Sport Management  News

Learning didn’t stop during spring break for dozens of Falk College students who took part in immersive travel opportunities. Falk College offers a wide array of travel programs for students, with study abroad and study away being pillars of the Syracuse University experience.

Three immersion travel programs this spring provided Falk students with unique opportunities for hands-on learning from leading industry professionals, while also discovering and embracing different cultures.

Ireland

Students enrolled in the SPM/EXE 300 “Sport Culture in Ireland” class spent nine days in Ireland over spring break. The group of 13 students, comprised of sport management and exercise science majors, traveled to iconic Irish spots such as the Cliffs of Moher, Temple Bar, and Kilmainham Gaol to experience the culture of Ireland.

The students visited the Na Fienna Gaelic Athletic Association club, where they participated in Gaelic football, hurling, and handball games with classmates while learning about the sports’ history and impact in Ireland. At University College Dublin’s Institute for Sport and Health, experts in the fields of sports medicine and exercise science gave insightful presentations about injury and rehabilitation research. At a visit to the Leinster Rugby Club, students learned from team officials about the role of technology in athlete development and what it takes to manage a winning sport organization.

Visit the Ireland 2025 blog to learn more about the students’ experiences in Ireland.

Italy

In each of the last two springs, students in the SPM/SAL 300 “Italian Football: Impact and Outcomes” class have visited Italy to meet with representatives from Serie A soccer clubs and learn about Italian culture surrounding soccer, or calcio.

The sport analytics students on this year’s trip met with representatives from Soccerment, an Italy-based artificial intelligence platform seeking to accelerate the adoption of data analytics into soccer; networked with front office officials from Bologna FC; and toured Viola Park, home of ACF Fiorentina. Students experienced exciting Serie A matchups at Stadio G. Sinigaglia, home of the Como 1907 football club, and Giuseppe Meazza Stadium, home of Inter Milan. Aside from soccer, students toured historic locations such as the Colosseum, Roman Forum, and Milan Cathedral. On the final day of the trip, students learned how to make authentic Italian pasta from scratch.

Los Angeles

Students have enjoyed the Falk in Los Angeles Career Exploration trip for more than a decade. Open to all Falk students, the trip offers students the opportunity to connect with industry professionals, explore career paths, and visit leading organizations in one of the country’s largest sport markets.

This year’s trip included stops at the NFL Network, FOX Sports, Los Angeles Chargers, Los Angeles Rams, Los Angeles Kings, Los Angeles Clippers, the Rose Bowl and more. Students met and networked with with Falk’s extensive alumni network based in southern California to set themselves up for successful careers in the industry.

Dear Falk College Family,

Happy Syracuse University Giving Day! March 27 is the day when Syracuse’s global community unites for 24 hours of impact, friendly competition, and plenty of Orange pride!

Here in Falk College, we’re promoting giving that provides Falk students with transformative learning experiences from the classroom to the community and around the globe.

You have several giving options. Visit our campaign page to give directly to the Falk College Dean’s Fund, or visit our giving page if you’d like to give to a different fund that will support students in a specific program. For our friends in the human dynamics’ programs, please know that gifts to your programs will follow you to your new homes in Arts and Sciences, the Maxwell School, and the School of Education.

Please consider making a gift today to help our students reach their full potential!

Sincerely,

Jeremy S. Jordan, PhD
Dean and Professor
Falk College

The United Football League and the Sport Analytics program at Syracuse University have entered an agreement that will allow Syracuse sport analytics students to complete statistical analysis and provide insights and visualizations to the UFL. The agreement marks the first time an American college or university has worked with the spring football league.

As part of the agreement, the UFL will provide Syracuse students with experience in professional football and access to its employees, while Syracuse will provide the data analysis skills of students from the leading sport analytics program in the country.

“The United Football League is proud to team up with the two-time national champion Sport Analytics program at Syracuse University,” said UFL President and CEO Russ Brandon, a member of Syracuse University’s Department of Sport Management Advisory Council. “Innovation is at the heart of the UFL, so it is only fitting that we seek out the creativity and the expertise of these students as we look toward a new approach to sports analytics.”

