Texas Athletics and the McCombs School of Business launched Bevo Lab on Oct. 23, aiming to turn sports data into insights for coaches and student-athletes. Front Office Sports reports that the initiative plans AI tools across Texas’s 21 varsity programs, including sport-specific chatbots and roster evaluation models.
Kirk Goldsberry leads the project, according to Front Office Sports. He is executive director of the Business of Sports Institute at McCombs and previously oversaw analytics operations for the San Antonio Spurs and 2016 Team USA Basketball. Sports Business Journal reports that Bevo Lab will be housed in the institute and that Goldsberry will help direct roughly 40 student researchers. Dell Technologies, Google Cloud and SHI International will help build the platform, the outlet reports.
Goldsberry gave Front Office Sports an example of what a chatbot could do: A baseball coach could ask questions about an opponent’s pitchers in ordinary language or request a graph of a pitcher’s recent velocity. He presented the matchup as hypothetical, not as an example of a tool already used in a game. He also described providing coaches with data to support preparation and decisions about recruiting and the transfer portal.
Goldsberry said he sees reasons to be skeptical about AI but expects it to improve sports analytics. He also raised a more immediate concern: student-athlete data can be sensitive, and the boundary between medical data and sports analytics can be blurry. He told Front Office Sports he wants protected data accessible only to people with credentials.
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