#SportsVizSunday mid year review

As the data initiative #sportsvizsunday reaches 6 months old I thought it was time for a mid year review! 

First, a reminder of where it all began...

Sports Viz Sunday kicked off at the start of 2018 when myself, Spencer & Simon noticed the frequency and quality of sports visualisations appearing on Tableau Public & throughout the Twitter Community.

To this point, we initially agreed to each share a sports viz that had caught our eye during the week on a Sunday - hence the name. We quickly built on this by creating a data dot world site to host our findings and drop relevant sports data sets for the community to use. 

The next step was introducing the monthly sportsvizsunday challenge - so far we have shared datasets on the Winter Olympics, Wimbledon, Formula 1, the Masters, the Champions League and the FIFA World Cup.

The quality of the contributions to the initiative has been nothing short of outstanding and has hopefully been an inspiration to anyone that hopes to get involved in the future!

Sports data has proved to be an excellent stimulus for great design - we have seen many of our sportsvizsunday submissions go on to be nominated as Tableau's viz of the day. 

I have pulled together a slide show of many (not an exhaustive list) of the submissions to date. Have a search of the #sportsvizsunday on twitter or visit the data.world page hereto see more.

I speak for all three of us when I say that we are delighted with the way the initiative has grown - through both the number of individuals contributing to the quality of these contributions. Getting a mention on stage alongside makeover Monday as an inspiration to the community at Tableau Conference's Iron Viz was a particular highlight - congratulations to sportsvizsunday regular Klaus for your astonishing winning effort and to Sarah & Daniel for being up there in the first place! 

Finally, a big thank you to Spencer & Simon who have been vital to driving this forward and are also essential members of the Tableau community outside of the #sportsvizsunday initiative - a constant inspiration to myself and many others!

Looking forward to meeting many of you at TC18 in New Orleans! Look out for the three of us (plus honorary members Neil Richards & Klaus Schulte) sporting our sportsvizsunday stash - Simon may have to print a few more if people continue with their fantastic submissions.