Weekly Round-up 04.04.2021

Happy Easter to all of our #SportsVizSunday family, if you're Easter Sunday was anything like mine it would have started with an obligatory family Easter egg hunt. Whilst those chocolate eggs may have been tricky little blighters to find, the good news is that your hunt for sports related data visualisations is so much easier! Welcome to our latest round-up of the amazing sports visualisations created across the data-viz community.

To start with let's enjoy the 4 visualisations created as part of our March challenge, adaptive sports, and part of a community collaboration with #ProjectHealthViz and #DiversityInData.

I absolutely adored this created by Megan Seritan. The clarity of design, the labelling, even the consistency of gridlines, everything about it just screamed class and well considered design.

Next up we have a titan of the Tableau Community, Michelle Frayman. Michelle gives so much to others and so many will no doubt owe Michelle a debit of gratitude for the generosity she shows with her time and her words of wisdom when it comes to feedback. Well now it is time for us to show Michelle some love, her Boston Marathon viz included a really cool (excuse the pun) addition, that of weather analysis alongside winning times. This for me was a great example of complimenting the original data-set with additional insights that really added to the story being told. Great job, Michelle... although we have one question for you.... 231 vizzes in to your Tableau Public porfolio and this appeared to be your first #SportsVizSunday entry, where have you been?!!!

Nicolas Mieszaly looked at how the Paralympic Games have developed since 1960, in particular focusing on participants, nations and gender equality. I have to say I really enjoyed those annotations / callouts on the map, the clarity of layout was a real achievement and resulted in the viz being so easy to engage with and follow.

Last, but not least, for the March challenge we have a viz by our #SportsVizSunday co-lead, Chris Westlake (yes, the co-lead who cannot spell the hashtag correctly! only kidding Chris!). Chris took inspiration from the Paralympic Games logo to explore medals won by each country. The small multiple layout worked really well and resulted in an eye-catching yet insightful design, nicely done Chris.

I have to admit, March's community challenge will be a tough one to follow, the quantity and quality of entrants was phenomenal, but if you are keen to rise to the challenge, don't forget the April #SportsVizSunday theme is already live. Kate Brown is hosting this month and is sharing data on Lacrosse. I can hear some of you saying already, 'La-What?', well for me one of the best aspects of our monthly challenges is the chance to explore a new sport, or one you are not so familiar with. If you would like to explore the data and the challenge, check out Kate's introduction to both the challenge and the sport.

Moving on from the #SportsVizSunday challenge, but keeping with the theme of community initiatives, for anyone wanting either a source of data-viz inspiration or an excuse to viz regularly over April, I encourage you to check out #30DayChartChallenge, run by Cedric Scherer and Dominic Roye.

There are plenty of amazing visualisations being created, across a range of tools and platforms and some of them are even sports based, win win! Mo Wootten's first 2 visualisations for the challenge looked at Japanese dominance at the All England Badminton Championships and then the countries that have won the Men's FIFA World Cup. In particular I loved the simplicity of the Japanese Dominance viz, it oozed class.

Tableau Zen Master and sports fanatic, Lorna Brown, analysed the Goal Kickers in the Betfred Super League (Rugby League for those of you wondering). Those of you familiar with Lorna's work will not be suprised it was a technical masterpiece behind the scenes and also a pretty damn good one to look at too.

Last weekend saw the start of the 2021 Formula 1 season and motorsports fan, Mateusz Karmalski created a couple of related vizzes, one timelapse analysis of the Bahrain Grand Prix and an analysis of the media ratings of each driver. Even though I have serious misgivings about some of the media scores given by the outlets, I will give a hat tip to Mateusz, the marginal histogram is a really smart way of visualising the data.

Our #SportsVizSunday co-host and all round good-guy, Spencer Baucke spotted this visualisation by Sarah Pallett, analysing the COVID-19 related attendance restrictions of MLB matches on the opening day of the 2021 season. I really enjoyed the playful background and integration of the axis into the image, this led to a really clean and engaging design, in my opinion.

Next up Vignesh Suresh paid tribute to 16 times World Champion Wrestler, John Cena.

The highlight colour and BANs certainly allowed us to appreciate how popular and successful Cena has been in his career to date.

It wouldn't be a weekly #SportsVizSunday weekly round-up without a couple of Football vizzes and this one by Marius Fischer analysed the 229 goals of Thierry Henry during his Arsenal Career. I had the honour and pleasure of watching the magician in person at Fratton Park and I honestly think he was unplayable at the height of the career, and when you see the position of some of his goals, especially those free-kicks you might just agree with me.

A massive thank-you to Rob Radburn who showed #SportsVizSunday isn't just about the vizzes you create but also calling out and showcasing vizzes you see and appreciate that were created by others. This analysis by the Tomkins Times on English Referees and Foreign Players was an absolute masterclass in analysis and storytelling, nicely done Paul Tomkins.

For those of you who do not know, the infamous CJ Mayes is a Manchester United fan, but we cannot really hold that against him as he creates some of the most inventive visualisations across the Tableau Community at present. This work-in-progress piece looking at the FIFA player attributes was so interesting to look at, although I am sure CJ will be the first to admit some aspects may be a little more playful in design, as opposed to hard and fast, quick insights. Never-the-less, I love seeing CJ pushing the boundaries of Tableau and showing us all what is possible when you put your mind to it.

It would not be right of me to share my radial analysis of the Six Nations Winners and Grand-Slams without giving a nod to CJ, his radials really have inspired me of late and I doubt I would have created this viz without his efforts. The design was definitely minimalist, I wanted to go for poster style, over in depth analysis, and I was really grateful for the positive response the viz got from across the community.

Next we go across the pond to Boston and the vizzing of John Whitmer, this viz to celebrate the kick off of the 2021 MLB Season explored which team is best positioned to dominate the league for the forthcoming years.

And last, but very not least, a shout-out to Tableau Zen Master, Eva Murray. As part of her new role as Senior Evangelist at Snowflake, Eva is creating some great analysis using the hashtag #DataMarketplace. This exploration of Ice Hockey's Stanley Cup included some great call outs and I loved the clever way Eva integrated a second chart into the white space. Congratulations on the new role, Eva, and thank you for all you do for the data visualisation community.

So that is it folks, another week and another 17 vizzes (I could have sworn I finished last week's round-up of the 15 vizzes created thinking, phew, next week's wont be as mammouth as this one, how wrong I was!); but before I sign off I just wanted to remind everyone that #SportsVizSunday isn't limited to just the Twitter data visualisation community. There are many people participating in #SportsVizSunday without a Twitter account and, thanks to Tableau's new search capabilties, those visualisations just became alot easier to find. So why not try searching for #SportsVizSunday on Tableau Public and un-earthing a few hidden gems of authors that you may have not previously been aware of, and don't forget to give them a follow!