This season, Bellarmine acquired a new coaching staff. This new staff, led by Coach Beauchman, has a goal of turning the Bells’ fortunes around after struggling to win for the past few seasons. Along with this goal, they aim to create a more modern program with a more progressive offense and, along with it, new tools to better prepare for matchups. From here, the position of Director of Football Analytics was opened up to manage Samarth Girish’s self-developed programs.
Samarth is a part of this year’s senior class and is excited to help Bellarmine’s football program in this way. He first came up with this idea a few years back as a hobby project over the past several years due to his interest in football. However, there was never really an opportunity for him to use these programs — when Bellarmine hired Coach Beauchman to take the reigns of the program, Samarth reached out to Coach Ronald to ask him if he was interested in using his programs. When the coaches were intrigued, Samarth got the job to analyze the performance of the student athletes and to help prepare the team for the upcoming matchups.
For the past few months, Samarth has diligently gone to football practices and workouts to collect data points (e.g. passing yards or yards per catch) to rank and compare players. In addition to collecting data from practices, Samarth has created a program to predict the play calls of other football programs based on past film. After spending hours watching tape and compiling that data, he can use that program to predict certain plays that can occur at a certain time. His analytics have allowed the Bellarmine coaching staff to know, in real-time, what offensive plays are other teams likely to call and realize what defense they should be in and vice-versa to adjust their game plan.
However, Samarth refuses to take credit for helping contribute to the success of the program. He says all the credit goes to the players and all the coaching staff. What he does say is that his favorite part about this job is just meeting all the players and the coaching staff as well as the parents. He says being able to talk to them and hang out with them is what makes his job so enjoyable because he respects them for their commitment to the sport even during this difficult year.
As of the time I’m writing this article, Bellarmine has just picked up their first win this season, and Coach Beauchman’s first win as Bellarmine football head coach, against San Benito. As Bellarmine heads into their League season, we all hope that Bellarmine has a successful season ahead of them.
Go Bells!