One AI-based advancement at a time, UF leaders are transforming the sports industry
As emerging technologies like AI reshape sport industries and professional demands evolve, it is essential for students to graduate with the expertise to thrive in their future careers. To ensure that these students are set up for success, the UF College of Health & Human Performance has launched a new sports analytics program.
Led by Scott Nestler, Ph.D., CAP, PStat, a professor of practice in the Department of Sport Management and a national analytics and data science expert, the program ties back to the UF & Sport Collaborative – a five-part project intended to elevate UF’s presence on the global stage in sports performance, healthcare and communication.
“Tools and insights that previously were only available to professional sports teams are now coming to the college level, and it makes sense for universities to begin using these data, technologies and new analytic methods,” Nestler said.
The sports analytics program fosters collaboration between academic units, such as the Warrington College of Business and the University Athletic Association, helping bridge the gap between sport research and innovation and empowering students to address real-world challenges through data and AI.
For example, the program offers opportunities to leverage technology and analytics for strategic decision making in player acquisition, team formation and in-game decisions. Beyond performance metrics, the program also explores marketing strategies and revenue analytics, providing a well-rounded understanding of the field.
“When you have enough data and a large enough sample of individuals, AI can help make predictions that otherwise would take prohibitively longer for a human to accomplish with traditional methods,” said Garrett Beatty, Ph.D., the assistant dean for innovation and entrepreneurship and an instructional associate professor in the College of Health & Human Performance’s Department of Applied Physiology and Kinesiology. “Because those data volumes are getting so large, AI models, machine learning, deep learning and other strategies can be leveraged to make sense and glean insights from sport and human performance data in ways that have never been done before.”
The program seeks to offer several educational opportunities, such as individual courses, certificate programs and potentially a full degree program. In the long term, Nestler envisions the program evolving into a center or institute, beginning with establishing a research lab in the spring.
Additionally, the program will leverage the university’s supercomputer, HiPerGator, to analyze larger data sets and use newer predictive modeling machine learning algorithms.
“As faculty and staff move from working with box score and play-by-play data to using tracking data, which contains coordinates of all players and the ball on the field or court tens of times per second, the size of data files in sports analytics has grown tremendously,” Nestler said. “HiPerGator, with its large storage capacity and multiple central processing units/graphic processing units, is ideal for using in sports analytics work in 2025.”
Nestler also aims to increase student involvement by enhancing UF’s Sport Analytics Club and hiring research assistants to work on projects for the University Athletic Association.
“We need to take a broader view of what AI is and realize that it incorporates a lot of what we’ve been calling data science and analytics in the form of machine learning models, which came more out of statistics and computer science. Those are types of AI and those that I think will largely continue to be used in the coming years within the sports space,” Nestler said. “Also, we’re continuing to see growth in the number of people interested in working in this space, and I don’t foresee that changing. Fortunately, we are also seeing the number of opportunities available to those with the appropriate skills increase as well.”