THE SPORTS AND THE STATS

The statistics and the sport are strongly linked. In all the sporting disciplines the stats play a fundamental role in order to analyze the efficiency of the performances, and they are very useful to interpret the tactical management and to obtain conclusions. That numerical information is represented by percentages, comparison, averages, graphics… I am going to focus on two sports I like especially: football and basketball.

In football, statistics are concerned to observe both of the individual and collective performance. For example, from a group perspective, the quantity of passes and shoots indicate us if a team propose an offensive or defensive playing style, and we can compare it with the other clubs in order to make comparisons. From an individual point of view, the number of goals and assists of a player can induce us to think it is good or bad. For more advance information, the heatmaps help us to know which the most preferred position of a player is on the pitch. This image corresponds Messi’s movements on the pitch in a match in 2015.

In basketball the stats are primordial and more influential than in football: points, rebounds, assist, blocks, shot percentage, etc. These numbers are taken into account in naming the MVP of a competition. To give concrete examples, the best 2-points shooters are usually players who play near the basket (the tallest players), as well as the rebounds and the blocks are dominated by them; the best 3-points shooters are often short players. The table shows us the stats of a team in different disciplines (minutes, points, rebounds, assists…) of the play.

The most common hobby for Primary children are usualy the sports; for this reason it is a good idea to use it as a context in order to motivate them in the learning of mathematics. From my point of view, a useful activity (third cycle) could be the representation of different statistic information in graphics and finding the average. For example, the teacher would provide the number of points and rebounds of a player in ten games. Students would have to add all the points and rebounds to find the average, and then they would make a dot plot to observe the progression of their performance in points and rebounds (it would be compulsory to draw a line for each statistic discipline). To expand the activity, it could ask the best and the worst performance of the player and analyse them critically, thinking if the player is improving or getting worse observing the progression.