Welcome back to our monthly newsletter! Here is what’s been going on at Gemini:
GSA Webinar #2: Advanced Player Role Clustering for Recruitment Profiling
Thanks to everyone who signed up for our second webinar on Advanced Player Role Clustering for Recruitment Profiling - we hope you enjoyed it! Host Amod Sahasrabudhe, Gemini Machine Learning Engineer, did a brilliant job demonstrating how to classify style of play in football (soccer) using Gemini, combining data from our partner providers, Statsbomb and Skillcorner.
Here are some observations on the webinar from our Head of Product, Ally Brabant:
“Listening to the webinar, I was reminded, yet again, that all great analysis starts with clean, organized data… [At Gemini], we are constantly reflecting on how we can support our customers through their growth cycle, help them mature faster, and enable them to focus more on deriving insights from data rather than simply wrangling it into shape.
You might be thinking ‘well duh, data needs to be clean and organized,’ and you would be right. But what many don’t understand is how much actual work goes into getting data into that format (shout out data engineers!).
For many, this isn’t as cool or trendy a topic as others in tech, but having clean, centralized data is foundational for any organization that wants to be data driven. To say it another way, organizations can’t do great analysis without first having good data.
To that end, we’ve come up with a Data Maturity scale that we are always thinking about when talking to customers about how Gemini can help them do more, faster.”
If you were unable to attend live or would like to watch the webinar again, the video recording is available on our YouTube channel.
At Gemini, it's our aim to continually deliver you interesting, informative and educational content. We would love if you could take a few minutes to answer this short Webinar Feedback Form to help us in the future.
Stay tuned for info on our first webinar of 2024!
MLB Winter Meetings
Earlier this month we once again attended the Major League Baseball Winter Meetings, in Nashville, Tennessee! It was a fantastic experience overall, where we had the opportunity to speak with multiple baseball teams to gain valuable knowledge about data strategies in baseball and build long-standing relationships. Special thanks to Chris Carrieri, Amod Sahasrabudhe, and Alec Coughlin for your stellar representation of Gemini, and thanks to Nashville for being such a great host city!
Some key takeaways, as per Alec:
1. There’s a reason MLB is viewed as the world’s most technically advanced league.
It’s safe to assume that MLB has been getting after tech + data innovation for 20+ years (think Moneyball) and the amount of horsepower in the room was something else. Nothing compares to talking to super smart, deeply technical leaders about all things data infrastructure modernization and realizing your AI ambitions over 2 days…
2. Design Matters.
One of my favorite conversations was with a technical + design centric leader who explained how important their commitment to UI / UX has been in helping drive adoption and embrace of their data infrastructure and technology investments across the club.
3. The conversations around People, Process + Technology were fascinating as it’s critical to always keep in mind how real Change Management is.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of manual work within data science workflows that should be automated so that practitioners can focus on higher impact work, letting the machines handle the automation of tasks they’re purpose built to handle for you.
Gemini in the Media
Ben Gauna included us in his list of sports startups set to make a big impact in 2024!
Ally Brabant and GSA were featured in MarketScale, including a video recording of Ally’s presentation at Washington University Olin Business School’s 9th annual Olin Sports Business Summit.
CEO Jake Schuster was part of a panel on the future of sports and technology, alongside David Oxfeld and Joey Levy, moderated by Saxon Baum, and hosted by Florida Funders and J.P. Morgan at the Betr headquarters. Investors and entrepreneurs in attendance discussed how technology will play a key role in the business of sports, as well as how the next generation of athletes and sports professionals are investing in sports technologies and exploring ways to further engage fans and athletes.
Looking Ahead to 2024
We are so proud of everything we have accomplished in 2023 and are incredibly grateful to everyone who has helped us get to where we are today! Thank you all for being along for the ride and reading each of our updates, newsletters, and thought pieces.
We’re so excited for what 2024 has to bring as we grow, and we hope you will continue following our journey and finding ways in which Gemini’s product can help your team.
We hope you’ve had a joyful festive season and wish you each a wonderful year ahead!
Don’t forget to watch this space for updates on what’s happening next at GSA!