Meredith Wills

Sports Data Scientist & Analytics Consultant  |  LinkedIn

ABSTRACT: The Impact of Technology on Sports Analytics 

Analytics have been a part of sports—especially baseball—for decades. However, the last ten years have seen the advent of information-gathering technologies. What began with MLB-only pitch tracking has evolved into player and ball tracking across multiple sports, in-game biomechanics information, and data gathering at minor league and even amateur levels. This flood of increasingly complex inputs has transformed analytical methods from simple statistics into “big data” data science modeling. As a result, clubs now have the ability to radically improve overall team performance, provided they harness the data and make good use of it.  A “success” dichotomy is already appearing in baseball, with other sports likely to follow.

BIO - Meredith J. Wills, Ph.D.

Dr. Wills is a sports data scientist and technology consultant. Before moving into sports, she spent two decades doing NASA-funded astrophysics research. Her resulting data science expertise has proven ideal for working with the latest ball and player tracking technology, and she specializes in spatial analysis and visualization. She has also worked with sports technology firms on biomechanics and on-field tracking. Dr. Wills received her B.A. in Astronomy & Astrophysics from Harvard in 1996, her M.S. in Physics (specialty: Physics Education Research) from Montana State University-Bozeman in 1999, and her Ph.D. in Physics (specialty: Solar Astrophysics) from Montana State University-Bozeman in 2003. She currently resides in Versailles, Kentucky.