The 2021 U.S. Open Field @ Torrey Pines South Course

Link to GitHub Page: https://c6shi.github.io/golf/index.html

With the 2023 U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open approaching in the upcoming months, I figured it would be interesting to see how these open championships might differ in terms of player background compared to the typical professional events. As a UCSD student who longingly gazes at the greenery of Torrey on walks (and fortunate enough to play the North Course!), I had particular interest for the 2021 U.S. Open, which was played on the South Course. At the time that I started working on this project, I had also watched (on TV) Jon Rahm win his first green jacket at the Masters. This also helped me funnel my decision to this specific U.S. Open where he won as well.

Golf Digest (Photo by J.D. Cuban)

This is my first JavaScript and D3 project (as part of the DSC 106 final project), and I definitely struggled to get my ideas implemented. I have had to cut down many parts in order to finish this assignment on time, but I have many directions to take this further and into a more effective visualization. Additionally, I think many parts of the game have become analyzed to the point where some of the stats out there might not seem relevant or useful. I am sure that somewhere out there, people have already analyzed/visualized the same ideas I have, so I would view this project as more of my experimental entry into JavaScript while working on something I am interested in. Given the data, I think it would be very cool to reproduce some of the visualizations on golfchannel.com or pgatour.com, especially the hole-by-hole/play-by-play.

Issues I ran into:

• Clustering countries represented by players by country (and placing them in a roughly similar geographical context as they do in reality)
• Tooltip not showing up
• Adding player profiles and names with centering and interactivity
• Displaying colleges with a bubble chart, but some bubbles overlap others

Improvements + new ideas (constrained to the same dataset):

• Select multiple players on the leaderboard scroll and highlight their round scores, countries, and colleges (if applicable) in the respective visualizations
• Select players by their country, college, age range, rank, etc.
• Option to “Select All” or “Deselect All” and keep track of selected players underneath the leaderboard scroll
• Click on a college bubble and show a node-link diagram with all the players that played for that college
• Obtain a dataset of college latitude, longitude coordinates rather than hardcoding each one
• Obtain more consistent images of player profiles
• Adjusting the size of each visualization so that it appears more as a dashboard rather than having to scroll down to view each visualization