By Reilly Cahill

With the annual Sports Analytics Conference approaching, the Sports and Society Initiative presented an opportunity for students to learn more about sports research projects.

SSI hosted its third “Getting Started on a Sports Research Project” Oct. 23 in Thompson Library. The event featured Ohio State students with tips on how to start a sports research project and their own experiences with sports research projects, as well as a Q&A session with Dr. Ryan Ruddy and Dr. Christopher Knoester, SSI research director.

The event was kicked off by William Sorg, a third-year in statistics and an SSI data analytics intern, who presented the foundations of a research project, resources on how to get started and what he’s learned through creating projects for the Sports Analytics Conference.

Sorg’s requirements for a good research project: 

• To have a good topic or question
• A testable hypothesis
• Quality data
• A method that addresses the hypothesis.

When starting a project, Sorg described what a good topic or question looks like.

“It should be actionable, so it has some impact on how people watch the sport [or] participate in the sport,” Sorg said.

Once a topic or question has been chosen for the project, Sorg emphasized the importance of using resources on SSI’s student research page, such as the sports data sets, which have accessible data across professional and collegiate sports.

For the upcoming Sport Analytics Conference, Sorg is preparing a track and field probability model. He had previously presented a model on college football recruiting rankings and a predictive model on the Boston Marathon.

While working on his projects in the past, Sorg emphasized the importance of learning how to scrape and clean data, which is an automated process of getting data from websites, verifying and formatting the data.

“Time-wise, I spent probably 95% of it on scraping the data and cleaning the data,” Sorg said.

Sorg’s final takeaways from his presentation included the importance of sharing the project with others to gain feedback as well as choosing a research topic that’s important to them.

“You should be interested in your research topic, you’re going to spend a significant amount of time doing this,” Sorg said.

Following Sorg’s presentation, Zachary Fogt, a third-year in economics student, and Neil Sampath, a third-year in sociology, each presented research projects they are currently pursuing.

Fogt, who is in Ohio State’s Department of Economics Undergraduate Research Assistant Program, is researching the “hot hand” in baseball. Through new data methods in recent years, Fogt described that he’s been able to find changes in analytics that he wouldn’t have been able to see previously.  

“The hot hand is considered largely a fallacy by academics, but the tides kind of turned the last decade or so on that, especially with some new innovative statistical techniques,” Fogt said.

Sampath, who is in the Undergraduate Research Assistant Program, is working on a project focusing on social factors and the risk of a serious sports head injury, through national survey data and statistical analysis.

As the event wrapped up, Knoester described the benefits of getting involved with SSI’s student research department.

“If you’re interested in society generally, all these different things that are going on, how they intersect with sport specifically, we have some of the best data for that,” Knoester said.  

The upcoming Sport Analytics Conference will take place in March 2026, with research projects due at the start of the month.

For more information on SSI’s student research page, visit here.