Big-data game changer: Marquette develops a new generation of analytics-savvy sports scientists

The data revolution has reached gyms, practice fields and stadiums. In sports ranging from Olympic weightlifting to NFL football, a flood of data from fitness wearables, precision sensors and video motion-capture systems - and experts who excel at drawing insights from that torrent - are making data science an indispensable part of athletics and human performance.

At Marquette, the Master's in Sports and Exercise Analytics program is a hub not only for developing that expertise but also for advancing science with next-generation research into human movement and conditioning. Projects include collaboration with teams in Marquette's Division I athletics department, and program faculty have deep ties to the U.S. Olympic Weightlifting team and USA Track & Field. Crucially, faculty and graduate students work side by side in much of this work - collecting data from athletes and coaches, translating biomechanical measurements into actionable insights, and informing strategies to help a range of athletes perform at their peak.

Dr. Kristof Kipp, professor of exercise science, is co-director of the program and architect of several of its advanced research projects. He co-founded the master's program, also known as SPRT, in 2019 with Dr. Paula Papanek, now professor emerita of physical therapy, in response to an increasing need for data scientists in health-related disciplines, and a heightened demand for sports science expertise at professional sports teams and universities.

During their two-year tenure, SPRT graduate students spend extended periods in both practice facilities and the lab gathering data on athletes and at computers turning those data points into meaningful insights on how to improve human performance. A new accelerated-degree program option will also let students get a combined undergraduate and graduate degree through SPRT in as little as five years.

"Pretty much everything performance-related now has a data component," says program graduate Zak Kindl, Grad '23, now a clinical research coordinator and lab manager at the University of Oregon's Bowerman Sports Science Center. "Being able to look at and understand the different components, types and methods of those analytical parts is essential."

The Marquette program is an ideal fit for students who want to combine a love of high-performance sports with an interest in the power of data and numbers, two elements the program integrates seamlessly. Graduates are now working with USA Track & Field, Big 10 football teams, professional sports teams like Atlanta United, and elsewhere, where their ability to pair sport science knowledge with data skills puts them in high demand.

The program "gives students different tools to analyze human movement or human performance to inform the recommendations they're making to coaches," says Kipp.

While SPRT includes a healthy dose of number crunching, Kipp and other faculty members drive their students to be as hands-on as possible with athletic partners, including athletes and coaching staff from Marquette Athletics, many of whom are research study participants. "It's a very applied program," Kipp says. "It's really marrying sports science and data science together."

That combination of traditional sports research and analytics know-how was what drew the USA Weightlifting team to Marquette starting in 2022 for three successive annual training camps that doubled as research opportunities. Using high-speed cameras and special scales that measure force production, among other high-tech tools, Kipp and several doctoral students in Exercise and Rehabilitation Science gathered impressively granular data on all the athletes, such as how the angle of their legs changed each millisecond, and exactly when they hit peak force production. Then, using statistical algorithms, the sports science team sifted through all that data to extract meaningful correlations between those attributes and factors that might improve performance.

During a 2023 clinic at Marquette, Dr. Kristof Kipp and members of his research team collect data to help USA Weightlifting athlete Hampton Morris achieve peak performance. Morris won bronze at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

As the team prepares for the 2026 world championships and the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, the collaboration with Marquette continues. Kipp and doctoral students Wanda Sihanath and Emma Patterson visited the team's training facility in Colorado Springs last year and this year to track and analyze athletes' biomechanical data.

Kipp can't reveal many specific insights into Olympic team performance, citing his partners' desire to maintain an edge. But a high-level insight that the data is providing, across disciplines, is that "performance is constrained by how efficiently athletes transfer energy through the body," he says. "Small inefficiencies early in the movement can reduce the final outcome in a measurable way."

Data collected with Olympic athletes is incorporated in case studies and analyses taught in courses taken by analytics master's students. And SPRT students have numerous opportunities to take on projects that are highly relevant both to themselves and to the partners they're working with, says Dr. Danilo Tolusso, clinical assistant professor of exercise science and SPRT program co-director.

One of Tolusso's main projects is working with student-athletes on Marquette's women's lacrosse team to supercharge a basic fatigue survey. As a first step, athletes use a smart tablet to report how tired they feel on a 0-to-10 scale at the beginning of a training session. This data is then cross-referenced with detailed movement and biometric measures from those practices to help the researchers better understand how well fatigue correlates to activity.

Tolusso says the study is bringing hard data and clarity to the deceptively simple question of whether athletes can tell how tired they really are - and giving coaches a better idea of when they may need to step in before risks of injuries or impaired performance mount. "There's so much data right now," Tolusso says. The real challenge is "separating out the signal from the noise and actually making decisions based on that."

For the men's and women's soccer teams, research teams including master's students track GPS data during games and practices to monitor training load and stress, while peers from the master's program use 3D motion capture technology with men's and women's basketball to help student-athletes achieve movement mechanics that are optimal for their sport.

"Being able to apply classroom concepts directly within a performance setting gave me practical experience that translated seamlessly into my current role. It made it much easier to step into similar projects and contribute right away."

Katy Krueger, Grad '25, performance scientist with Major League Soccer's Atlanta United FC

In each case, projects make a clear connection between what's taught in the classroom and what occurs in the gym and the lab, Tolusso says. "You're working with data that you literally just collected. We try to give as many opportunities as possible for our students to be in the strength and conditioning facility or be down in a research lab."

Those skills typically translate to a post-graduation job right from the first day, say former students like Katy Krueger, Grad '25, who is now a performance scientist with the Atlanta United Football Club.

"Being able to apply classroom concepts directly within a performance setting gave me practical experience that translated seamlessly into my current role," she says. "It made it much easier to step into similar projects and contribute right away."

Another important skill Marquette teaches its master's students in sports and exercise analytics is finding ways to translate scientific data for a non-scientist audience, says Austin Plummer, Grad '25, a research and development analyst at Rutgers University Football.

His time with the program showed him "how to tell a story with data rather than just presenting complex math and numbers, specifically communicating that story to less-technical stakeholders," Plummer says.

Above all, SPRT aims to give students a foundational understanding of the theory behind the tests they run and the data they gather. Those conceptual underpinnings are doubly important in a field that is as young and evolving as sports data science, Tolusso says. Tools, tests and methods are all still changing, making it imperative that graduates enter the field ready to grow and adapt.

"We try to give our students the tools to be thinkers and to question things," he says. "Those skills will stand the test of time and allow people to be continuous lifelong learners in a field that is constantly changing and improving."

That dynamism also makes it an exciting time to enter the field, Tolusso says. Students and graduates will have a chance to participate in building the foundations of sports and exercise analytics - and leave their imprint on a growing profession.