Analytics for Decision Making in Sports Performance

Sporting organisations, analysts and sport scientists work in environments that contain complex problems. For example, what type of drills to add in a training session, how much training an athlete should complete in a week, what athlete to select in a draft and if an athlete can progress quickly from an injury, in order to return to play.

Recent improvements in sports technologies have increased the accessibility and volume of data to capture information that may help the above stakeholders make decisions, yet solely, it is not possible to make sense of these sources without assistance. To assist decision makers in environments whereby the data available is large and beyond the information processing capabilities of a human, decision support systems may be of use. Decision support systems assist with organisational decision making by using objective data to generate a recommendation or assessment.


In this unit, students will learn how a decision support development framework can be utilised in high-performance sport. Students will conceptually map a sport performance problem, by evaluating the context, output and process of a decision support system. Students will then synthesise how various machine learning can be applied to form different outputs, decisions and recommendations. Students will translate findings from decision support systems and critique how they may be able to fit into a high-performance sport setting.