Sports Coaching Networks: Using Community Detection to Analyse Coaching Strategies

We construct a directed social network of coaches based on tutelage, from which we examine community structure based upon connections in the network given by community-detection algorithms. We use this approach to investigate communities of coaches from the National Football League for American football and Major League Baseball, both sports leagues in the United States. We analyse patterns amongst communities of head coaches from different types of networks and investigate whether the history of who a coach has worked for impacts on how successful they are likely to become. Communities can also be formed based upon different strategies employed by coaches, which are studied in relation to the communities found from algorithms.