TRAIN Scholar Steven Gonzalez's Blog

  This past week I met with Dr. Costa to quickly go over any additional questions I might have about the background readings he gave me to get started. After that, we moved on to the real fun, building my first model. He had me start with a simple model using only xG (expected goals) to predict the possible outcomes of a match between the Phoenix Rising and the San Diego Loyal. I started out by collecting information for the last 10 matches each team played and created an Excel spreadsheet with that information. While I would consider myself computer savvy, I don’t have extensive experience with Excel. I know enough to get around Excel, but I also know Excel is a very powerful tool and there are a ton of shortcuts to make work and life more efficient in Excel. I hope that as I spend more time on this project, I get to know the ins and outs of Excel. For now, I guess I will continue feeling like my dad does when trying to figure out how to add an attachment to an email… With t...

  A bit late with my blog post for this week. We got hit pretty hard by the storm on Thursday and lost both power and internet. Thankfully power was restored early Friday morning but four days later, we are still without internet service. Have a technician coming out tomorrow, so hopefully that gets resolved. Not having internet access while taking online classes is problematic to say the least. But I digress. Earlier this week I had the pleasure of meeting with Dr. Posta. We discussed what the internship will entail in greater detail he got me started with some further readings on the model we will be using for this project. Soccer is generally a low-scoring sport. This can be inherently problematic when attempting to create a model that can accurately predict match outcomes. Interestingly, the model doesn’t place as much weight on match scores as one might initially think. Take for example a match where team A defeats team B 2-0. In this match, team A has 2 shots on goal an...

      Coming into this semester, I really wasn’t sure what I would be doing for my authentic experience. I ended up with a few different exciting prospects including a coding project with Professor Manning and a Calculus project revolving around the tabular method for integration. However, at the last minute I came across a Sports Analytic Research Project being led by Dr. Posta here at PC. As a huge sports fan, I could not have dreamed up a better research project than one marrying math and sports. I was fortunate enough to be chosen to participate in this internship and I am beyond excited to be a part of this project!