Master of Computer and Information Science, Cleveland State University, 2017, Washkewicz College of Engineering

The on-ball screen is a fundamental offensive play in basketball; it is often used to trigger a chain reaction of player and ball movement to obtain an effective shot. All teams in the National Basketball Association (NBA) employ the on-ball screen on offense. On the other hand, a defense can mitigate its effectiveness by anticipating the on-ball screen and its goals. In the past, it was difficult to measure a defender's ability to disrupt the on-ball screen, and it was often described using abstract words like instincts, experience, and communication. In recent years, player motion-tracking data in NBA games has become available through the development of sophisticated data collection tools. This thesis presents methods to construct a framework which can extract, transform, and analyze the motion-tracking data to automatically identify the presence of on-ball screens. The framework also provides assistance for NBA players and coaches to adjust their game plans regarding the on-ball screen using trends from past games. With the help of support vector machines, the framework identifies on-ball screens with an accuracy of 85%, which shows considerable improvement from the current published results in existing literature.

Committee: Sunnie Chung Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Yongjian Fu Ph.D. (Committee Member); Nigamanth Sridhar Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Computer Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1981, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1979, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1974, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1963, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1963, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Theatre

Over the past decade, especially in the United States, there has been a significant increase in what has commonly come to be known as athlete activism. Examples of this phenomenon include such moments as Colin Kaepernick's anthem protest in the National Football League (NFL) and the campaign for pay equality undertaken by the United States Women's National Team (USWNT). Though these examples, and many others like them, have affected important and tangible social change, there are many in the United States who claim that the practice of sport activism only serves to unnecessarily politicize the realm of sport. Opponents of sport activism often argue that sport should be kept separated from more serious matters such as pressing social and political issues. However, this argument is predicated on the assumption that sport is inherently apolitical or that it somehow exists independently of societal structures, which is demonstrably false. In “Finding Hope at the Arena: A Performance Studies Approach to Sport,” I make use of performance studies frameworks to investigate sport as a meaning-making mode of live performance with utopian potentiality. Using performance scholar Jill Dolan's theorization of the utopian performative as a theoretical framework, I examine several key moments and eras in United States sport history to interrogate the notion that sport is, or ever has been, separate from social and political issues. Through archival and performance analysis methods of research, I interrogate the ways in which sport, as a genre of live performance, produces myriad utopian visions of the country that often serve to uphold or critique the dominant social order. Moreover, I imagine this study as a step towards what I call a model of utopian sport spectatorship. Utopian sport spectatorship facilitates a form of engagement with sport similar to that of a theatrical production. In this model of spectatorship, participants, both those involved in the aspects of athletic c (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Angela Ahlgren (Committee Chair); Heidi Nees (Committee Member); Jonathan Chambers (Committee Member); Amilcar Challu (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Performing Arts; Social Structure; Sociology; Theater

Master of Science (MS), Bowling Green State University, 1961, Human Movement, Sport and Leisure Studies

Committee: J. Russell Coffey (Advisor) Subjects: Education

Master of Science (MS), Bowling Green State University, 1957, Human Movement, Sport and Leisure Studies

Committee: J. Russell Coffey (Advisor) Subjects: Education

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1947, Human Movement, Sport and Leisure Studies

Committee: Walter A. Zaugg (Advisor) Subjects: Physical Education

Master of Science (MS), Bowling Green State University, 1957, Human Movement, Sport and Leisure Studies

Committee: J. Russell Coffey (Advisor) Subjects: Education

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2022, Communication

The purpose of this study was to determine how an organization's public communication like a website helps visitors understand its culture. Sports organizations were chosen for analysis because of their inclusive nature of the past, present, and future aspects of the game as well as its importance and strong presence in society. The goal of this paper was to apply Organizational Culture Theory to four sports halls of fame's websites to analyze how an organization's public communication illustrates its culture. Based off the assumptions of OCT, three research questions were developed to dive deeper into the concepts of the theory. From there, a code book was developed, and the websites of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Hockey Hall of Fame, and National Baseball Hall of Fame were individually analyzed. Research Question 1 focused on how a public website communicates an organization's values by specifically analyzing the mission statements, community involvement, visitor information, and official press and media reports found on the organizations' websites. Research Question 2 was based on how a public website communicates an organization's inclusive criteria of who is and who is not a member. The coding and analysis focused on organization information, employee information, and nominee and inductee criteria which are the factors as to how inclusive criteria determine who is a member. Research Question 3 questioned how a public website's use and interpretation of symbols communicate and market an organization's culture. Through the analysis of symbols and performances coded from the websites, the results express that organizations can communicate their culture and market it through the symbols of videos, photos, explanations of induction processes, and slogans, and the performances of explanations of election processes and use of metaphors.

