By Mandy Housenick
GoLeopards.com columnist

For years, recruiting for college coaches was all about watching film, analyzing statistics and going to see players compete in person.

When things got serious with a select few, you'd sit down and talk to the student-athletes and their families.

Now with professional teams diving deeper and deeper into analytics, it's becoming more and more tempting for college coaches to want to head down that same path.

It's easier said than done, though. Professional teams have seemingly endless budgets compared to colleges. They have more staff available to do the research; more coaches to implement the strategies and more time to study the after affects.

Those roadblocks aren't stopping Lafayette's men's soccer and baseball teams.

Both programs are working with students on projects which now are influencing the way the coaches run their programs.

Cameron Zurmuhl '20, who is working with men's soccer coach Dennis Bohn but getting paid a small stipend by professor Trent Gaugler, is looking for "hot spots" to see if there are certain areas of the country, or even the world, that are home to top-quality soccer players who also happen to be really intelligent.

"I assume some place like the University of Alabama has done something like this before with (football) linemen maybe and analyzing past performance with their school and conference," Bohn said. "But in our world, I haven't come across it. I think (Lafayette athletic director) Sherryta (Freeman) is really open-minded to it. We don't have a staff that could dig this deep into it, so to have a student help us and really get some hands-on experience and potentially help our program, we think is a pretty cool concept."

Andrew Hollander '20, who is volunteering with the baseball team, spends much of his time calculating in-depth, behind-the-scenes statistics from pitchers – such as spin rate - that 10 years ago no one even heard of.

"The job Andrew has done has been awesome," assistant baseball coach Andrew Dickson said. "He has organized everything in a cleaner version and taken it from multiple sources and put it into a spread sheet that we can delve into. He really dives into the numbers for us. I think his role will continue to grow as the season goes on."

Zumuhl, who is majoring in computer science and minoring in math, is fascinated by the project so far. He is in the process of gathering data from 35 schools in 12 conferences, which include all of the Ivy and Patriot League schools and others that have similar academic requirements, such as Duke, Villanova, etc.

He is gathering data all the way back to 2006. His job? To track how many starts they made (that means did they start more than half the games), were they all-conference players and if so, how many times for every single player on every one of those 35 schools between 2006 and 2018.

"I haven't been able to analyze my data yet," Zurmuhl said. "I'm still gathering it. But what has surprised me the most is how poorly some of the colleges have stored the data. Part of the reason the format is poor is back in 2006 web technology was poor. But I have written this code to be future proof as the years go on."

While the idea for all of this was Bohn's, the veteran coach said none of what is transpiring would be possible without all of the work Zumuhl has put into it. He's eager, hard-working, reliable and extremely good at the task at hand. He started at the beginning of the Fall 2018 semester (unpaid at the time) but then over the winter break upped his hours to about 40 hours a week. Currently, he spends about 10 hours a week during the spring semester working on it.

"We hope by the end of the semester we will have the dynamics of a website and the search engines for that website," Bohn said.

"For me it's cool because, I do think after 20 years in our sport, 'Do we really think we are that special that we have that eye for talent?' But maybe this will give us a little bit of an advantage instead of following the herd. I told Cameron I'd be happy to work with him to help him to turn this into a business because I think all coaches could benefit from something like this. My brain works one way and his works another and I think we are a good team like that because of that.

"It's great to work with a young person who is so excited."

Hollander's analytics are (hopefully) meant to have a much more immediate impact on the players themselves.

Much of his work deals with pitchers with the use of a computer software program called Rapsodo.

A high-speed camera is set up behind the plate to measure spin rate, a crucial part of any pitcher analysis.

"It tells us how much the fastball drops on its way to the plate," Hollander said, "which is directly influenced by the spin rate, which directly correlates with more strikeouts.

"Spin rate is a statistic that a lot of professional and college teams use when recruiting players. It's really a metric that tells you how good a pitcher's fastball is."

Lafayette got the Rapsodo program, which is used by college baseball and softball teams as well as Major League Baseball squads, last summer.

The Leopards baseball team also uses two other programs: Blast (also used by softball players and golfers) and Synergy, which is scouring software to identify the types of pitches pitchers are throwing in certain counts.

They also utilize Diamond Charts, which develops spray charts displaying splits for such statistics as OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage).

"These programs are pieces of the puzzle," Dickson said. "There are so many things involved in winning championships. Your culture. Your players.

"What [Hollander] is doing will hopefully help us with the player development and the preparation that goes into it."

Analytics now are part of every sport. It was only a matter of time before it trickled down from the professional level.

In a short time, Lafayette is seeing how important those analytics-driven programs can be.