Nick Wan

I’ve spent the last several weeks interviewing amazing candidates for this role and my insights on the landscape of sports psych / baseball mental performance are definitely different since the start Here’s some of my observations and thoughts about the state of psychology and cognition in sports

So I see the state of applied psych as: - many people who are ready to run comprehensive studies and earn buy in via quantitative psych - very few companies (not just orgs, not just baseball) who are willing to allow multi year roadmap to show validity - fewer people who can outline a roadmap

I’ve spent the last several weeks interviewing amazing candidates for this role and my insights on the landscape of sports psych / baseball mental performance are definitely different since the start Here’s some of my observations and thoughts about the state of psychology and cognition in sports

A lot of this seems to be related to how difficult it is to show performance gains due to psych tools. If you can’t say how much better someone can be, then it’s hard to make any strong claims as to why applied psych is important. And I think that’s a disconnect between the lab vs real life

I’ve spent the last several weeks interviewing amazing candidates for this role and my insights on the landscape of sports psych / baseball mental performance are definitely different since the start Here’s some of my observations and thoughts about the state of psychology and cognition in sports

I see a lot of poorly executed pop psych assessments (think: myers briggs) as primary assessments while the real interesting research happens as small tests and never scale out because the vision of applied psych is very narrow. Many chase “keep people from failing” and not “optimize people”

I’ve spent the last several weeks interviewing amazing candidates for this role and my insights on the landscape of sports psych / baseball mental performance are definitely different since the start Here’s some of my observations and thoughts about the state of psychology and cognition in sports

HELL IS REAL

REAL

One not-so-side-quest for BDB this year is whether to impute missing combine drills and if so, how? There’s combine player tracking data that can help with more accurate imputation. But it’s a little spicy to impute — a player doesn’t do all the drills for a reason. Very few do all of them

2027 Big Data Bowl is live and this year is finding correlates between NFL Combine data and in-game player tracking data www.kaggle.com/competitions... some personal thoughts as a previous BDB competitor, BDB team sponsor, and BDB content creator

there's a lot of notebook spam on kaggle. i've made my claims well known to kaggle staff and BDB organizers. it will be difficult for beginners and novices to differentiate between predatory vote-4-vote kagglers and actual, helpful notebooks. try to find a community to share work with. helps a TON

2027 Big Data Bowl is live and this year is finding correlates between NFL Combine data and in-game player tracking data www.kaggle.com/competitions... some personal thoughts as a previous BDB competitor, BDB team sponsor, and BDB content creator

I’m hiring for a new psychology and cognition coach! If you get excited about cool results like in this thread and want to find ways to apply this back to players before games, in the dugout, and after games, check the posting out here: www.teamworkonline.com/baseball-job...

A lot of my baseball career has been in analytics but many probably didn’t know I also lead our mental performance group, the psychology and cognition department. This consists of me, several researchers, and coaches who apply our findings back to the players and coaches

short faq from DMs: - x axis is inverted because the measures are actually the existence of opposite traits (feeling out of control and not feeling in flow). Particularly for flow, I’ve measured it as alpha desynchrony from resting state baseline, which appears in z transform as negative values

A lot of my baseball career has been in analytics but many probably didn’t know I also lead our mental performance group, the psychology and cognition department. This consists of me, several researchers, and coaches who apply our findings back to the players and coaches

But of course: does it play? And it’s cool to see here: more often you’re in flow state (or can get to flow state), the better the projection gains are — and this correlation is stronger than the emotional regulation factor!

A lot of my baseball career has been in analytics but many probably didn’t know I also lead our mental performance group, the psychology and cognition department. This consists of me, several researchers, and coaches who apply our findings back to the players and coaches

Correlating strategies and the feeling within game is great but everyone will ask “does it help with performance?” Since we collect data, we can compare this back to how much their overall projections change since implementing strategy usage. And while the correlation is weak, it’s not nothing!

A lot of my baseball career has been in analytics but many probably didn’t know I also lead our mental performance group, the psychology and cognition department. This consists of me, several researchers, and coaches who apply our findings back to the players and coaches