The UFL is the premier spring football league formed from the merger of the XFL and USFL in 2024. Under the combined ownership of RedBird Capital Partners, FOX, Dany Garcia, and Dwayne Johnson, the UFL features eight teams in key markets: Arlington, Texas; Birmingham, Ala.; Detroit, Mich.; Houston, Texas; Memphis, Tenn.; San Antonio, Texas; St. Louis, Mo., and Washington, D.C.

The 2025 UFL season will kick off at 8 p.m. ET Friday, when FOX Sports debuts FOX UFL Friday – a new night dedicated to UFL action taking place each Friday during the 10-week regular season – with a matchup featuring the St. Louis Battlehawks against the Houston Renegades. The league’s second season will conclude on Saturday, June 14, when ABC presents the 2025 UFL Championship Game.

“The UFL envisions itself as a gathering place for innovative thinkers,” said UFL Vice President of Football Technology Brad Campbell. “Thanks to the contributions of the sport analytics team at Syracuse we will be able to raise this vision to a whole new level.”

Under the leadership of Sport Analytics Undergraduate Director and Professor Rodney Paul, Syracuse’s sport analytics students captured back-to-back National Sport Analytics Championships in 2023-24, and they have won numerous player and team analytics competitions in football, basketball, and baseball. About 70 students are providing data collection and analysis for 13 of Syracuse University’s athletic teams, and the program’s other professional partners include the Kumamoto Volters’ men’s basketball team in Japan, the Farjestad BK women’s hockey team in Sweden, the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets, Major League Soccer’s CF Montreal, and others.

Under the agreement with the UFL, the Sport Analytics program is coordinating student participation, and seven students have joined the first phase, with more to be added later. The UFL is assigning projects related to league operations and initiatives, and the parties are holding regular meetings to discuss projects, share findings through visualizations (charts, graphs, dashboards), and strategize on next steps.

“We are honored to partner with the UFL and look forward to providing insights and actionable items for the teams and league,” Paul said. “The experience and feedback our students will gain from this partnership is something that’s impossible to replicate in the classroom. Opportunities like this have been our dream since the start of the program, and we are so appreciative of all the wonderful people in the UFL and how their experience and expertise will benefit our students in so many ways.”

About the UFL

The United Football League (UFL) is the professional spring football league born from the groundbreaking 2024 merger of the XFL and USFL. With the visionary backing of RedBird Capital Partners, FOX, Dany Garcia and Dwayne Johnson, the UFL is redefining the football landscape. Built on tradition and positioned to innovate and expand fan engagement and player opportunities, the league is poised for growth with its eight teams in key markets: Arlington (TX), Birmingham (AL), Detroit (MI), Houston (TX), San Antonio (TX), Memphis (TN), St. Louis (MO), and Washington D.C. The UFL is committed to pushing the boundaries of the game and delivering an elevated experience for players, fans, and partners alike.

About Syracuse University’s Sport Analytics Program:

The Sport Analytics program in the Falk College of Sport at Syracuse University is a first-of-its kind program focusing on key skills to prepare students for a career using analytics in sports. The curriculum approaches sport analytics from both the player/team performance and business side of sports. Students gain skills related to high-level mathematics, coding and database work, business courses, visualization, statistical modeling, and machine learning. In its brief history, Syracuse Sport Analytics majors have placed with teams across all major leagues in sports, betting and daily fantasy companies, and tech and business companies using a wide range of analytical skills.

Imagine the insights you could uncover by having every jump, swing, pivot and sprint captured and transformed into precise data. That’s exactly what students in the sport analytics program are doing, through a partnership established in 2022 between the Syracuse University Department of Athletics and the David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics. By revealing a deeper understanding of performance and potential, students collaborate with Orange coaching and training staff to deliver data-driven insights gathered through a combination of wearable technologies and good old stats-keeping.

