February 2021

For the third year in a row, GT Athletics hosted a Sports Innovation Hackathon (virtual for 2021).  [A Hackathon is a design sprint-like event; often, in which computer programmers, engineers and others involved in software development, including graphic designers, interface designers, project managers, domain experts, and others collaborate intensively on specific challenges.]

This year GT Athletics partnered with GT’s Data Science at GT Club, our largest community of student data scientists, to manage the Hack.  https://hacklytics.io/  

GT Athletics presented 3 challenges.

Football - Social Media Recruiting Assistance.  Winner summary:  Analyzed social network services feeds in student athlete recruitment. Formulated problem statement by probability prediction of a prospective student athlete based on athletic performance and ‘social media’ sentiment analysis.

Tennis - College Tennis Recruiting Identification Assistant.  Winner summary:  built a program that helps the GT tennis team to recruit possibly hidden young tennis talents.

Track – Hurdles video data tracker.  Winner summary:  came up with a pipeline to extract as much information as possible from videos of athletes jumping over hurdles, which can help athletes fine tune their jumps over time.

Over 200 people/students participated from around the world.  Of which 7 different teams worked on the sports challenges.  The Hack lasted 47 hours.  Started Friday Feb. 5, 2021 @ 5pm – Closing ceremony ended 4pm Sunday Feb 7.

GT Athletics went on to contract 2 teams to build out their project for use within our program.  Be on the lookout for future Hackathons as we continue to leverage innovation and technology as a differentiator for Georgia Tech athletics.