Math Students Give Davidson Athletics An Edge
The first time he saw Stephen Curry play basketball in 2006, Tim Chartier didn’t know much about the freshman guard.
"I don’t think I knew his name yet," he says. "I did know that he was a very good math student."
That’s because Tim — or Dr. Chartier, as he’s known around the Davidson campus — is a math and computer science professor. And earlier that fall, the professors in Dr. Chartier's department had discussed promising students in Calculus I.
"We do talk about: is there anyone that we should be encouraging to be a math major?And this young basketball player came up," Dr. Chartier recalls. "And so the first time I ever saw Steph Curry, I turned to my wife and I pointed and I said, 'That’s the kid who’s doing really well in Calc I.'
"I don’t necessarily identify him that way now."
Before he was an NBA star, Steph Curry played for Davidson. (Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
Stephen Curry famously led Davidson to the Elite Eight of the 2008 NCAA Tournament.
But more recently, behind the scenes, Dr. Chartier and a group of math-minded students have also aided the Davidson basketball program.
Dr. Chartier now oversees a student group called "Cats Stats," which uses advanced analytics to help the university's sports teams.
"The manpower we have is extensive," says Matt McKillop, the Davidson men's basketball team's associate head coach. "So when I walk into my office on a Monday, and we've got a game that following Saturday, I'm looking at a piece of paper that they've crafted that basically tells me everything I need to be aware of as I begin my — all the work I'm going to put into watching film and scouting an opponent. So the time they save us is extraordinary."
And helping scout men's basketball opponents is just a small part of what Cat Stats now does to help Davidson. But getting to this point, forging this alliance between the college’s math experts and its athletes, wasn’t so easy.
It required a math professor who is perhaps a bit unconventional.
Dr. Chartier
Seth Kindig started at Davidson in 2010. As a sophomore he took Dr. Chartier’s linear algebra class. Early in the semester, one of Seth’s friends pointed something out about their professor.
" 'Have you ever noticed that he, like, he uses his hands to teach a lot?' " Seth recalls. "Come to find out later that Dr. Chartier is actually a mime in his free time."
"Another thing was — I don't know if he still does, but he at least used to keep, like, a 12 pack of Diet Coke in his office," says Ford Higgins, who also started at Davidson in 2010 and came to know Dr. Chartier. "And, man, he would crush those things."
(For the record, Dr. Chartier says it’s no longer true that he keeps a 12 pack of Diet Coke in his office at all times. He keeps two.)
Professor Tim Chartier oversees a student group called Cats Stats which uses advanced analytics to help the college's sports teams. (Courtesy Davidson College)
But more important to this story than the miming or the Diet Coke was that, since 2009, Dr. Chartier had been using math to predict the outcomes of the NCAA Tournament. As a homework assignment, he’d even had students build their own models to fill out their brackets
And, for the summer of 2013, Dr. Chartier asked student Seth Kindig to stick around to work as a research assistant on a basketball-related study.
They were trying to use math to figure out which college teams played a similar style of basketball — and Seth and Dr. Chartier wanted to see if the results they were getting made any sense.
So Dr. Chartier reached out to some of the Davidson men's basketball team's assistant coaches.
"One of the nice things about Davidson is we’re a school of 2,000 students. I’m sending an email to someone that I know, and so I will get a response. That doesn’t guarantee interest," Dr. Chartier says with a laugh.
"I was interested in it, but I didn't think too much of it," Matt McKillop recalls. "I felt like ... I was almost doing him a favor."
At the time Matt and the rest of the Davidson staff were like most college basketball coaches: they only looked at traditional stats — such as points, rebounds, turnovers — and they didn’t really know how advanced analytics could be applied to basketball.
Then Seth and Dr. Chartier showed Matt and another assistant the results of their work.
"And they said, ‘Oh, this makes a lot of sense,’ " Dr. Chartier recalls. "And then they said, ‘Oh, you used mathematics for this?’ And we said, 'Yes.' "
"It was eye-opening in a number of ways," Matt says.
The coaches started asking their own questions.
" 'Could you answer this for us? Or this for us?' " Dr. Chartier recalls.
Around that same time, Matt learned that two of the basketball team’s student managers — Miles Abbett and Ford Higgins — were also math majors interested in advanced analytics.
And when the school year began, Dr. Chartier got a visit from Seth, Miles and Ford. They asked if they could work together to help the men’s basketball team.
