
Sports Analytics
Work in teams, compete on real sports analytics challenges, and build a portfolio-quality project for the future of sports.

Course Information
Certificate Track
Learn for Free
About this Course
Sports Analytics is an MIT graduate-level, project-based course in which learners work in teams to solve authentic challenges in the sports industry. The course combines technical topics such as statistics, machine learning, engineering, and data visualization with team-based project strategy and communication, so learners can create a portfolio-quality final deliverable that is meaningful and shareable with sports practitioners.
Learners will grow their technical foundation, then team up on an open-ended project in football, basketball, or cricket, working through staged deliverables and culminating in a final algorithm that will be evaluated on unseen data in a competition against other learner teams.
Unlike traditional problem sets with single correct answers, these projects focus on practical solutions to authentic sports industry questions. Learners will learn to frame complex problems, analyze data, evaluate models, iterate on methods, refine solutions, and translate findings into actionable recommendations.
After completing this course, learners should be able to:
- Apply statistics, machine learning, data analysis, and engineering skills to real-world challenges in sports industries.
- Gain hands-on experience working with authentic datasets from football, basketball, and cricket.
- Define and scope open-ended projects in the sports domain, adapting as the project evolves.
- Build practical skills in data visualization, model evaluation, project development, strategy, and technical communication.
- Execute projects to produce deliverables that are meaningful to sports practitioners.
- Communicate technical insights effectively to audiences such as sports organization management, analysts, coaches, engineers, business leaders, and players.
- Develop a portfolio-quality project that demonstrates the ability to solve open-ended, real-world problems.
Data science and artificial intelligence are transforming the sports industry. Professional teams, leagues, wearable technology companies, sports startups, and other organizations increasingly rely on data-driven insights to improve athlete performance, optimize strategy and operations, evaluate player health, design innovative products, enhance fan experiences, and drive innovation. The analytical, strategic, communication, and project management skills developed in this course are also transferable across industries including healthcare, manufacturing, finance, and product development.
If you have specific questions about this course, please contact us at sds-mm@mit.edu.
What you'll learn
- Apply data science to sports analytics challenges
- Build and evaluate machine learning models
- Analyze football, basketball, and cricket datasets
- Develop team-based project strategy and deliverables
- Communicate insights to sports practitioners
Prerequisites
- Probability
- Machine Learning
- Undergraduate multivariable calculus, linear algebra
- Undergraduate Python programming
Meet your instructors
Christina Chase
Lecturer , Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Department of Mechanical Engineering. Co-Founder and Managing Director, MIT Sports Lab
Christina Chase is a Lecturer at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with a joint appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2015, she co-founded the MIT Sports Lab with Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi and serves as its Managing Director. Prior to this she was the first Entrepreneur in Residence at MIT through the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Christina has helped hundreds of teams go from concept to company In 2013, she was named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the Boston Tech Community and in 2014, Mashable named her one of the 15 People Shaping Boston’s Tech Scene. In MIT’s School of Engineering, Christina leads one of the largest undergraduate entrepreneurship classes, Entrepreneurship in Engineering. She helped start and co-direct, StartMIT (formerly Start6), an entrepreneurship bootcamp, with Dean Anantha Chandrakasan. She has served as the Academic Advisor for the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s 2A Entrepreneurship Track and as an advisor for the Design of Medical Devices and Precision Machine Design classes and has lectured on innovation in the Department of Material Science in their senior capstone design class Materials Projects Laboratory, where students create the next generation of groundbreaking materials, as well as mentored for the MADMEC Material Science Design Competition. She has also taught Applications in Advanced Entrepreneurial Techniques, where advanced MIT startup teams are helped to accelerate growth over the semester.
Christina is an entrepreneur with a track record of success in a several industries, starting her first company when she was 18 years old. Most recently she was the CEO and co-founder of Firehoze, an education technology company that focused on online education that involved over a hundred instructors from the most prestigious universities. She has worked with numerous founding teams across industries, including B2B hardware, healthcare IT, materials and coatings, and consumer electronics, and has also led innovation in established companies, such as the photonics company, Labsphere, where as the Director of the Materials and Coating division, in under a year she tripled revenue and led the group to file three key patents for new materials. Christina is a Techstars mentor and serves on the Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum, is a judge for the SXSW Accelerator Competition and former Advisory Board member. In 2013, she was named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the Boston Tech Community. In a past life, Christina was a cyclist where she was one of 12 women selected by the US Cycling Federation to train at the US Olympic Training Center. She has taught downhill skiing in Colorado, summited six of Colorado’s 14-ers across seasons, and her latest sport is kiteboarding.