A new standard in the highest divisions
How we determined the quality of youth teams in the Belgian Hockey pyramid to create the best possible top leagues.
The Belgian Hockey Federation (KBHB) and SciSports formed a partnership to develop a team index that measures the quality of hockey players and teams in Belgium.
The partnership was formed to make sure the strongest youth teams play against each other in the top leagues of the Belgian hockey pyramid.
The challenge
Due to the lack of insights in the quality level of players, there was a mismatch between the strength of a team and the league level. This resulted in less enjoyment and performance improvement among (young) hockey players.
Our solution
By using 1.5 season of historic match sheet data (collected since 2018) and a unique algorithm, classification is automated for 15,000 youth players and 800 teams in the age categories under 14 to under 19. The index is used to determine which teams should play against each other during the regular season.
What the KBHB have to say about SciSports
We had the problem that the league level a team was assigned to always depended on the results of its predecessors in the previous season and was not based on the actual qualities of that team. With the SciSports team index we now have a system to automatically assign team strengths based on the players that actually play in that team. SciSports was able to deliver fast and accurate results because of their experience with similar cases.
The results
- By using the index the KBHB overcomes the problem that teams used to be assigned to a league based on results of its predecessors in the previous season instead of being assigned to a league based on their actual strength
- By using the index the strongest teams compete against each other
- Team index is used for creating top leagues in the season 2020-2021
