Undergrads Quantify the Caitlin Clark Effect in Spring Analytics Competition

Basketball phenom Caitlin Clark, now a rookie with the WNBA’s Indiana Fever, drew sold-out crowds as a University of Iowa Hawkeyes guard and boosted interest in women’s basketball to unprecedented levels – dubbed the Caitlin Clark Effect. On May 16, six undergraduate teams from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business competed to quantify it.

The competition was the final project of the Smith School’s second Business Analytics in Action Workshop and the culmination of the course BMGT 434: Analytics Consulting. Each semester, students in the class participate in 10 to 15 different team consulting projects involving analytics concepts.

For the final project, teams worked to quantify Clark’s impact on her Hawkeyes team. Students collected and analyzed their own data to measure Clark’s effect on team performance, fan engagement, brand value and economics. Teams focused on different aspects – from salary comparisons between women and men athletes, to social media popularity, to ticket sales.

Professors Gisela Bardossy and Bruce Golden worked together to develop the course and competition with a Smith School Teaching Innovation Grant. It launched with Golden’s section of the course and workshop in fall 2023.

“It’s great to see the students working together to come up with innovative ways to tackle these projects,” says Bardossy, an associate clinical professor. “The competition aspect of the final workshop just makes it a little more challenging and gives them practice presenting for judges.”

The judges were Jared Banks, a marketing executive with over 15 years of experience working with Fortune 100 companies and top sports brands; and Timothy Santosa and Tory Gray from UMD Athletics. The winning team members received Smith-branded backpacks.

Golden says the purpose of the final workshop is to showcase the business analytics progress students made throughout the semester. It gives teams a chance to focus on a real-world project and interact with business analytics professionals from industry. Students also competed for a best project presentation prize.

“The spring workshop represented the culmination of a semester full of opportunities to practice and grow,” Bardossy says. “Students worked on multiple projects and reviewed and presented various analytics cases.”

Two of the course projects had students participating in campus-wide analytics challenges, including the Smith Analytics Consortium’s annual Datathon and the weeklong Info Challenge. Teams of students from Bardossy’s course won prizes in both.

Through multiple projects, teams had the opportunity to put into practice various analytical tools, including analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a model for analyzing complex decisions using math and psychology. John Sammarco, president of Definitive Business Solutions and an adjunct professor at the Smith School, is an AHP expert and taught students how to use it.

Then, using AHP students helped UMD employees select the best healthcare plan. Students interviewed a faculty or staff member to determine what was most important to them, used that information to define evaluation criteria, and then determined scores to reach a recommendation. While all teams were working with the same healthcare plans, they reached vastly different recommendations highlighting how needs and priorities vary among decision makers and the importance of understanding them for sound recommendations.

Students progressively improved in their analytical confidence and communication skills throughout the semester, says Bardossy. The course took the role of a capstone for the operations management & business analytics (OM/BA) major, giving students the chance to use the technical skills they learned in other classes.

“Students were excited to participate in these events as they could apply their skills to real projects and gain relevant experiences outside the classroom,” Bardossy says. “They had to pull from analytical tools learned throughout their OM/BA major, while also learning to deal with challenges that arise from working with real problems and data.”