Since my placement year at University I have tried to further my coding skills in R. In my final year at University Dr Sean Williams, my Dissertation Project Supervisor, ran an R Coding Club open to all Sport and Exercise Science students. This provided an excellent opportunity for me to delve into different sports datasets and experiment with different ways of visualising data.
The first shows an example of visualising cumulative data in the format of a gif. Here it is for the number of Tour de France wins for each team. It can be a great starting point before further investigating the data. For example, why do some teams take so long to get their first win, or stop winning after a certain timepoint? In this example of course it is usually due to when the team was formed or disbanded. Team Sky's successes began in 2012 with Wiggins but the team was only formed in 2010 and they have been fiercely competitive since.
Next, here shows an example of using Countermovement Jump data as a KPI in performance testing. The variable of interest is the flight time to contact time ratio and significant changes are visualised with a simple colour system; red for significant decrease, black for no significant changes and green for significant increase. This can be of great use for an S&C coach when monitoring athlete performance during a season. Although none in the image below show that decrease, they would be instantly flagged in the final column had any shown significant decreases in performance.
This data could also have been visualised in the form of bar charts, as shown below. This is also effective in highlighting significant change in athlete performance, once again through colour, with further detail given through visualising their mean performance and the upper and lower boundaries. These boundaries show the coefficient of variance in the data, which is useful in understanding if change is due to chance or a significant change in performance.
These are just some examples of how I have tried to upskill in R. Although I am not always able to give it as much time to further learn as I would like, I do hope to keep on developing these skills when possible.
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