Greetings, my name is Evan Eyster and I am a writer here at Indomitable City Soccer.
Like most 20-somethings in the Sacramento, California area today, I grew up playing soccer on area rec teams. Once high school started, I left soccer to run track and get a job. It was also in high school that I started to like numbers much more.
When I went to college, I began following soccer closely once again. I started playing again, this time in an intermural league during my freshman year, but what really hooked me for good was the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
With studying and classwork, time to play was hard to come by in college, so I started to change how I looked at the game. My interest in numbers - helped along by engineering and math courses - led me to start looking at how numbers and soccer come together.
I enjoy breaking down numbers, seeing what small patterns emerge and thinking about how they can be used to explain past results or predict future ones. There is nothing more interesting to me than to use numbers to find a vulnerability in a strong team, see strength in a supposedly weak team, or predict how the season will play out.
You can follow me on twitter at @IronPonyChef for updates and for a statistical look at Sacramento Republic FC and other teams around USL. Additionally, if there are ever any statistics that you feel would be interesting to look at, let me know and I will do what I can to dig into it.