“For the teams that have embedded these students into their programs, it’s worked out very well. They’ve been able to get insights that have led to a lot of success,” says sport management professor Rodney Paul, director of the sport analytics program. “That’s opened up doors for not just those students, but all the students who follow.”

The partnership originally started with the men’s soccer team, and head coach Ian McIntyre considers the sport analytics team an integral part of the program. “They played a very important role in helping us secure a national championship in 2022,” McIntyre says. “Our analytics team wonderfully complements our coaching staff to help create the best possible training environment for our players and allows our program to compete at the very highest national level.”

The program now includes 11 teams, with students contributing to performance analysis based on each team’s needs. “We created an internship program to add value by helping teams analyze their data in meaningful ways,” says sport analytics program manager Francesco Riverso.

Students gain practical experience, refine their skills and pass on their knowledge to new interns, creating a cycle of continuous improvement. “We don’t rebuild—we reload,” Paul says.

Tracking Movement for Real-Time Insights

When the Orange men’s soccer players take to the pitch, they’re outfitted in PlayerData vests with GPS trackers that provide real-time data on their movements. The sport analytics interns track and analyze metrics like total running distance, acceleration, deceleration, sprint distances, how often players speed up or slow down. The students generate heat maps that reveal player positioning during a match and have created two apps that allow them to organize their information into data visualizations. “We can transform the raw data in a way that allows the coaches to see it easily and gain insights,” says lead analyst Nick Rovelli ’24, G’25, a sport analytics graduate who has worked with the soccer team since 2022 and is now an applied data science graduate student.

During home games, Rovelli is on the sidelines while analyst Theo Schmidt ’26 sits in the stands, collecting data that he feeds to Rovelli, who communicates with the coaches. “It’s definitely high pressure, so there’s some growing pains,” Rovelli says. “But the coaches have been great at giving us positive feedback and are always encouraging us to do more.”

Even during away games, the analytics team watches matches on the ACC Network and ESPN+ to gather stats, view player data and communicate with coaches. They also create scouting reports, as well as pre- and postgame analyses. Next season, they plan to use Wyscout, a platform that offers video analysis tools and a comprehensive database of teams. “The program is a great opportunity—a win-win, both for the department and the students,” says Schmidt, who joined the team in 2023. “We’ve had to build so many tools. It allows us to experiment with different applications and really take advantage of the coaches’ willingness to let us learn.”

Monitoring Player Workloads

Women’s lacrosse analytics interns Caden Lippie ’25 and Ryan Severe ’25 will admit they didn’t know much about lacrosse before they began working with the team in 2022-23. But since then, they’ve helped monitor player performance through the VX Sport system, a wearable GPS technology that tracks the players’ movements in real time. “Working in a program for this extended amount of time is unique,” Lippie says. “You get a different perspective working with a small staff, which is a good experience.”

The data—including live metrics on game days—helps the coaching, training and conditioning staffs manage player loads and minimize injuries. “We can work someone back into practice from a recovery or injury standpoint,” says assistant strength and conditioning coach Mike Sullivan. “It helps us plan for the future in a safe manner so we can try to keep everyone healthy and minimize any risks of overloading them.”

Lippie and Severe upload data after practices and games into Microsoft Power BI, a software system that allows them to produce visualizations and reports. Lippie worked with associate athletic trainer Kat Chaney to incorporate a daily wellness survey the players take before practice into a dashboard with the GPS data. “It’s awesome for us to have a snapshot of each student-athlete on the team, of all their metrics we’re collecting and how the team is feeling on the whole,” Chaney says. “Caden’s information is helping us on a daily basis improve our communication with the student-athletes.”

Lippie and Severe both appreciate the opportunity to work with different technologies, especially as their use becomes more prevalent among college and pro teams. “It’s been a super valuable experience that could help us in our professional careers,” Severe says. “Learning the technologies that a lot of teams use and interacting with DI lacrosse coaches has been such an amazing experience.”