Committee: Kelly Dillon (Advisor); Tim Bode (Committee Member); Sheryl Cunningham (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Sports Management

BA, Oberlin College, 2022, Gender Sexuality and Feminist Studies

In this paper, I set out to understand how women have been successful as coaches of men's sports at the Division III college level and above. This is important because despite a national increase in women playing sports after the passage of Title IX in 1972, there continues to be a glaring lack of women in coaching positions, especially within men's sports. Existing scholarship highlights social barriers to reaching these positions, however there is very little information about the women who do achieve success in this field. Four coaches from men's baseball, basketball, and football teams were interviewed in order to gain perspective on what has been crucial to their success, as well as the structural issues within athletics that present barriers to women being successful coaches. I found that mentorships and support systems are crucial in order to access opportunities in coaching, and that there are several physical and cultural environments within sports that hinder these opportunities. The final chapter explores how to move forward in order to create more opportunities for women to coach men's sports at the highest levels. This research is necessary as athletics move forward in the name of progress, and as we begin to see higher numbers of women involved in positions of power in men's sports.

Committee: Christie Parris (Advisor); Al Evangelista (Committee Member); Greggor Mattson (Advisor) Subjects: Gender; Gender Studies; Physical Education; Social Research; Sociology; Womens Studies

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 2020, Industrial and Systems Engineering

There is a large body of systems literature that studies and learns from adaptive team performance in high-complexity domains (nuclear, healthcare, aviation). However, there is little to no systems research on arguably the most popular team setting: organized sports. Using converging methods, this study looked at (1) patterns of adaptation that are revealed when using a resilience engineering lens to look at intra- and inter- game coaching decisions, and (2) the strategies that coaches use to affect individual and system performance on a collegiate basketball team. The specific concepts borrowed from resilience engineering used to view this domain were common ground, mutual directability, interpredictability, polycentric control and being poised to adapt, amongst others. A resilience engineering lens was used due to the fact that it is known to be critically important to other complex adaptive systems. Decision-making and adaptations in sports are commonly thought to be targeted towards each individual. Through structured interviews, this study found that there are hidden triggers and decision-making processes that are system-focused rather than individually-focused when coaches assess the need for an adaptation and execute it. In addition, the existence of different time scales to implement and execute adaptations was found to be a critical point that coaches exploit in order to increase the readiness to adapt during high tempo periods. Basketball has high varying tempos on multiple time scales, from longest to shortest: practices and film sessions between games, halftime breaks, timeout breaks, play breaks and in-play breaks. This study identifies various hidden system level strategies that coaches use in order to achieve successful team performance across the different time scales: increasing the levels of common ground, directability, predictability, readiness to adapt and polycentric control. For example, this research found that the development of coded ter (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michael Rayo Dr. (Advisor); Dave D. Woods Dr. (Committee Chair) Subjects: Engineering; Systems Science

MA, University of Cincinnati, 2019, Arts and Sciences: Communication

This project explores the realm of college sports through a tensional perspective. Specifically, this paper analyzes the paradoxical tensions present within the term student-athlete in men's Division I college basketball. As an FBI probe closed in on corruption in prestigious NCAA institutions, the Commission on College Basketball (CCB) was formed to assess the state of men's Division I college basketball. The CCB created a 53-page report detailing the issues with college basketball and recommendations on how to resolve them. Through a grounded iterative method and the framework provided by Putnam, Fairhurst, & Banghart (2016) on paradoxical tensions in organizations, this study examines the paradoxical tensions related to the term student-athlete in the CCB Report. This paper finds a central tension of incentive-disincentive, and three sub-tensions: academics-athletics, tradition-status quo, and sufficient compensation-insufficient compensation. This study then describes the implications, theoretical and practical, derived from the paradoxical tensions and management strategies found.

Committee: Gail Fairhurst Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Stephen Depoe Ph.D. (Committee Member); Nancy Jennings Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

BA, Oberlin College, 2019, Art

This research uses personal and theoretical frameworks to unpack paradoxical notions of Blackness in both it's political and chromatic understandings as related to my studio practice. Jared Sexton posits the color Black as simultaneously all-consuming and incomprehensible; a necessarily contradictory state. I utilize this concept in addition to material histories that span from Pompeii to modern day New York City and art historical references as foundational explanations of my work. Written in both formal and intimate voices, this text is an extension of my studio practice, situated at the nexus of the realization and subversion of binary states of existence.

