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SCHENECTADY, N.Y. – With the new basketball season set to get underway this weekend, Union College women's basketball senior Nicole Conley will once again begin the challenge of balancing her biomedical engineering course load and the long basketball season. This summer, Conley had the opportunity to introduce the collaboration of engineering and sports to a younger audience during a week-long program at Columbia University.
 
Conley and volunteer assistant coach Amy Loya '14 spent a week at Columbia as counselors for the Youth Sports Lab, a basketball camp designed to engage local student-athletes in engineering, analytics, and sports medicine. Fourteen middle school students from Harlem took part in hands-on, engineering challenges and sports competitions to help transform their understanding of athletic performance through the lens of data collection and whole body biomechanics.
 
"I had an awesome time at Columbia with 4th Family and the rest of the Youth Sports Lab program," Conley said. "It was great to see how much the kids learned about applying STEM+M to the game of basketball throughout the week."
 
Conley served as a mentor and coach for student-athletes from underrepresented minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine (STEM+M). She drew from her own experiences on the court and in the classroom to connect with students and help deliver the Youth Sports Lab curriculum, which was developed by Loya as a part of her role as the STEM+M Director for the non-profit organization, 4th Family Inc.
 
The collaboration resulted from the alumni connections of Loya, who was a four-year member of the women's basketball team at Union and graduated in 2014 with a degree in bioengineering. In addition to serving as an assistant coach with the Dutchwomen, Loya is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in the department of biomedical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
 
"Amy has been involved with 4th Family for many years and asked me if I wanted to participate in the Columbia camp," Conley said. "I am grateful that I had the opportunity to work with 4th Family and I'm looking forward to doing it again in the future."
 
The growing role of sports science and analytics in professional sports organizations parallels the trajectory of a higher demand for STEM+M careers. Thus the goal of Youth Sports Lab is to shift the students' perspective of STEM+M by using basketball as an avenue to broaden their entry into the STEM+M career pipeline. Conley's participation in this initiative is a testament to the Union College Women's Basketball team's commitment to serving the community, alongside their dedication to academic and athletic excellence.
 
"Participating in this camp helped me be able to teach others about biomechanics," Conley added. "Being a biomedical engineer and an athlete, biomechanics is an important field of study. Using my knowledge of the subject helped me teach the kids how biomechanics can be applied on the court. Knowing information about a topic is one thing, but actually being able to teach it to someone else really helps solidify your knowledge of that subject."
 
In concert with ball-handling obstacle courses, shooting drills, and 5-on-5 scrimmages, students were introduced to the idea that the scientific method for identifying a problem and testing a hypothesis can also be applied to questions on the basketball court. Over the course of the week, middle school students assembled the electrical circuits and wooden housing for "jump plates" that measure vertical jump height. They also recorded their shooting efficiency from various spots on the court and entered their data into a computer program that generated personalized heat maps. Finally, they participated in a series of physical fitness competitions that mimic the NBA Rookie Combine in order to receive player performance evaluations. By the end of the week, students not only improved their skills and competency on the court, but they also completed a self-directed research project aimed at measuring and testing a basketball attribute of their choice.
 
For example, one group measured the vertical jump height of the Columbia University Women's Basketball team before and after taking part in a leg exercise to investigate the influence of fatigue. Another group looked for a correlation between shooting percentages and athletic ability, based on the heat map results and player performance evaluations. The camp concluded with a poster session, in which student groups presented their findings to faculty members and graduate students from the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Orthopaedic Surgery at Columbia. To the campers' surprise, Emmanuel Mudiay from the New York Knicks stopped by to hear about their projects and talk about his experiences leading up to the NBA Draft. He reinforced the value of working hard in school and highlighted some of the ways he relies on sports science and data analytics every day in the NBA.
 
About 4th Family:
The mission of 4th Family is to provide resources for underserved populations to encourage continued engagement in STEM+M fields. The connection between sports and STEM+M offers a unique opportunity to capitalize on both the ubiquity and diversity of youth basketball programs, in order to introduce a greater number of young athletes from various racial backgrounds to career options in STEM+M. This integration primarily introduces students, who were previously disinterested in STEM+M, to relevant topics within the context of basketball, an activity at which they are determined to improve and intrinsically enjoy. This provides a new setting and motivation for academic success in their STEM+M-based classes due to a learned appreciation for how the material can be used as a basketball tool. Additionally, student-athletes are taught how to improve as basketball players using STEM+M as a competitive advantage. The resultant enhancement of a participant's self-efficacy regarding basketball training serves to refine his or her capacity for, and quality of, athletic performance.
 
Thanks to Amy Loya for providing much of the information used in this article.