Lyev Pitram Capstone 2025

LINK TO MY GOOGLE SITE: https://sites.google.com/scienceleadership.org/lyev-pitram-capstone/

This capstone was a sports analytics project related to ultimate frisbee at the professional level. I learned about a sport completely new to me, collected and manipulated data from the UFA (Ultimate Frisbee Association) website, and used code in R Programming to answer an analytic question I formulated from watching the sport. The topic I chose to explore was relating the distance of a frisbee pass to the likeness of its completion. The introduction to my research is the following:

The sport of Ultimate Frisbee centers around passing a disc across a 100 yard field, trying to score while an incomplete pass almost guarantees a turnover. When practicing, strategizing, and making split second decisions, players have the choice between “hucking” the disc deep downfield or playing it safe and “dishing” or “swinging” it to a closer teammate. Naturally, a shorter pass is more likely to be completed, while a longer pass is riskier, and could lead to a significantly more beneficial outcome. But by how much? This project seeks to measure the true risk of throwing a longer pass, and the variances in the abilities of different teams and players in professional frisbee as it relates to passing distance. This project, focusing on the 2024 UFA season, hopes to not only discover the true relationship between pass distance and success rate, but also highlight teams and players that find more success in these areas than the league average.