![\"Hart](\"https:\/\/news.furman.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Hart-Crop-2.jpg\")
Hart Zwingelberg ’15 speaks at the 2019 Carolinas Sports Analytics Meeting (CSAM) hosted by Furman on April 13 in the Watkins Room of the Trone Student Center.<\/p><\/div>\n
Zwingelberg talked about that and more as one of two plenary speakers<\/a> at the 2019 Carolinas Sports Analytics Meeting (CSAM) hosted by Furman on April 13 in the Watkins Room of the Trone Student Center. A mathematics\/economics double major at Furman, Zwingelberg was thrilled to get the chance to give back to his alma mater.<\/p>\n \u201cFurman meant a lot to me and has given me a lot of opportunities,\u201d he said. \u201cOpening in the morning for the conference was pretty special.\u201d<\/p>\n Zwingelberg\u2019s position with the Fire is a new one as soccer rushes to catch up to the data-driven approach to game strategy and player evaluation that began sweeping other sports more than a decade ago.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have just come around in the last few years with starting to quantify and understand styles of play and performance-based metrics. Those are the types of things that I presented,\u201d he said. \u201cMy talk revolved around soccer analytics, in particular the new metrics and the different things going on.\u201d<\/p>\n An example is a new category called \u201cexpected goals,\u201d which is the score of a match based on the statistical probability of goals being scored compared to hundreds of thousands of similar scenarios in games already played. In other words, a 2-0 final may have actually been much closer than the score says \u2013 say 1.8-1.5 in expected goals \u2013 which theoretically allows a more accurate evaluation of performances by the team and individual players.<\/p>\n Furman last hosted the Carolinas Sports Analytics Meeting in 2016.<\/p><\/div>\n Zwingelberg, a native of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, said he was offered a similar position by another MLS team shortly after graduation, only then it was an unpaid internship. The fact that the same job is now in the front office of the highest levels of professional soccer in the U.S. shows how quickly the field is growing, which in turn opens a whole new world of opportunity for young math \u2013 and other \u2013 majors.<\/p>\n \u201cThis wasn\u2019t a thing even five years ago,\u201d he said. \u201cTo see (teams) starting to switch to a more analytically based and project-oriented front office, it\u2019s really great. And it\u2019s only going to explode from here.\u201d<\/p>\n The other speaker was Peter Keating, a senior writer at ESPN, who has worked with Furman math professors John Harris ’91, Liz Bouzarth and Kevin Hutson for several years\u00a0to devise formulas to predict upsets<\/a> in the NCAA men\u2019s basketball tournament. He discussed his most recent project attempting to identify the most dominant athlete of the last 20 years from all sports.<\/p>\n Spoiler alert: It was Tigers Woods even before Woods’ dramatic victory at The Masters<\/a> the day after CSAM.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/news.furman.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/CSAM-Crop.jpg\")