The movie, Moneyball, is based on the true story of how the Oakland Athletics baseball team used data analytics to build a competitive team on a limited budget.
“I saw the movie Moneyball in 2011 and walked out of the theatre saying, I want to do that!” Dave recalls. “So, I started an undergraduate degree I applied statistics, followed by La Trobe’s Master of Sports Analytics.”
After some time in the workforce, Dave returned to La Trobe to pursue an industry PhD in Sports Analytics with the Essendon Football Club.
“My PhD aims to improve objective measures of player performance and development for elite Australian football,” he says.
“It is the perfect project for me, because it gives me experience and exposure to an elite sports environment. It also allows me to apply my data analytics and statistics background to the problem of improving objective measures of player development.”
Dave says being embedded with the Essendon Football Club has been invaluable.
“It has been amazing to sit down with AFL coaches and discuss my work with them, how they see data analytics fitting in with their way of assessing player performance and development, as well as being able to implement their thinking into my data models.”
And while he loves Australian Rules Football, Dave hopes to one day combine his data expertise with his true passion – soccer.
“I would love to work with Football Australia in setting up data models to provide objective measures of player talent across all the age groups,” he says.
“With the rapid growth of women's sport, I think it would be rewarding to embed the data analytics process early into the growing professional culture of women’s soccer and have it become a cornerstone of how players are assessed for selection in the Matildas and junior representative teams.”