"I mean, from a professor point of view, I have three students asking if they can do more math with me, so I was like, 'Of course!' ” Dr. Chartier recalls.
But he also cautioned the group: the Davidson basketball program was successful — it’s not like the team needed to make any radical changes. Even after losing Stephen Curry — who, per Dr. Chartier, voluntarily took Calc II, but ended up majoring in sociology — the Wildcats had been back to the NCAA Tournament twice.
"And so I also was very honest: 'Yes, we can try. But to be quite frank, I don’t know if we’ll actually create something that they can actually use. If you’re OK with that, I’m all in,' " Dr. Chartier recalls. "And they said, 'Yes, we want to try.' "
So the group that would come to be known as Cats Stats was born.
Cats Stats ... And An 'Old School' Head Coach
Ford, Miles and Seth started crunching numbers. But they and coach Matt McKillop also needed to get Davidson’s longtime head coach on board.
"He has a pretty old school approach," Matt says. "He was not as quick to be interested in seeing these numbers."
So Matt proceeded with finesse.
"We would give him a little bit and a little bit more, and hopefully we'd have some film to back up some of these numbers with," he says.
But the team's head coach had good reason to trust Matt.
"He may not always make it appear that way, but I think so — deep down I think so," Matt says with a laugh.
See, Matt McKillop has a pretty strong connection with the Davidson head coach. It’s his father, Bob McKillop.
"He’s the kind of guy that will be like, 'Ah, I don’t even want to think about analytics.' But then he’ll plan a practice, and it’ll be designed to emphasize certain things that we talked about," Matt says. "So, one of those things like, he's listening, but he's not hearing you. Or he's hearing, but he doesn't want you to know that he's listening. So it was delicate."
After playing for his father Bob McKillop (left), Matt McKillop (right) is now Davidson's associate head coach. (Courtesy Davidson College)
Meanwhile, the three original Cats Stats members faced their own challenges.
Seth studied lineup efficiency, essentially looking at how different combinations of Davidson players fared on the court together.
That meant Seth would have to track which combination of players was on the court at all times — and record the outcome of each possession: made basket, missed basket, or turnover.
"So I was in my dorm room, late at night most of the time. I would watch film of the game with the Excel spreadsheet open, just basically hunched over the keyboard typing in numbers as fast as I could," Seth recalls.
At first, he says, it took him four hours to get through a game.
Ford, meanwhile, wrote up his first scouting report for one of Davidson’s opponents.
The coaches wanted something that would be easy to read. But what Ford turned in was "pretty much just a wall of text."
"It was not good," he adds with a laugh.
But Ford quickly got the format down. And instead of needing four hours to get through the film of each game, Seth cut the process to an hour.
And Matt says his dad began to trust the analytics more and more.
"Once he saw that we were making the right decisions, I think he was pretty bought in to the extent that he possibly could," Matt says.
Becoming Part Of The Team
About a third of the way through that 2013-14 season, the coaches brought Seth and Dr. Chartier to a game in upstate New York. They were in the locker room before tipoff.
"Where the coaches go over the last points of 'This is what we need to be thinking when we play the game,' " Dr. Chartier recalls. "And Seth suddenly turned to me and says, 'My goodness. This is all my work.' "
Everything was going well. But two things began to dawn on Dr. Chartier.
"First of all, I was very aware that the coaching staff depended on the work that we did," Dr. Chartier says. "That created a lot of concern, mainly because all the members of the group were seniors."
And there was certainly no recruiting budget or scholarships to offer for Cats Stats.
Nevertheless, that next year, five new students joined, and the group once again supported the men’s basketball team. From there, the club took off.
In the third year, there were 13 members. They started working with the women’s basketball team, too. The fourth year, there were 30 students.
This year, Dr. Chartier says, there are more than 80 Cats Stats members.
"At this point, we support men and women's basketball, men and women's soccer, volleyball, football, baseball, swimming," he says. "And we started some field hockey work this year as well."
(In case you're wondering how advanced analytics can help the swim team, Cats Stats recently studied the optimal amount of time spent swimming under water after diving into the pool at the start of a race.)
And Cats Stats has now become part of the recruiting pitch to prospective Davidson athletes. When Matt McKillop brings high school prospects to campus, he doesn’t just show them the training facilities and the basketball gym. He’ll introduce them to Dr. Chartier.
