I made a basketball analytics course
And Ken Pomeroy is the co-creator!
Over the past several months, I’ve been working on a basketball analytics course — with the goal of putting everything I know about the subject into one place.
But I haven’t been doing it alone. A while back, I managed to convince Ken Pomeroy (!!) to create the course with me. Slowly but surely, we went from writing a course outline to recording presentations together on various analytics-related topics.
As of today, the course is not only finished but available for purchase. For newsletter subscribers, you can use the code “HV” at check-out for a special 15% discount if you buy within the next week.
The Target Audience
Establishing an exact target audience has always been a bit of a challenge for me and Hoop Vision. Naturally, a large portion of my audience is coaches — presumably looking for an edge with their team or just within their profession.
But that’s never completely been the mission statement of Hoop Vision. Sure, I sometimes make content about cutting-edge strategies and tactics that are taking over basketball. But I also made a 22-minute video on the history of the flex offense — an offense that peaked about 20 years ago.
Besides just coaches, I have tried to serve regular basketball fans as much as possible. I still remember this tweet I received in response to the first time I ever covered Texas Tech’s no-middle defense: “Holy crap. I had no idea all these subtle moves were happening.” That was an “aha” moment that non-coaches could enjoy the content as well.
Generally speaking, my rule has been to try not to worry too much about the target audience — just create things that interest me and let the chips fall where they may. And for the most part — when it comes to creating free content — that’s a pretty reasonable strategy.
The bigger problem is when creating paid content. For example, my old Hoop Vision PLUS newsletter was priced at $100/year. I always felt like that was too cheap for college coaches who can easily expense the cost to their university, but too expensive for the average fan who just wants to learn a little more about the game.
So by not narrowing down to an exact target audience, it probably limited the growth of the newsletter to a certain extent.
Now you may already know where this is going, but the first thing Ken and I had to do for the course was pick a target audience. That decision wouldn’t just determine the price of the course, but also the content. Which group of people were we trying to serve?
Well, the course is called Basketball Analytics for Coaches — so I guess you can see where we landed on that decision.
We designed the course to be actionable for coaches. We believe that after taking the course, you will have learned how to optimize the way you think about basketball strategy. This will hopefully make you a better coach and decision-maker in the process. If you’re an aspiring coach, we believe learning more about analytics through this course will make you a more well-rounded potential candidate.
In other words, we aren’t teaching how to code or be a professional data scientist — we’re teaching coaches how to think analytically and implement data into their decision making process.
However, I’m aware that many of you who subscribe to this newsletter are not coaches. Would you still benefit from taking this course?
If you have enjoyed my content and Ken’s content in the past, I don’t see why you wouldn’t enjoy this course, too. You may not benefit as much as someone who is working with a team, but we are confident you would still enjoy it. It just depends on whether it’s in your price range.
The Course Structure
Our course consists of 12 modules.
Intro to Basketball Analytics
Thinking Statistically
Tempo Free Statistics
Player Metrics
Incentive Stats
Evaluating Your Team
Shot Selection
In-Game Decision Making
Coaching Trade-Offs
Practical Advice for Lower Resourced Coaches
Resources for College Coaches
The bulk of the curriculum is in modules 2 through 10. For those modules, we created PowerPoint presentations that provide real data and statistics on relevant coaching topics. And at the same time we use the presentation format to provide a framework for how to conceptually think through decisions.
Then we finish the course with modules 11 and 12. Module 11 was specifically created for high school coaches and module 12 was specifically created for college coaches.
For more information on what is in each module, we go through them all in module 1 — which is free to access.
Overall, the course contains over 10 hours of pre-recorded video content.
Final Thoughts (and what’s next for HV)
This was a fun project to collaborate on with Ken. The wealth of knowledge he brings to the table has added so much value to the course beyond what I could have provided on my own.
And he actually wasn’t the only person who helped bring this idea to life. My friend Eric Shapiro — @eric_shap on Twitter — has been helping with different tasks behind the scenes. Most notably, he created the course landing page that you see when you go to bballanalytics.com.
I’m proud of what the three of us created and I’m excited for our “students” to actually start taking the course.
Beyond the course, I have also been busy creating YouTube videos. I already have three videos that are ready to be published. I’ll be publishing the first one this week — and then I’ll space out the other two so that one doesn’t eat into the other’s views.
With the course officially published, my attention will now be focused on making the best basketball YouTube videos possible. I hope you stick around for the ride!
Excited to dive in!