Where Goalbound came from.
We built Goalbound with the goal of enabling informed decision making in college athletic recruiting.
In 2013, Tom Garvey began blogging about lacrosse through an analytic lens under the title of Laxparent. Those early blog posts were a largely manual effort of capturing college rosters, aggregating them in spreadsheets and looking for trends a complete dataset made visible.
Goalbound is the next iteration with the more audacious goal of creating a scalable, repeatable process and product through a modern tech stack. I'm thankful for the contributions of more than twenty people who have worked on the web application.
My current vision for Goalbound is threefold:
Help high school athletes, particularly those from non-hotbed regions, understand potential college athletic opportunities by showing where athletes from their town/region played college sports in recent years.
Serve as the quantitative research analyst for college lacrosse programs through a Moneyball framework. For mid-major programs, I hope to show them an alternative recruiting strategy that helps to discover regions in the country where top players hail from but are not typically recruited to play D1 sports.
Goalbound is an opportunity for me to stay connected to lacrosse, a sport I love. Beyond a connection by sourcing and analyzing recent data, this project lets me learn new technologies and practice data visualization.
Thank you for coming to goalbound.co. Feel free to drop me a line with questions or comments.