Philip Maymin, PhD, professor and director of Fairfield Dolan’s Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) program, was named winner of this year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Pro Division Hackathon. Held in Boston, Mass. on March 6 and 7, the hackathon was part of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, presented by ESPN, which brings together sports analytics experts to create groundbreaking solutions in the sports industry.

Dr. Maymin is no newcomer to the conference. In 2018, he competed and won the research paper category for his work entitled “An Open-Sourced Optical Tracking and Advanced eSports Analytics Platform for League of Legends.” In this paper, Dr. Maymin introduced new metrics to track player performance in the popular multiplayer League of Legends video game, and used the methodology to quantify an individual’s impact on overall team performance.

This year, Dr. Maymin participated in the hackathon portion of the conference and was selected from several hundred people who applied to take part. The theme of this year’s hackathon was college basketball player and ball tracking data. Participants were given player and ball tracking data from men’s and women’s college basketball games, provided by sensor-based technology company ShotTracker, to perform analyses and gain insights related to in-game play. Participants shared their findings and three finalists were selected to present to a panel of judges comprised of sport analytics experts.

“There’s so much data, so many problems to solve, and so little time in the world now; that’s why I love hackathons,” said Dr. Maymin. “At a hackathon, every participant attempts the impossible, and this year every group and individual had some interesting results in just a few hours on some very complicated spatiotemporal college basketball data. That’s exactly the goal of Fairfield’s MSBA program. We give recent graduates and seasoned professionals the tools to quickly and efficiently extract useful and actionable information from a pile of raw business data. I like to think of it as helping our graduates achieve the optimistic hackathon mentality for life.”

Fairfield Dolan will now offer the Master of Science in Business Analytics Program as a fully online program, starting in the fall of 2020. Students also have the option of pursuing a traditional on-campus track. The degree is STEM designated and provides graduates with the ability to compete for the growing employment demand of jobs in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields.