The Importance of Visualization in Sport

This week's Pacey Performance Podcast is all about data visualisation and communication. Eva Murray, Lead Evangelist at Snowflake, Julian Haigh, Director of Sport Science at Inter Miami and Adam Sheehan, Strength and Conditioning Coach at Munster Rugby are our guests today.

We are all dealing with more data in aour daily lives whether that be from fitness trackers to smart meters in our homes to track our electricity usage. But those working in pro sport are collecting hundreds of thousands of rows of data each day and are expected to communicate that back to coaches. But how can we best do that? That's what the next hour is all about.

In the first half of this episode we focus on the first step in this process which is asking the right question. If we're not asking the right question, how can we come up with the right answer? We then dive into the experiences of Eva, Adam and Julian who each explain their experiences, good and bad when it comes to delivering messages using data to coaches.

In the second half of the episode we discuss the various methods of visualising data, which ones have been successful and how data visualisation software has become an integral part of a sports scientist’s armory. If you are interested in making the most of your data and want to make a real impact with it, check out this episode with Adam, Eva and Julian.

Main talking points -

• How to know that you're asking the right question
• Leveraging data using data visualisations
• Options for data visualisations
• "If you can't explain it, don't use it"
• How to best create context around data
• The importance of storytelling within data
• Data visualisation rules - the fundamentals