Club Spotlight: Sports Analytic Club
After running the Basketball Circle for a few years and realizing there wasn’t a club for Sports Analytics, Chase Wong (2024) teamed up with Noah Balough (2025) to start the Sports Analytics club this past August. Wong has been playing basketball for as long as he can remember and is a big supporter of the Warriors, and both Wong and Baloguh are interested in fantasy sports before starting the club, so they thought creating this club would be a great opportunity to engage with different sports. Their interest in math and experience in taking advanced math classes at OHS also better prepared Wong and Balough to get involved in sports analytics.
According to Wong, the goal of the Sports Analytics Club is to “invite guest speakers and work on sports analytics research papers to submit to various conferences.” Most recently, the club has submitted a team paper to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which is one of the most prestigious high school conferences in this field in the world. If successful, the team will present at MIT in March, and they also plan to attend other events such as the Carnegie Mellon Sports Analytics Conference. In the past few months, the club leaders have enjoyed working with the students and their club sponsor, Mr. James Fredericks, a math instructor at OHS. Recently, they have valued “spending some time talking about sports and the football season going on right now” as well as hearing a variety of perspectives in discussions. Despite a successful start to the year and many new members, one of the challenges that Wong and Balough have had to work through is “finding a sport that everyone is knowledgeable about and interested in.” They have found that it requires compromise and flexibility on everyone’s part, for example, for their most recent MIT Sloan paper submission, the group decided to write about American Football. This has been a great opportunity for those with less knowledge of the sport to learn more about it from students who follow it more closely.
The Sports Analytics Club looks forward to an exciting year ahead and encourages anyone interested to check it out!