"It's unique that we can recruit a player and say, 'Hey, here's a New York Times article about one of our professors, what he does with analytics,' ” Matt says.
I ask Matt if other coaches express jealousy when they learn of Davidson's mathematics help.
"I haven't really seen much jealousy or had too many conversations with coaches about it," he says. "Everybody’s fairly secretive. You know, I have a Cats Stats shirt, but I don't walk around in it when I'm recruiting or around other college coaches. I don't want to draw too much attention to one of the benefits that we have."
Except there’s already at least one basketball coach out there who has the inside scoop on the analytics help the Davidson men’s basketball program is getting.
Seth Kindig — one of the founding members of Cats Stats — now teaches at a high school in Georgia.
"I have taught every high school math. This year, I’m teaching AP Calculus for the first time," he says. "And, kind of most important to me, is that I also am the varsity girls basketball coach."
I probably don’t have to tell you that Seth keeps track of his team’s lineup efficiencies.
If they could build an app, I could too: A non-programmer’s path to programming
I’ve been coding full time for approximately three years. Prior to working as a developer, I lived a completely different life, doing jobs that I didn’t care about just to pay the bills. Before going back to school in 2010 for computer science, I worked as an administrative assistant. At that time, my roommate and my boyfriend, both of whom were getting degrees in electrical engineering, were building an app together. I helped them with some of the design, and knew I was as intelligent as they were, and I thought “If they could do it, so could I.” So I took an entry-level programming class which I went to during my lunch break from work, and I got an A-. From there, I decided to go back to school to get a degree in computer science.
Currently I am an associate software engineer on the core services team at MuleSoft, a San Francisco-based enterprise software company, where I’ve been for just over six months. The work is interesting and I’m learning a lot. The projects I work on have given me the ability to work with a variety of libraries and frameworks and in several code bases, and I work with a great team who are collaborative and supportive.
Changing careers or just completely jumping into a new field isn’t always easy, particularly with engineering and programming, but there are a few things I’ve learned that made it doable for me. If you’re willing to build up your skills and put in a lot of work, that change is completely possible.
How to enter the world of programming
1. Take an intro course on programming. I spent some time trying to learn to program on my own, but there were some important basics that I wasn’t getting by going the solo route. Often self-service online tutorials skip over some of the fundamentals; I’ve interviewed prospects who were self-taught and passed on them not because they were self-taught, but because they couldn’t answer basic algorithm questions. Going back to school full time may not be an option for everyone, and there are several ways to learn entry-level programming in other formats, such as community college classes and online courses (like EdX, Coursera, or MIT open courses). I was working full time before my coding days, and started my education by taking a 1.5 hour class at the University of Washington during my lunch break two days a week. If you decide to start learning how to program on your own, you need to learn fundamental concepts and understand that it’s not just about cut-and-paste Ruby or JavaScript code.
2. Look for mentorship in your first coding internship or full-time job. I had an unpaid internship as a mobile application developer at Kiva in my first semester out of school, while concurrently working as a course development assistant at Mills. This internship was invaluable to me and my career growth, as I worked very closely with my manager who also served as my mentor. Starting out, I’d recommend building a company work history rather than jumping into freelancing. I’ve found that a lot of bad habits and hacky approaches can be adopted with a background in just freelancing. I’m not saying never freelance, but early on in a career, most people would benefit from working with and learning from others.
3. Choose a workplace that encourages learning and fosters employee growth. While there is potential to make a lot of money in engineering and programming, especially in the Bay Area where the demand for these roles is very high, focus on searching for career opportunities that will help you grow as a developer. I’m at MuleSoft because I needed to learn more and the company culture advocates for each employee to steer his or her own career path. I felt as though I was stagnating in my last job and I was in a position that didn’t have a lot of opportunity for growth, so I wasn’t becoming a better engineer. It’s especially important to look for a job early on in your career that will help you learn and grow.
4. Take advantage of those free conferences and meetup groups. There are tons of meetup groups out there to help you get into programming and find opportunities to learn more. There are several options on meetup.com, such as Girl Develop It and Women Who Code SF. Take advantage of free or inexpensive tech events, such as those hosted by some of those meetup groups, Hour of Code, Rails Bridge, Code Chix, and more. Sometimes developers can get free passes for paid conferences, like I did with Twitter Flight.
