All-Star The Road To Worlds Data Analysis

[Ashley]

Hi everyone,

I'm taking a grad class this semester called Visual Analytics. For our final project, we have to take a data set and analyze and visualize the data. I decided to use my data from the Road to Worlds. Hopefully I'll be making an interactive subset of the site with lots of charts and graphs and explaining the story it tells.

For the first part of project, we have to submit a needs assessment. Some classmates have so-called "customers" that they can interview, and others have to make up and imagine their own customers. But I have real users and figured I'd ask you guys!

If you can reply below and let me know some trends that you'd like to find in the data, I'd really appreciate it.

1. What is your role in the industry (athlete, parent, coach, fan, other)?
2. What are you trying to get out of your visit to the site (checking out the competition, checking out the field depth at worlds, ???)
3. What analyses of the data would you find interesting? Some examples I've though of:
- The strength of a division based on the percentage of paid bids (i.e. large senior/large coed are almost completely full paid bids). Alternatively, the percentage of teams within a division that did/didn't get a bid
- Travel distance between gym location and bid event
- See which divisions have been most affected by the decrease in AL bids this year.
- Heat maps comparing bid events and gym locations
- Anything else?!

Any thoughts/ideas you have would be great. Feel free to PM me if you don't want to post publicly.

 

[p.o.k.]

Item 3 is a huge assumption - division strength based on paid bids. It is not necessarily that straight forward. How were bids distributed, what type of scoring - is it apples to apples, and we all know EP's have division favorites - coed vs all girl. You would probably need to look at the what type of score sheet was used - in my experience the results can be vastly different for like performance. Why for example are there 3 times as many small coed full paid bids than small senior this year. Is everyone saying that division just totally sucks, or is there something else going on this year, has scoring changed (skills across divisions given the same point value or is a division just awarded based on type) or has it been like that consistently year after year. I have been to several comps this year and no all girl bid was awarded. You may have to do a historical view and probably stratify your data based on certain categories. It may show nothing or a new trend to think about.

 

[Ashley]

Item 3 is a huge assumption - division strength based on paid bids. It is not necessarily that straight forward. How were bids distributed, what type of scoring - is it apples to apples, and we all know they have division favorites - coed vs all girl. You would probably need to look at the what type of score sheet was used - in my experience the results can be vastly different for like performance. Why for example are there 3 times as many small coed full paid bids than small senior this year. Is everyone saying that division just totally sucks or is there something else going on this year has scoring changed or has it been like that consistently like this year after year. I have been to several comps this year and no all girl bid was awarded. You may have to do a historical view and probably stratify your data based on certain categories. It may show nothing or a new trend to think about.

It's definitely a stretch. Probably I can't make an assumption about "strongest divisions" based on something like that, but it would be interesting to see that data year over year and how that breakdown has changed.

 

[p.o.k.]

Item 3 is a huge assumption - division strength based on paid bids. It is not necessarily that straight forward. How were bids distributed, what type of scoring - is it apples to apples, and we all know EP's have division favorites - coed vs all girl. You would probably need to look at the what type of score sheet was used - in my experience the results can be vastly different for like performance. Why for example are there 3 times as many small coed full paid bids than small senior this year. Is everyone saying that division just totally sucks, or is there something else going on this year, has scoring changed (skills across divisions given the same point value or is a division just awarded based on type) or has it been like that consistently year after year. I have been to several comps this year and no all girl bid was awarded. You may have to do a historical view and probably stratify your data based on certain categories. It may show nothing or a new trend to think about.

Well it seems I must of sorted road to worlds strangely - there is not 3 times more sm coed paid bids than sm sr. There is more sm coed than sm sr just not three times. That being said out west there have been very few all girl paid bids awarded this year - just seems strange to me.

 

[quitthedrama]

Hi everyone,

I'm taking a grad class this semester called Visual Analytics. For our final project, we have to take a data set and analyze and visualize the data. I decided to use my data from the Road to Worlds. Hopefully I'll be making an interactive subset of the site with lots of charts and graphs and explaining the story it tells.

For the first part of project, we have to submit a needs assessment. Some classmates have so-called "customers" that they can interview, and others have to make up and imagine their own customers. But I have real users and figured I'd ask you guys!

If you can reply below and let me know some trends that you'd like to find in the data, I'd really appreciate it.

1. What is your role in the industry (athlete, parent, coach, fan, other)?
2. What are you trying to get out of your visit to the site (checking out the competition, checking out the field depth at worlds, ???)
3. What analyses of the data would you find interesting? Some examples I've though of:
- The strength of a division based on the percentage of paid bids (i.e. large senior/large coed are almost completely full paid bids). Alternatively, the percentage of teams within a division that did/didn't get a bid
- Travel distance between gym location and bid event
- See which divisions have been most affected by the decrease in AL bids this year.
- Heat maps comparing bid events and gym locations
- Anything else?!