Committee: Kristina Paabus (Advisor); Grayson Earle (Advisor); Johnny W. Coleman (Advisor); Pipo Nguyen-duy (Other) Subjects: Black History; Black Studies; Fine Arts

Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Ohio University, 2019, Business Administration

This research aims to connect the implications of on-court performance in the National Basketball Association (NBA) to All-NBA Team voting patterns. At the end of each regular season, a panel of writers and broadcasters vote on who they deem to be the 15 best players during that season, forming the All-NBA Team. As both the ultimate signifier of high-performance and the ultimate determinant of maximum contracts, a player's selection to one of the All-NBA Teams can change both the course of their career and the long-term success of the team they are on. Due to the outsize importance of nominations and due to the lack of available research in this field, this research's main purpose is two-fold: it aims to both find the best classification model for voting patterns and, concurrently, the most sensitive attributes, in order to construct a framework for future players. Subjects in the initial data set consist of all players who started at least 82 regular season games from 2010 to 2017, with the dependent variable being whether or not they were nominated to one of the three teams within the same timeframe. Due to the rarity of an All-NBA Team selection, this data set contains a dominant majority class. 21 models will be constructed based off of it, and the methodology utilizes existing classification methods—bagging, boosting, random foresting, logistic regressions, and classification trees—for model generation. After constructing these models on the original imbalanced data set, an oversampled set, and an undersampled set, it then scores all of the models against a control group and runs a sensitivity analysis on the best model. The results of the study found that the bagged classification tree run on the original imbalanced data set best-predicted voting patterns and that the assists per game a player registers during the regular season in which they either received their first nomination or registered their best PER season is the most sensitive attribute.

Committee: William A. Young II (Advisor); Ehsan Ardjmand (Committee Member) Subjects: Business Administration

Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Ohio University, 2018, Business Administration

This paper reviews prominent authors in the field of data visualization in order to gain a deeper understanding of the process of creating successful data visualizations. Business, journalism, and design implications are taken into consideration. A new set of guidelines for all steps of the data visualization process is proposed that can be used across disciplines and levels of understanding. A data visualization series is presented along with explanation of the application of these guidelines in the project. Practitioners and researchers across fields will have a deeper understanding of data visualization and be able to apply the guidelines to more successfully communicate with their audiences.

Committee: Raymond Frost (Advisor) Subjects: Business Administration; Design

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2017, Media and Communication

In 2014, the leadership performances of National Basketball Association (NBA) Commissioner Adam Silver and National Football League (NFL) Commissioner Roger Goodell (both men who occupy White positionality), in response to two critical moments in their respective leagues, offered insight into prevailing racial and gender ideologies between United States (U.S.) professional men's sport, and ultimately, U.S. society. In the NFL, a domestic abuse incident between NFL star Ray Rice and his then-fiance Janay Palmer, two individuals who do not occupy whiteness, and in the NBA, racist comments made by then-owner of the Los Angeles Clippers Donald Sterling, a man who occupies whiteness, required responses and disciplinary action from the commissioners. Utilizing critical rhetorical analysis as a method of textual analysis (McKerrow, 1989), this dissertation examines and critiques Commissioners Silver and Goodell's rhetorical performances as leaders in response to these incidents as well as the surrounding global news and sports media reactions to their decisions. Informed by concepts within critical whiteness studies (e.g., Nakayama & Krizek, 1995), intersectionality (e.g., Crenshaw, 1989; 1991), Black Feminist Thought (BFT) (e.g., Collins 1991; 2004; Griffin, 2012b; hooks, 2004), hegemonic masculinity (e.g,., Trujillo, 1991), and dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981; Baxter, 2011), this dissertation examines the intersection of whiteness and hegemonic masculinity within the commissioners' performances to explore how whiteness functions dialectically and intersectionally to secure its persuasive power as a strategic rhetoric. The analyses within the two case studies revealed two distinct dialectics: (1) rhetorics of postracism vs. critical rhetorics, and (2) rhetorics of honor vs. rhetorics of shame. Overall, this project extends understanding of how the rhetorics of whiteness work dialectically and intersect with the rhetorics of masculinity within the NBA and NFL via the rhetorical p (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Alberto Gonzalez Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Lisa Hanasono Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Christina Lunceford Dr. (Other); Ellen Gorsevski Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Rhetoric