Conventional statistics are no longer enough for sports in the über-advanced twenty-first century. While it was once sufficient to track just batting average and home runs in baseball, analysts now turn to metrics like fielding independent pitching and batting average on balls in play to judge how well players are performing. Similarly, in basketball, player speed, separation, and distance travelled, among other things, are being recorded to generate more data about the sport and the way it’s played.
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These cutting-edge basketball statistics will be on full display during the NCAA Women’s Final Four and Championship, which will take place on April 3 and April 5, respectively. ESPN, which is set to broadcast the women’s games, is going to make use of STATS LLC’s SportVU player tracking technology to provide information and graphics to the broadcast that they wouldn’t otherwise have. SportVU utilizes a six-camera system installed in basketball arenas to track the real-time positions of players and the ball 25 times per second, thus revealing exponentially more knowledge than could be observed by the naked eye. This is not SportVU’s first hurrah with basketball, though — the multi-camera technology has been making its mark in the NBA for a few years now.
But providing player- and ball-tracking for basketball is certainly not the only thing SportVU does, and definitely not the only thing that STATS LLC does. Not even two weeks ago, STATS teamed up with Virtually Live to bring its state-of-the-art in-game analysis to the world of virtual reality. Around the same time, STATS also teamed up with a few universities and Disney to create Chalkboard, which is a highly intelligent system that allows users to search for plays by drawing out the plays themselves. And of course, STATS has also ventured into the international football world, providing data for FIFA, UEFA, and popular teams throughout Europe.
Seemingly every day the introduction of new technology into the sports world enhances experiences for both athletes and fans. And whether it’s through creating smarter virtual reality or providing new graphics that make watching the NCAA Women’s Final Four a ground-breaking experience, STATS LLC is doing as much as anyone to put sports in a technological golden age.