This article considers the relationship between Big Data and the athlete. Where Beer and Hutchins have focused on Big Data and sport, this article concentrates on the athlete's potential response to Big Data monitoring. Drawing on the work of Andrejevic, and Kennedy and Moss, the project speaks to the Big Data-athlete relation through the theoretical framework of the digital divide. It describes Big Data and its relation to the digital divide before tracing out how athletes might respond to Big Data monitoring by presenting concerns about privacy and/or embracing a quantified self. Considering these responses provides a starting point for further work on how athletes should treat Big Data and its implications for sport. Keywords Big Data, analytics, digital divide, sport, NBA "I've always believed analytics were crap. They're just some crap that some people who are really smart made up to try to get in the game 'cause they had no talent" (Charles Barkley, quoted in Curtis, 2015, para.1). Analytics, and its extension into Big Data, have become one of the foremost developments in 21st-century sport. Even as old school athletes like Charles Barkley appear dismissive of their value, many sports organizational decisions increasingly flow from Big Data and the voluminous amounts of quantitative information of which it is comprised. However, in spite of the seeming
Data analytics have become a significant evaluation mechanism within professional baseball to objectively quantify performance. This trend also has integrated into youth baseball through statistical applications that digitally capture and evaluate player performance. This essay examines the influence of baseball stat-tracking app GameChanger in the context of Little League Baseball and how it positions players, parents, and coaches to understand responsible citizenship through neoliberal risk management. The essay considers how risk management quantification and its accompanying development of responsible citizenship through GameChanger impact each of these stakeholder groups. As statistical evaluation becomes more commonplace in Little League Baseball, it shifts the Little League Experience into a more quantified, risk-management enterprise. In doing so, the experience becomes altered by enhancing opportunities for those players whom data suggest possess the maximum utility for production.
This article addresses Leonard’s (2006a) call for inquiry into virtual sport by exploring how Electronic Arts’ Fight Night Round 2 (2005) inscribes the boxing body into the digital game. This article qualitatively analyzes the text of the game in order to consider how it deals with the immateriality of bodies in new media as it translates them into digital space. By focusing on the game’s avatar creation system and control set, I argue over and against the freedom proclaimed by theorists about new media that Fight Night Round 2 positions users within a hegemonic masculine subjectivity. The essay concludes by addressing how this positioning speaks to the significance of this mediation for boxing as the game positions users in relation to the sport.
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