It’s never too late, as in my case, nor is it too early for women to enter the engineering field. Many girls are interested in engineering and technology at a young age, but by the time they reach college and the job market, most of them have chosen to go in other directions, often because they felt discouraged from pursuing these interests. Fortunately, there are many ways communities are encouraging girls and women to pursue their passion in a career in STEM. For example, there are several nonprofits such as Girls Who Code and Technovation Challenge that provide young girls opportunities to learn how to program.
There are also tech organizations driving initiatives to educate women in STEM and increase diversity among the workforce. Intel has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to improve the diversity of the company’s workforce. MuleSoft is holding its First Annual MuleSoft Coding Cup in September, which includes a hackathon and industry-leading speakers, to help give girls in their formative years the experience, knowledge, and empowerment to pursue their passion for engineering.
With all these paths to engineering opening up, particularly for women, there are more reasons than ever to pursue a career in tech. The only person who can change your life is you. So get to it!
Willow Solem is an associate software engineer at MuleSoft, a platform for building application networks. Connect with Willow on LinkedIn.
Excel's IF statement made easy
Excel is many things: powerful, useful, colorful, handy, but its logic functions can be challenging to newcomers due to their implied logic, and a shorthand syntax designed to fit on a single line in the formula bar.
In particular, there’s the IF statement, which generates by far the most Excel-related queries to Answer Line. But once you’re familiar with it, it’s a breeze. At least for simple stuff.
[Have a tech question? Send your query to answer@pcworld.com.]
Just like ordering lunch
Logic in programming or formulas is no different from deciding where to go and what to eat for lunch. If Harry’s is open, then we’ll go there, and I’ll have the Caesar’s salad. If Harry’s is closed, then let’s eat at Harriet’s and there’s a turkey burger that’s not too heavy. If both are closed, to heck with it, I’m doubling down on a Whopper meal.
In a formula that’s more relevant to Excel: If this cell, A1, is equal to 1, then cell B1 will equal 2, otherwise cell B1 will equal 3. Plain language requires a lot of typing and space, so it’s common practice to both infer and shorthand. In the BASIC programming language (not VBA, though it’s similar) the logic above would look something like:
IF A1 = 1 THEN
B1 = 2
ELSE
B1 = 3
ENDIF
As the word “will” and others can be deduced from context, they are left out. “Equals” has been short-handed to the = symbol. Fewer words to type, while still easily readable.
Excel condenses things even further. The destination, being the cell the formula is entered into, is also inferred by shorthanding. The “=" you must enter into the formula bar before creating a formula simply means "this cell equals the result of the following formula”. The true and false results are identified merely by their order, as the second and third fields, respectively.
What you wind up with is =IF(the Comparison to make, the value of the cell if the comparison is true, the value of the cell if the comparison is false). Or specifically in this case: =IF(A1=1, 2, 3). Nice, neat, compact—if not particularly easy for neophytes.
Nesting
Things get even harder to read when you want to do one thing if A1 equals 1, and another if A1 equals 13. If the first test isn’t true, i.e., A1 does not equal 1, the formula falls through to the false field. So cleverly, instead of forcing you to return a hard value such as 3, Excel lets you use this false field to test another condition using a nested IF statement. In this case, if A1 is equal to 13: =IF(A1=1, B1=2, IF(A1=13, B1=5, B1=3)).
The last false field in a series of nested IF statements is always the default result returned if none of the conditions are met.
You can also nest IF statements in the true field if you want to test if multiple conditions are true, such as B1 =2 and C1 = 3, though there are other functions that are easier such as AND or OR, which I’ll cover in another column. You can continue to nest IF statements in either field till the cows come home, or, more likely—the formula becomes impossible to read, which happens very quickly. If you want to make complex logic more readable, then you’ll have to delve into Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and write macros for cells.
Excel provides other powerful, IF-related functions such as COUNTIFS and SUMIFS, and AVERAGEIFS that make it easier to deal with ranges of cells, but they all operate in the same manner.
By the way, the mock Excel formula for lunch would be (more or less): =IF(Harrys=Open, “Caesar’s salad”, IF(Harriets=Open, “Turkey burger”, “Burger King Whopper Meal times two”)).
More stuff
That’s it for this time. Next time, I’ll cover the logical operators beyond the equals (=) I covered here, including “greater than” (>), less than (<), etc.
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