We love seeing and listening to young people looking to expand their reach and fill blue ocean through disruption and innovation…and new ways of looking at things. Case in point discovered this week from our colleague Adam Honig, a young company in the data analytics space…Project 94…who cut a partnership with Johns Hopkins Women’s Lacrosse to build out and fine their performance analytics evaluation. The use of AI and other tools to streamline the space is growing pretty quickly, and we wanted to learn more about the company and a young funder’s POV for what lies ahead. If you are starting projects, why not start with a program steeped in tradition in a sport like Johns Hopkins has been in lacrosse, and see where it goes?
Ethan Haas is the Founder and CEO of Project 94, a sports data services company. With a background in statistics, data engineering and artificial intelligence, Ethan has extensive expertise in wrangling and aggregating play by play sports data to use for predictive and prescriptive analytics. In addition to consulting for clients, he also writes for Project 94’s hockey analytics website where he built a team rankings system, a shot quality model, and a player similarity model for fans to interact with the data. Using all of this experience, Ethan’s team won the Hackathon competition at the 2024 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at MIT. We asked him to give us the lowdown on the business today and where he things it will go.
1) There is a great deal of focus about clutter in the data analytics space. What’s the value
proposition you have to cut through with?
Project 94 has a unique model where our services actually enhance the software our clients rely on. Think about the level of comfort and sophistication an assistant lacrosse coach has with raw data on player performance. Limited at best. We cut through the clutter and work like The Geek Squad, arming them with a playbook and building dashboards that support each coach and member of the staff to help the players gain a competitive edge on the field from using analytics.
2) How is AI, more importantly how will AI change, grow, augment your business?
The rise in investment and attention in AI has given us the ability to deliver better work. Not only do we build and deliver machine learning models for predictive analytics, but also other tools are being developed constantly to make it easier and faster to use AI models for deeper insights. Because we know the fundamentals of AI, we can expand where we use predictive analytics for both performance assessment and team strategy.
3) How do you define the marketplace that is addressable for you as a relative startup?
If you use sports and performance-related data, we want to work with you. The amount of data that is readily available in the industry is increasing rapidly and whether you are a team that wants to use data for competitive advantage, your athletic software needs a new machine learning model, or your company wants to build reports with data, our motivation is working with smart, innovative people in sports.
4) You recently did this Johns Hopkins women‘s lacrosse partnership…is that a scalable business and if so, how so?
Our partnership with Johns Hopkins Women’s Lacrosse has been excellent! Fantastic working with their Athletic Director Jen Baker, SID Jill Guide and of course, Coach Tim McCormack. The program is extremely passionate about using data and quickly adapting and implementing new data tools and software as solutions enter the marketplace. Project 94 scales with a ‘software + services for-the-win’ approach to help teams bring the data to their environment, customize it for their exact needs and maximize its utility.
5) What’s the biggest change you see coming in the marketplace that needs to be addressed, and how do you think the industry adjusts in the next three years?
The amount of innovate technology that collects data has been really exciting, whether it’s shot velocity trackers, exercise performance metrics, or something else. Those innovations will continue to increase, and quickly implementing each new technology while aggregating the new data with previous data sources is going to require efficient processing and a scalable system. Building a data-driven platform to collect and report all the information will be crucial to accessing these insights as soon as possible. Project 94’s goal is to help stay ahead of that curve, using all data collected in a cohesive process.
A win all around for a young company.
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