{"id":19197,"date":"2023-11-24T15:44:12","date_gmt":"2023-11-24T20:44:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/?p=19197"},"modified":"2024-01-08T11:10:26","modified_gmt":"2024-01-08T16:10:26","slug":"building-nba-analytics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2023\/11\/building-nba-analytics\/","title":{"rendered":"Building NBA Analytics"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Paige<\/a>
\u201cI remember seeing ads on the subway celebrating the NBA\u2019s 75th anniversary season. There were promotions all over the city to download the app, and I knew I helped build something that brought people joy.\u201d -Paige Senal<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When Paige Senal \u201917 was a first-year student at the Whiting School, she imagined a future working to save the planet. She never dreamed that six years later, she would be building analytics for the National Basketball Association (NBA).<\/p>\n

Senal is a software engineer on the Product Analytics Engineering team, where she designs, implements, and tests product analytics across the NBA\u2019s digital properties, including the organization\u2019s website and mobile and TV apps.<\/p>\n

Her team\u2019s work includes measuring what content viewers are watching and for how long on video, as well as analyzing what\u2019s driving fans to subscribe to League Pass, the league\u2019s premier subscription-based streaming service, which is available via the NBA app. \u201cIt provides fans the ability to watch live games and highlights and check scores, statistics, and standings all in one place, and it offers additional videos and series such as \u2018Pass the Rock,\u2019 which follows the league\u2019s new generation of players,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Senal notes that 99% of fans around the world will never step foot in an arena, \u201cwhich only underscores the importance of using the NBA app to deliver localized and in-language content that engages them year-round.\u201d<\/p>\n

She is particularly proud of her work on the NBA\u2019s app redesign, which launched in 2022. \u201cI remember seeing ads on the [New York City] subway celebrating the NBA\u2019s 75th anniversary season,\u201d says Senal.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were promotions all over the city to download the app, and I knew I helped build something that brought people joy.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Hopkins, Senal initially planned to major in environmental engineering<\/a>. But then a required computer programming course resulted in a Eureka moment: \u201cI was doing coding and it was awesome,\u201d she says. \u201cI switched my major to computer science<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her junior year, attending the Grace Hopper Celebration in Computing<\/a>\u2014the world\u2019s largest gathering of women technologists\u2014proved to be yet another defining experience. \u201cIt was my Disney World for meeting people in the industry,\u201d she says. \u201cSheryl Sandberg [Meta chief operating officer at the time] was a guest speaker. She said if you take anything away from this conference, it\u2019s to form communities of women in engineering so you can lean on other women.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat changed everything for me. I needed to lean on others at Hopkins within my major to get myself through. I became co-founder and president of Women in Computer Science at JHU<\/a>,\u201d she says, adding, \u201cMy time at Hopkins gave me the tools to succeed and a sense of self that can\u2019t be taken away.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Paige Senal \u201917 was a first-year student at the Whiting School, she imagined a future working to save the planet. She never dreamed that six years later, she would be building analytics for the National Basketball Association (NBA). Senal is a software engineer on the Product Analytics Engineering team, where she designs, implements, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":19273,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","issue-winter-2024"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBuilding NBA Analytics - JHU Engineering Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Read how Johns Hopkins alum Paige Senal builds analytics for the National Basketball Association (NBA).\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/engineering.jhu.edu\/magazine-archive\/2023\/11\/building-nba-analytics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Building NBA Analytics - 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