Capturing Pitching and Hitting Data

At Orange softball team practices early this semester, Gavi Sela ’26 and Andrew Diamond ’27 parked themselves behind the catchers to track pitches and hitting during batting sessions. “In the long run working with sports data, particularly in baseball or softball, will help my analytical skills, looking at all aspects of the data and being able to break it down, analyze it and look at the tendencies that a player or teams may have,” says Sela, lead analyst for the eight-member analytics team that launched a partnership with the softball team last fall.

From there, they log the location and outcome of the pitch as well as the kind of contact the batter makes. They feed the data into a spreadsheet and analyze it, helping to determine which pitches were successful and what batters were swinging or not swinging at. “The goal ultimately is to provide accurate insights to the coaching staff that can help the team improve its performance,” Diamond says.

Softball head coach Shannon Doepking says the analytics team “has already made an incredible impact on our program,” citing their work building out charts that help develop better hitting and pitching plans as well as in-depth scouting reports. “I’m excited for the future with this team and truly believe they will help us achieve goals that we have had with their help in true development of our student-athletes,” Doepking says.

As the softball season progresses, the analytics team hopes to work with other technologies, including Rapsodo, which tracks hitting and pitching data, and Synergy, a scouting platform that features opposing team statistics and game videos. They aim to build a foundation that will continue to grow the analytics program. While improving their analytical skills, they’re also developing interpersonal relationships with the team, learning from exchanges with coaches and players.

“Once we have a lot of data collected cleanly, we should be able to look into it at a deeper, more analytical level,” Diamond says. “Next year we’ll all be back and have a good feel for how everything works out year-round with the team.”

Effectively Communicating Data

Last season, the Syracuse women’s soccer team transitioned to wearing PlayerData vests, which use the live data from GPS trackers to monitor player workload. “I’ve worked for the team for three years now and I’ve loved every second of it,” says lead analyst Ian MacMiller ’25.

MacMiller was joined on match days by several other analytics interns who collected statistics on a shared spreadsheet and produced visualizations for a presentation that MacMiller shared with the coaches. “The interns’ main responsibility during games is to track stats that we communicate to the coaching staff so they can make necessary adjustments,” MacMiller says.

Along with the wearable technology data, the student analysts track ball losses, crossing accuracy, ball receptions in the attacking half of the field and other statistics that are “helpful for coaches to know what the players could work on in practices and games,” says analyst Matt Liddell ’25, who worked with the team last fall. “I got great data collection experience, which will definitely be important for lots of entry-level jobs in data analytics. It was a great test of my multitasking skills as well, since at times I was in charge of two to three statistics.”

MacMiller created dashboards through Power BI, so coaches could view data after practices and matches. For MacMiller, the opportunity to work closely with the coaching staff, including learning how analytics can be used to minimize injury prevention, has been a welcomed benefit. “The experience has allowed me to learn how to effectively communicate data and how coaches apply that data to their game plans and training sessions,” he says.

A Syracuse University story by Jay Cox originally published on March 4, 2025.

A research team from Syracuse University’s Falk College won the 19th Annual MIT Sloan Research Paper Competition.

Department of Sport Management student and lead author Alivia Uribe ’25, Sport Analytics Professor Shane Sanders, and Sport Analytics Associate Professor Justin Ehrlich teamed with University of Reading (U.K.) Professor James Reade and University of Stirling (Scotland) senior lecturer Carl Singleton to write “Do Behavioral Considerations Cloud Penalty-Kick Location Optimization in Professional Soccer: Game Theory & Empirical Testing using Polynomial Regression and ML Gradient Boosting.”

Their research was named best in field at the prestigious MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference March 7-8 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston.

The Sloan Sports Analytics Conference showcases cutting-edge research that’s featured in top media outlets throughout the world and has changed the way sports are analyzed. This year’s competition featured six sports tracks: Basketball, Baseball, Soccer, Football, Business of Sports, and Other Sports. Abstracts were selected based on the novelty, academic rigor, and impact of the research.

Ehrlich explained that the group submitted an abstract in the fall. Out of thousands of submissions, the most promising were invited to submit full papers. These manuscripts were then evaluated, and the authors of the top seven papers were invited to present orally at the conference in Boston earlier this month. A panel of industry experts judged these presentations, and the winner was announced during an awards ceremony at the conclusion of the conference.

