Kirk Goldsberry

I grew up in State College, PA in the 80’s and 90’s before attending Penn State. After graduating, I worked as a cartographer for FEMA in D.C., and for Delorme Mapping in Yarmouth, Maine. I Ieft Maine for Santa Barbara where I studied mapping as a grad student and met my lovely wife. We have moved around from California, to Michigan, and Massachusetts, before settling down in Austin, Texas. We have 2 children and I spend most of my time either hanging out with them or mapping basketball players. Academic I studied Geography at Penn State as an undergrad before getting a Master’s and a Ph.D. from UC-Santa Barbara. I was an assistant professor at Michigan State from 2007-2011 before accepting a visiting position at Harvard in 2011. My expertise in geography is in mapping and Cartography. I love maps. Basketball In 2012 I published my first work on basketball analytics at the MIT Sloan Conference. This paper changed my career. Following its publication, I helped create the 2012 NBA Finals Preview at the New York Times, before accepting a part-time position at Grantland, which at the time was just starting. I left Harvard and academics in 2013 and went to work at Grantland full-time, where I stayed until the site was shut down in 2015. At that time, I accepted two jobs on the “team side” – 1) as the head analyst for Team USA Basketball and 2) as the Vice President of Strategic Research for the San Antonio Spurs. I still do work at Team USA, but left the Spurs in September of 2018 to return to writing and teaching.