Swordmetrics – The Home Court Advantage in College Squash
If baseball can have the Society for
American Baseball Research, or sabermetrics, squash could develop
swordmetrics. Perhaps someone will start a Squash Organization
for Research and Data.
However you look at it, in the past
there has been a paucity of data on squash compared to baseball or many
other sports. Sometimes data vanishes, which happened in Canada
recently so that junior championship results from the last few years
are currently unavailable online.
That’s not to say no one is working
on more robust data and skill ratings. Clearly some are and US
Squash appears to be devoting substantial efforts to improve data
collection and analysis. Exhibit A is the new skill ratings
published by US Squash. Exhibit B hasn’t arrived yet, but US
Squash is reportedly working on a new scorekeeping app that might
capture a huge amount of data currently unavailable and allow for a
revolution in data and player analysis.
The US Squash website says its “new
rating algorithm is iterative, calculating the results for players many
times relative to one another in order to bring all players to the
appropriate rating level. It also has the ability to weight play, both
by placing more importance on the most recently played matches and by
weighting the importance of certain types of matches more significantly
over others. The new system uses players with many match results (and
therefore generally more accurate ratings) to refine the ratings of
opponents who have fewer results in the US Squash system.” It was
developed by Elder Research.
While the old algorithm, which was
based on ELO chess rankings, was transparent, it didn’t work very well,
especially for rapidly improving players such as juniors. Their
skill ratings often lagged well behind their actual skills. The
new skill ratings don’t seem to have this problem. While it’s not
clear exactly how the black box works, the skill ratings seem more
accurate than before. The increase in accuracy, especially for
high school player skill ratings where players often had few match
results that were meaningful, is impressive.
Today I’ll take a look at the home court advantage in college squash. Does it exist and how much is it worth?
The short answer appears to be yes,
at least for the top eight nationally ranked college squash men’s teams
over the last three years.
There are many reasons why the home
court advantage theory intuitively makes sense. Teams that play
away matches are playing on unfamiliar courts and sometimes play in
front of a large number of hostile fans. They may have taken a
long bus ride to get to the match and may be stiff from the ride, short
on sleep or both. Oftentimes teams will play three matches on a
single road trip, so they could be tired compared to their
opponents. It was no surprise that Trinity’s home match winning
streak, for example, lasted longer than its away streak.
I studied the top eight teams over
the last three seasons of college squash. While these teams only
play one regular season match with an opponent, the national
championship often presents a second match between similarly ranked
teams on different courts. This second match provides one way to
determine whether a home court advantage exists.
In the last three years, two national
champions won at home – Princeton and Harvard. Trinity won its
title on neutral courts.
During the last three seasons, there
have been 29 team pairs that have played twice in one season. Of
those matches, a stunning 14 of them showed a home court advantage
compared to the match played either on neutral courts or the other
team’s home courts. Twelve matches produced the same
outcome. There were only three match pairs where a team had a
better result on neutral or away courts than at home.
How much is the home court advantage
worth? Over the last three seasons, it ranged between 0.45 of an
individual match win in 2012-2013 to 0.91 in 2011-2012. The
average over the three seasons is 0.66. That’s a substantial
advantage.
Studying data takes a long time and I
freely admit there could be more accurate ways to assess whether there
is a home court advantage and whether the effect is as strong for
weaker teams. For example, instead of analyzing the team match
results, one could study the results between the same players in a
single season or perhaps study the team game or point totals rather
than the match wins and losses.
But my rudimentary look at the squash
data will have to suffice for now. As Erasmus said, in the land
of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
What's On My Mind is a column by rotating authors. Contact DailySquashReport@gmail.com