I am incredibly proud of our team’s work as it resulted in a fantastic project that resonates deeply with others,” Ehrlich says. “Although aiming for riskier, higher areas of the goal can yield greater expected conversion rates, players typically avoid these zones due to the increased risk of missing entirely, which carries negative perceptions. Our findings generated enthusiasm among many attendees and received considerable attention at the conference.”

Uribe, a forward on the Syracuse University women’s soccer team, is the first female lead author to be on the Research Paper Competition winning team in MIT Sloan’s 19-year history, according to the event organizers.

“This is something I’m extremely proud of,” says Uribe, a sport analytics minor. “I could not be more grateful for the professors who have helped me create this opportunity. The knowledge and expertise I bring into it as a student-athlete is something very unique.”

Sanders and Ehrlich built on their previous analytics research to assist Uribe with her research, while Reade and Singleton provided invaluable soccer data. This was the second consecutive year that Sanders and Ehrlich had a research paper selected among the top seven at MIT Sloan. Last year, they presented their study on the NBA that shows the average expected value of 3-point shots has become less than 2-pointers since the 2017-18 season.

“Falk College is an ideal place to work and teach, the best college I’ve ever been affiliated with by far,” Sanders says. “The administrators, faculty, and students really pull together here like nowhere else I’ve been. Moreover, our leadership team has positioned sport analytics to shine as a program.”

Read the team’s full research paper on the MIT Sloan Research Papers web page.

After students from the Sport Analytics program at Syracuse University captured back-to-back undergraduate team titles at the AXS National Collegiate Sports Analytics Championship in 2023-24, the program had just one more mountain to climb: An individual championship.

Late last month in Nashville, Tennessee, sport analytics major Jonah Soos ’25 reached that pinnacle by winning the championship in the undergraduate business analytics division.

“It was awesome,” Soos says. “Any time you can win a national event of this caliber against steep competition, it’s an incredibly validating feeling for the work you put in.

“I was so proud to represent Syracuse and the Sport Analytics program and all the time and effort they put in to cultivating the best rising talent in sports,” Soos adds. “I can’t give them enough credit for the work they’ve done and opportunities they’ve given me, so to give back and increase the exposure of the program is always something I enjoy doing.”

The Syracuse University undergraduate team of Soos, Piper Evans, Madelyn Forster, and Hunter Geise just missed a three-peat by finishing a narrow second to the team champions from the University of Iowa. Graduate analytics students Andrew Odnoralov and Owen B. Brown also participated in the competition for Syracuse.

Sport Analytics Undergraduate Director and Professor Rodney Paul and Sport Analytics Program Coordinator Jackie Dorchester accompanied the students to Nashville and mentored the group, and Soos praised Paul, Dorchester, and Director of Corporate Partnerships and External Engagement Francesco Riverso for “making opportunities like these a possibility.”

“Our group did an excellent job in a challenging and exciting event,” Paul says. “Jonah, as always, was incredible; calm and poised in the heat of competition. He’s truly a superstar as he makes it look so easy. You can almost see ‘the game’ slow down when you hear him present and see the literal art he creates with data. It is amazing to witness.

“We are so lucky to have a talent like Jonah in our program,” Paul says. “We’ll miss him after graduation, but I can’t wait to watch his career unfold.”

Soos, who is minoring in economics and sport management, has worked as a baseball analytics intern at Wasserman, a baseball talent agency, and he’s currently a data engineering intern for the Syracuse University men’s basketball team. This past August, after presenting his research on pitchers at the Saber Seminar in Chicago, Soos was approached by several Major League Baseball teams was hired by the Cincinnati Reds as a baseball analytics trainee for the 2025 season.

We reached out to Soos to learn more about his experience in Nashville and what it took to become a national champion. Here’s that conversation:

What was the format for the individual and team competitions at the National Championship?

