With the season in full swing, the Under Armour Performance Center is lively during the week, and last Tuesday was no exception.
In a partnership with the non-profit organization Strength in Numbers, the Ravens hosted 10 local college students who spent the last handful of months completing a data collection project.
Strength in Numbers, which aims to teach sports analytics to underrepresented minority and female students, and the Ravens opened the application to students from UMBC, University of Maryland, Coppin State, Towson, and Morgan State.
With more than 250 applicants, John Tobias, the founder of Strength in Numbers, and his teacher's assistant, BJ Turner, selected the participants. Ravens Vice President of Research & Development David McDonald, who helped lead the project from the team side, expanded the application pool to computer science students, knowing the overlap from that field to data analysis.
The students were eventually split into two groups of five, and each group was given two project options. The first was a field goal probability model, and the second was a data collection project.
Both groups chose the latter, which entailed building software they could use to collect data on the internet. The specific goals ranged from gathering information on college football rosters (height, weight, year, etc.) to collecting data from high school recruiting services.
"To me, it's about creating opportunities for these students, but also showing them how to create opportunities for themselves," McDonald said. "... If you have a computer and you have internet, then you can go out and collect data that otherwise you might have to purchase, or a company might have to give you. So that was hugely important."
The project was such a success that numerous students reached out to McDonald when it was done and asked for the slides on the field goal model to work on in their free time. For McDonald, that stood out because he knows having tangible projects will pay off when looking for jobs.
"It's easy to send out an email, but when somebody, and it's very rare, goes, 'Hey, I worked on this project, here's what I did. Do you have any feedback on it?' That engages because I'm like, 'Oh, this is more than them just trying to network,'" McDonald said. "They have a passion for it because they're doing work on it, and they're trying to bring value to a team."
When the project concluded, all the participants, along with Tobias, Turner, and a few other students, came to the Under Armour Performance Center. The local students presented their projects in the Ravens draft room, followed by a question and answer, and Sr. Manager of Fan Insights & Analytics Genevieve McNally provided feedback.
While there was certainly a focus on football in this project, McDonald knows the skills they learned can help in nearly every field.
"Being able to talk with them about the challenges they faced and tell them what we learned and how to approach it maybe a little bit differently is invaluable for them because you can take that with anything," McDonald said. "If you wanted to go work in real estate or something, well, there's information about houses and markets out there that you could use these same skills to get that data for that."
The project came together when team President Sashi Brown ran into Tobias and they began talking about Strength in Numbers, and Year 1 of the partnership was a clear success. But McDonald wants to make it an annual venture.
"I think there is a lot of need out there and we want to service that and support that as best we can," he said. "Strength in Numbers, the way John has it structured, was very professional.
"I think we'll continue that, and we're also looking at ways of scaling how we can help out. I'm pretty excited about some of the ways we're kind of trying to attack that in the future."