Any thoughts/ideas you have would be great. Feel free to PM me if you don't want to post publicly.

1. Parent
2. which teams have which bids; field depth at Worlds (for all divisions); bid comps and locations; bid declarations for each competition
3. I do think the % of paid bids can show the strength of the division, particularly the first half of the season and I find this information interesting. I am sure there are outside influences which skew the information, but it is still fairly accurate. I would also like to know scores of bid recipients at each competition (but I know this information is often withheld by the EP). I like the heat map of bids/locations idea. I would like to see the # of teams attending each bid event broken down between Worlds teams and non Worlds teams.

 

[ilikebigbows]

1. Alum/fan :(
2. Who has which bid? Who will my old team be competing against? How long did it take XYZ to get a bid? Who got a bid at ABC competition?
3. Year-to-year comparison of individual teams at Worlds/NCA/Cheersport (placements), quickness of attaining bid, etc. It'll be neat to see how far teams have come over the years.

 

[Cheergrandma]

1. What is your role in the industry ,( parent, )
2. What are you trying to get out of your visit to the site - Who is in our division, how many of each bid, history of competition teams attended (but there are mistakes in Road to Worlds on this),
3. What analyses of the data would you find interesting? Team's history at past Worlds(type of bid, placement), How many AL bids made it to finals, Event whose bid winners are most successful (eg. number of teams that won a bid at NCA that went on to place in top 10)

Good Luck with you project!

 

[cheermommaRN]

It might be worth setting your survey up in SurveyMonkey and then posting the link. This way you have an organized way of tracking your responses and evaluating the data you collect.
If you need any help I do a lot of data analytics and @cheergoogle probably has some pointers as well.

 

[Ashley]

It might be worth setting your survey up in SurveyMonkey and then posting the link. This way you have an organized way of tracking your responses and evaluating the data you collect.
If you need any help I do a lot of data analytics and @cheergoogle probably has some pointers as well.

I thought about that, but I only need a handful of responses to do the "Needs Assessment" part of the final project.

I was limiting myself to my data, but I might be able to take advantage of some of the big worlds spreadsheets we've done in the past to present some of the analysis on bids vs. final placements.

 

[MaineStar234]

I'm not sure if you're still looking for responses, but if you are...
1. I'm a retired athlete, so I guess that makes me a fan now maybe?
2. I used the website to see what teams were attending each comp hoping for bids and how steep the competition for bids would be at each event.
3. I would find how far specific teams typically travels each year for bid events, the average distance a team in general traveled to compete at a specific event, the average number of bid comps teams go to before securing their paid bid, as well as most of the other statistics brought up by users in this thread.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[vivskivs]

Hi everyone,

I'm taking a grad class this semester called Visual Analytics. For our final project, we have to take a data set and analyze and visualize the data. I decided to use my data from the Road to Worlds. Hopefully I'll be making an interactive subset of the site with lots of charts and graphs and explaining the story it tells.

For the first part of project, we have to submit a needs assessment. Some classmates have so-called "customers" that they can interview, and others have to make up and imagine their own customers. But I have real users and figured I'd ask you guys!

If you can reply below and let me know some trends that you'd like to find in the data, I'd really appreciate it.

1. What is your role in the industry (athlete, parent, coach, fan, other)?
2. What are you trying to get out of your visit to the site (checking out the competition, checking out the field depth at worlds, ???)
3. What analyses of the data would you find interesting? Some examples I've though of:
- The strength of a division based on the percentage of paid bids (i.e. large senior/large coed are almost completely full paid bids). Alternatively, the percentage of teams within a division that did/didn't get a bid
- Travel distance between gym location and bid event
- See which divisions have been most affected by the decrease in AL bids this year.
- Heat maps comparing bid events and gym locations
- Anything else?!

Any thoughts/ideas you have would be great. Feel free to PM me if you don't want to post publicly.

I would love to see the results and help any way possible. What software are you using?

 

[Ashley]

I would love to see the results and help any way possible. What software are you using?

I used tableau a bit at the beginning just to try and see some trends and get some quick visualizations up.

Now I'm using d3, a JavaScript library, to build an interactive chart and map. The analysis is going to be a little light, d3 is pretty slow and tedious because of how flexible it is, but I think it's a pretty cool visualization.

I'm presenting Wednesday, I'll post a link after that! (It's really not as exciting as it sounds, I just have a map showing where people travel to comps).

 

[Ashley]

So, I present tomorrow and made myself come to a stopping place. It's not super polished, but here's the visualization. It plots all the gyms and all of the competition and shows travel relationships between them. I didn't have location data for every gym.

And I would totally ignore the text box that shows up with average miles/comps. I think the data in it is wrong somehow, but I can't be bothered to figure out why:

http://theroadtoworlds.com/viz/