Harvey Van Blerkom —

For my Senior Project, I will be working with a company called Big League Advance, which is a company that uses advanced analytics and mathematical modeling to predict athletes success and “invest,” by giving up front payments (not loans) to players in exchange for percentages of their career earnings. I will be assisting them in their football department, where I will be helping the team create a predictive model for coverage schemes in the NFL, reviewing game footage and creating algorithms in Microsoft Excel. Over the course of this project, I hope to further my knowledge operating professionally, and through more professional software, like “R” and even Microsoft Excel. While it may just sound like boring or simple work, I think that this project is going to be an experience that will be very transformative and informative for me. Working in a professional environment will force me to communicate, focus, and commit more to my work than ever before. These experiences are ones that I hope to carry with me into college, and even beyond, as I hope to pursue a career in the sport analytics field. 

Interning with Big League Advance is exciting for me because, as an avid sport analytics fan, I wanted to have an experience that would allow me to learn more about how the advanced stats work from the inside. I have always enjoyed viewing and doing my own analysis of statistics in sports, but being able to do the same as part of something much bigger is extremely exciting for me.

At the end of Senior Project, I hope to showcase the predictive values I create, and show examples of how to translate a piece of footage into data. I want to push myself as a team member, and showcase the accomplishments I reach during my time in this Senior Project. This project should be super enjoyable, and I cannot wait to see where this project takes me, in skill development and experience.