How to win the Sloan Sports hackathon

Stan developer Daniel Lee writes:

I walked in with knowing a few things about the work needed to win hackathons:

– Define a problem.
If you can clearly define a problem, you’ll end up it the top third of the competition. It has to be clear why the problem matters and you have to communicate this effectively.

– Specify a solution.
If you’re able to specify a solution to the problem, you’ll end up in the top 10%. It has to be clear to the judges that this solution solves the problem.

– Implement the solution.
If you’ve gotten this far and you’re now able to actually implement the solution that you’ve outlined, you’ll end up in the top 3. It’s hard to get to this point. We’re talking about understanding the topic well enough to define a problem of interest, having explored enough of the solution space to specify a solution, then applying skills through focused effort to build the solution in a short amount of time. Do that and I’m sure you’ll be a finalist.

– Build interactivity.
If the judges can do something with the solution, specifically evaluate “what if” scenarios, then you’ve gone above and beyond the scopes of a hackathon. That should get you a win.

Winning a hackathon takes work and focus. It’s mentally and physically draining to compete in a hackathon. You have to pace yourself well, adjust to different challenges as they come, and have enough time and energy at the end to switch context to present the work.

One additional note: the solution only needs to be a proof of concept and pass a smell test. It’s important to know when to move on.

Positive, negative, or neutral?

We’ve talked in the past about advice being positive, negative, or neutral.

Given that Daniel is giving advice on how to win a competition that has only one winner, you might think I’d call it zero-sum. Actually, though, I’d call it positive-sum, in that the goal of a hackathon is not just to pick a winner, it’s also to get people involved in the field of study. It’s good for a hackathon if its entries are good.

The story

Daniel writes:

I [Daniel] participated in the SSAC22 hackathon. I showed up, found a teammate [Fabrice Mulumba], and won. Here’s a writeup about our project, our strategy for winning, and how we did it.

The Data

All hackathon participants were provided data from the 2020 Stanley Cup Finals. This included:

– Tracking data for 40 players, the puck, and the referees. . . . x, y, z positions with estimates of velocity recorded at ~100 Hz. The data are from chips attached to jerseys and in the puck.

– Play-by-play data. Two separate streams of play-by-play data were included: hand-generated and system-generated. . . .

– Other meta data. Player information, rink information, game time, etc.

Data was provided for each of the 6 games in the series. For a sense of scale: one game has about 1.5M rows of tracking data with 1.5 GB of JSON files across the different types of data.

The Hackathon

There were two divisions for the Hackathon: Student and Open. The competition itself had very little structure. . . . Each team would present to the judges starting at 4 pm and the top teams would present in the finals. . . .

Daniel tells how it came together:

Fabrice and I [Daniel] made a pretty good team. But it almost didn’t happen.

Both Fabrice and I had competed in hackathons before. We first met around 8:30 am, half an hour before the hackathon started. As Fabrice was setting up, I saw that he had on an AfroTech sweatshirt and a Major League Hacking sticker on his laptop. I said hi, asked if he was competing alone, and if he was looking for a teammate. He told me he wanted to compete alone. I was hoping to find a teammate, but had been preparing to compete alone too. While it’s hard to do all the things above alone, it’s actually harder if you have the wrong teammate. We went our separate ways. A few minutes later, we decided to team up.

Something about the team felt right from the start. Maybe I was more comfortable teaming up with one of the few other POC in the room. Maybe there was a familiar cadence and vibe from having parents that immigrated to the US. Maybe it was knowing that the other had been through an intense working session in the past and was voluntarily going through it again. Whatever it was, it worked.

In the few days prior, I had spent a couple hours trying to gain some knowledge about hockey from friends that know the sport. The night before, I found a couple of people that worked for the LA Kings and asked questions about what they thought about and why. I came in thinking we should look at something related to goalie position. Fabrice came in wanting to work on a web app and focus on identifying a process within the game. These ideas melded together and formed the winning project.

For the most part, we worked on separate parts of the problem. We were able to split the work and trust that the other would get their part done. . . .

The Winning Project: Sloan Goalie Card

We focused on a simple question. Does goaltender depth matter?

Having access to x, y, z position of every player meant that we could analyze where the goalie was at the time when shots were taken. Speaking to some hockey people, we found out that this data wasn’t publicly available, so this would be one of the first attempts at this type of analysis.

In the allotted time, we pulled off a quick analysis of goalie depth and built the Sloan Goalie Card web app.

I don’t know anything about hockey so I can’t comment on the actual project. What I like is Daniel’s general advice.

P.S. I googled *how to win a hackathon*. It’s a popular topic, including posts going back to 2014. Some of the advice seems pretty ridiculous; for example one of the links promises “Five Easy Steps to Developer Victory”—which makes me wonder what would happen if two competitors tried this advice for the same hackathon. They couldn’t both win, right?

3 thoughts on “How to win the Sloan Sports hackathon

  1. “Some of the advice seems pretty ridiculous; for example one of the links promises “Five Easy Steps to Developer Victory”—which makes me wonder what would happen if two competitors tried this advice for the same hackathon. They couldn’t both win, right?”

    Homer Simpson agrees with you: in the Dead Putting Society episode Bart and Ned Flanders’ son Todd play a round of mini golf to decide who mows their lawns and when Homer sees the Flanders family praying he says “Hey Flanders, it’s no use praying. I already did the same thing and we can’t both win.”

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