2024 College Ultimate Championship Statistics

Data Cleaning
Joining
Data Visualization
Statistics from the 2024 College Ultimate Championships to be tidied and plotted.
Authors
Affiliation

Gavin Cassidy

St. Lawrence University

Robin Lock

St. Lawrence University

Published

June 26, 2024

Module

Introduction

Ultimate, also commonly known as Ultimate Frisbee, is a non contact sport where 2 teams of 7 players see who can reach the target score. College Ultimate has games played to 15 points, or to a time limit where the winning team has to score 1 more point to win the game. Points are scored when a team successfully throws the Frisbee to the opposing teams end zone and a teammate catches the Frisbee. Each point of Ultimate starts with both teams in their end zone. The defensive team pulls the Frisbee to the offensive team, and the offensive team tries to score without dropping the Frisbee. Players cannot move when they have possession of the Frisbee, so the defensive team tries to block their ability to pass, or intercept a pass to receivers. The defensive teams goal is to stop the offense from scoring and to pick up the Frisbee and score on them. The team that scores becomes the defensive team for the next point, and pull to the offensive team. Teams also switch ends of the field after each point to prevent any wind advantage.

The 2024 College Ultimate Championships took place May 18th-20th for Division 3, and May 24th-27th for Division 1. 16 teams competed in both the Men’s and Women’s tournaments for the Division 3 titles, while 20 teams battled to win the Men’s and Women’s Division 1 titles. The weekends were full of exciting games and wild weather, as teams battled to win their groups, and advance to the bracket. The data from the weekends includes statistics for each player, along with the number of games their team played.

  • Points: number of points the player scored
  • Assists: number of assists the player scored
  • Turns: number of turnovers the player threw
  • Ds: number of defensive blocks the player made
  • Plus Minus: the point differential of the player for points started on offense(Note: defensive points do not contribute to plus minus)

The learning objectives associated with this module are:

  • Being able to tidy and clean data sets

  • Using dplyr and ggplot functions to visualize the data

  • Clean, join, and tidy the data files and complete the worksheet

Data

This data comes from the 2024 Division 1 and 3 Men’s and Women’s College Ultimate Championships. It contains total scoring and defensive statistics for players at the two tournaments. There are 2 datasets, the first one contains player statistics. This dataset has 8325 rows and 7 columns. Each player has 5 rows with totals for different statistics.

ultimate_total.csv - - Total event statistics

Variable Descriptions
Variable Description
player player name
level the level that the player was competing at (D1 or D3)
gender gender of the player’s division (Men or Women)
division level and gender of the competing player’s division
team_name full name of the players team
statistic the name of the statistic measured by value (Points, Assists, Turns, Ds, Plus Minus)
value the measured value of the statistic

The 2nd dataset contains the total games played by each player’s team in the College Ultimate Championships. It has 1665 rows and 6 columns. There is only 1 row for each player and it contains the games played.

ultimate_games.csv - Total games played for each player team

Variable Descriptions
Variable Description
player player name
level the level that the player was competing at (D1 or D3)
gender gender of the player’s division (Men or Women)
division level and gender of the competing player’s division
team_name full name of the players team
team_games the total games played by the player’s team

Data Source

The data is obtained from a USA Ultimate 2024 Nationals Stats Dashboard data visualization done by Ben Ayres, originally found on USA Ultimate.

Materials

ultimate_worksheet.qmd - Worksheet with data tidying and visualization questions. Should take a student around 45-60 minutes to complete.

ultimate_worksheet_ans.qmd - Answer key/guide for the worksheet

Students should find that D1 Men’s division has very dominant offenses and the D3 Women’s division has less dominant offenses with defenses scoring more.