Reading the Game in Numbers: Shen Hongqiu's Route to Sports Analytics

Shen Hongqiu arrived at the middle school with a report card full of top marks and one weak spot. English had never asked much of him in primary school; here nearly every lesson was taught in it. For the first weeks he could follow the shape of a class without catching what was inside it.

His response was unglamorous and effective. He wrote himself a daily plan — words, listening, reading — and kept to it. He read vocabulary aloud until it stopped slipping away, and when a grammar point would not settle he collected example sentences until the pattern was obvious. He took everything he had missed to a teacher. By the end of half a term the gap had closed, and the routine outlasted the problem that started it.

Six years later that routine has somewhere to go. He holds an Early Decision offer from Rice University to study sports data analytics — a programme built on statistics, computing and the patience to sit with a dataset until it says something. It suits a student who describes his best quality as dependability, and who answers questions about his future with dates rather than adjectives.

The following conversation took place before graduation and has been edited for length and clarity.

English was the subject you had to fight for. What actually worked?

Repetition, mostly. I was completely focused in class, and then I took everything I had not understood to a teacher, one item at a time. I made a plan and kept to it: vocabulary, listening, reading, every day. Half a term later the gap was gone. There was no clever method in it. A great many small ones, repeated.

What do you miss when you think about leaving?

The food, honestly. Students call the canteen the Grand Hotel and it earns the name — the roast duck, the oil-splashed noodles. But the place I will miss is my dorm room, and the talking that went on there before sleep.

Which teachers changed the way you think?

Mr. Sheridan made humanities something I looked forward to. Mr. Fan taught me maths and physics and was also my mentor — the person I went to when I could not see the next step. And Mr. Gao, my homeroom teacher, noticed things before I did.

What did the school give you that will still be useful in ten years?

Confidence. This is an open school; the teachers leave you room. If you want something and you are willing to act on it, you can usually build it here. I learned that the distance between wanting a thing and having it is mostly administrative, and that someone will usually sign the form.

One habit you still use?

Prepare in advance. For anything. If the groundwork is done, the day itself is mostly execution, and execution is the easy part.

You describe yourself as dependable rather than brilliant. Why that word?

Because it is the one I work at. Being on time, doing what you said you would do, keeping your word, carrying your share. Buffett said that being dependable matters more than being clever — that it is the highest compliment you can pay someone's ability and character. I think he was right. Cleverness is cheap here. Everyone is clever here.

How did sports analytics choose you?

It came out of my family before it came out of school. Both my parents worked in sport, and my father took me to NBA and CBA games until I understood what I was looking at. Later I visited universities in the United States, did a summer programme, interned at a sports data company and ran a research project on the same subject. At school I took AP Calculus, AP Statistics and AP Computer Science A — the three tools the major actually uses — and our teachers ran extra sessions on past papers, which is why those exams never frightened me.

You also started two clubs. What were they for?

A maths competition club, because I had made every mistake a younger student is about to make. And a volunteer teaching club that works with students in Tibetan areas — the only thing I have done here that was useful to people I will probably never meet.

Was there a hard part in the application season?

Less than I expected, because I had planned early. The one real fight was TOEFL speaking, which has never been my strength; the teachers worked with me until the score was good enough and then we stopped worrying about it.

What would you tell a student two years behind you?

Know exactly where you are going before the race starts. Choose the target early, plan backwards from it, then be stubborn. By the time I applied, the result felt more or less like a formality.

And to the school, on the way out?

Graduation is a beginning, not an ending. This is the one place I am allowed to criticise and nobody else is. It is where I learned to walk forward and where I will look back for the strength to keep doing it.

He leaves with an AIME score of 9, the top one per cent of AMC 10, the top five per cent of AMC 12, a gold from the Senior Mathematical Challenge and a top-ten finish in China in the Berkeley Math Tournament's Puzzle Round. Rice, founded in Houston in 1891, will ask him for all of it. What it will get first is the half-term habit: a plan, kept.