Client Analyst Gavin Byrnes Explains What Math Can Do for Sports
Client Analyst Gavin Byrnes Explains What Math Can Do for Sports
To read part one click here
What is your most memorable experience thus far?
That would have to be this past June, when I went to the NHL draft in Minneapolis-St. Paul. As far back as I can remember I have had the idea that I would love to be a general manager for professional sports team. It was a dream for me to be at a draft and be part of a team's scouting and drafting process.
Being in the room with the boards with the players’ names written on them was cool. Watching the players walk up to be drafted, and knowing that something I said may have played a part in the decision to draft a particular player on this professional stage, was truly memorable.
You majored in math in college—how is that being applied in your role at Decision Lens?
At Princeton, I took courses in areas as diverse as real analysis, complex analysis, game theory, some finance, regression, probability, statistics, and many more.
Most of the math I do at Decision Lens is not nearly as theoretical as the work I did in college. It's not that the things I learned to do in college are my emphasis in work; it's more that my college work gave me an understanding of how to approach problems like this. This job gives me practice in approaching a problem and coming up with a useful and efficient way to solve it.
If you weren’t at Decision Lens where would you live or what would you be doing?
I might have tried to break right into the sports world, which would have been quite difficult, with menial jobs and much less freedom to explore my own ideas than I have here. Alternatively, I may have followed my old roommate’s path and tried to get a job on Wall Street. Ultimately, though, I didn’t go down either of those roads. I knew that I would like to work at Decision Lens.