It was set up in a March Madness-style bracket, starting with 64 students in 16 different rounds of four students, and two students advanced from each round. Points were awarded for teams for every round a student advanced and totaled over each section (undergraduate and graduate) once the competition concluded to create the team standings.

As students, we presented our five-minute presentations to a room of judges each round, and if selected in the top two, we moved on to face other students until a winner-take-all final four in front of the entire conference. The first day was used for data analysis and the heats, and the second day was for the final four and a networking challenge.

What was your “assignment,” and were you given any advance notice of what you would be doing?

Our assignment was analyzing PWHL (Professional Women’s Hockey League) social media data provided by Zoomph to create analytical insights about ways the brand can continue to grow and expand. We were provided sample data and a study guide ahead of time to think through the question and understand the data. Most questions on the study guide were very broad and built to give a lot of flexibility for interpretation and analysis, leading to the true assignment of creatively interpreting the data to find critical data-driven insights.

What was your reaction when you received your assignment?

I definitely felt like the competition played into my strengths. My favorite part of data analysis is the storytelling component–placing data in context to find actionable insights and key takeaways that anyone can understand. In this format with quick presentations and limited time, you really have to be at your best and cut the fluff, only giving judges quick hitters to make a cohesive story.

Can you explain what kind of data you received, what you needed to analyze, and how you went about that?

We received data from different social media platforms for each PWHL team tracking post reach, engagement, and platform-specific effects. We were given roughly four hours to create the data-driven insights and build a presentation before everything was locked and no changes could be made.

That sounds nerve-wracking. What was your strategy under such a tight deadline?

When looking at the practice information, I was lacking some direction and only prepped different functions to clean the data and get it into a usable format. At 6 a.m. on the morning of the competition, I had an idea almost slap me in the face: It was super simple but innovative and I knew I could tell a compelling story. I don’t know a lot about hockey, so I placed myself in the shoes of the PWHL social media managers and asked how I would engage myself. Considering I would be new to the brand, if the post reached a lot of people like me, and I interacted or engaged with the post, I would deem that as the most successful since you’re broadening your fanbase while also generating active fans.

I entered looking to build something to fit that narrative and took the four hours to execute it, and found some interesting results. The hardest part was probably the time constraint itself, as when you’re working through a problem like this, it’s hard to manage your time effectively and execute all your ideas in such a short window. I found myself constantly pushing my own boundaries to work quick and thorough, having to focus to overcome different errors, challenges, and kinks in my analysis. Finishing the project was a win in itself, and when I looked back and saw the visual and analytical quality I generated, I was proud of myself! I felt I set myself up for success.

How was the data judged and how was it determined that you were the champion of the undergraduate division?

Each round, you would give your five-minute presentation to judges (more judges each round as you progressed), answer some questions, and wait outside as each competitor did the same. It was grueling–you had no idea whether you were scraping by in the hot seat or flying through–but there was a fun sense of camaraderie between all of the competitors, and I made some really awesome connections with people.

The first round was definitely the hardest; you had never given your presentation before and had very little prep time, so I was definitely the most nervous walking out of that presentation. As the rounds went on, I was in a flow state and felt every time my presentation got stronger and stronger up until the finals. The final round, unlike the previous ones, was a winner-take-all from the four students that advanced through the elite eight. That was the first real chance to size up your competition, see what everyone had done, and I was impressed with how vastly different each presentation was despite having the same data and objectives. Judges then voted on the order of the final four presentations, and I was fortunate enough to be crowned champion.

From your experiences at Syracuse University and Falk College, what is it about the program that prepares you to have this kind of success at the national level?

The Sport Analytics program is revolutionizing education in sport. To have the opportunity to so frequently interact with alumni in the industry, learn using real world data, and practice and compete against peers to build a collective wealth of knowledge, it’s what leads us to win all these competitions. I’ve learned so much from everyone around me–my peers, mentors, professors, and industry professionals–and without that experience, there is no way I would be where I am.

To learn more academic programs, experiential learning, and career opportunities in sport analytics, visit the Falk College Department of Sport Management website.

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