Rising Stars: Meet Payton Soicher of Aurora, CO

Today we’d like to introduce you to Payton Soicher

Hi Payton, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I’ve had two different careers in my life – sports, and then data science. I played baseball from my youth through college, and in college I majored in actuarial science which is the study of risk. Once I finished college, I started at a database management company where I found a new passion for working with data. I’ve been lucky that my passion of sports and professional career have intertwined. I’ve gotten to work with different sports teams and universities to help manage their data, and I worked as a data scientist at Sony Playstation on their baseball video game MLB The Show.

However, I’ve always wanted to design something myself. I wanted to build something that would be unique in a way that could bring a new element to the conversation of sports.

My father went to Michigan State University, so from a young age I was basically brainwashed to be completely in love with MSU. I’ve never lived in Michigan, I didn’t go to school there, but its always had a special place in my heart. In 2021, I was watching week 12 of the college football season where #7 MSU was playing #4 Ohio State. It was a very important game for determining who would play for the Big 10 Championship, as well as being in the top 4 teams to play for a national championship.

At half time, MSU was losing 49-0. In a moment of complete agony, my wife walked into the room and did two things. 1 – mocked me and laughed at the situation and 2 – made a comment that really struck me. “What will they be ranked now?”

As someone who spends their weekdays building algorithms to try and predict outcomes, this was a fascinating idea. College football has two main polls that people pay attention to – the AP Poll, and the College Football Selection Committee Poll. When you see a promo for a college football game, or during the game itself, depending on the time of the year the ranking you see next to the team’s name is the ranking from one of those polls. Those polls are very, very important to fans, especially the College Football Selection Committee’s poll because they have the final say on who makes the playoffs at the end of the year. These polls get released from 1 to 3 days after the games have been played and it’s a pretty big reveal. So as my wife is making this comment, I’m thinking to myself “Yeah, actually that would be really interesting if we could see RIGHT NOW what the updated rankings are! Why do I need to wait a few days to get the results? I want to know now!”

I did some research to see if anything like that was out there, which I found nothing of the sort, so I decided that would be my new project and I called it Rankings Right Now.

With most machine learning models, you’re trying to predict an outcome based off individual data points. This means that one record of data is not influenced by another record of data. They’re independent. However, that is not true with college football rankings. Each week the rankings of teams depend on how well a team played, as well as how all the other games turned out. This was extremely tricky to mess around with. There is also the factor that there is no point system with these rankings. They release the top 25 ranked teams, but nobody really knows who is 26 – 130. I have encountered a wide variety of predictable problems, but this was a completely different beast.

After about a year I had come up with a “prototype” of an algorithm and built a Twitter bot around it to give updates in real time. This was mostly for me to experiment with the idea, as the accuracy of the predictions were nowhere close to where they needed to be. It took another 2 years for me to finally be satisfied with the results that I was seeing. Early this year, after countless hours of trial and error, I finally looked at the predictions of what I saw and showed my friends what it could do, and their excitement convinced me this could be something bigger than just a side project. I might be able to achieve my goal and hopefully bring something new and interesting to sports conversations around the country.

I love learning about tech and programming is my hobby, so I put together my first website from scratch, integrated the algorithm into the website to give real time predicted rankings, and put in some other fun features to allow users to see what rankings will be based on multiple given outcomes. I will do a full launch starting this fall.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
A lot of the work that has been done so far has come purely off momentum. Rankings Right Now was just a side project that morphed into something more interesting as time has gone on. The real challenges have been learning things I’ve never done before. Building an application on a website, learning how to register for domain names and set things up correctly, figuring out what platforms to host things on, things like that. Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I don’t really have that many close friends who are programmers like me, so a real struggle has been me having to figure out a lot of things out on my own. However, thats led to a lot of learning and growing for me as a programmer, which in the end I’m grateful for.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My current job is a machine learning engineer for a video distribution company. My specialties are in machine learning and data science, which has been a crazy field to be in the last few years. I’ve also spent a lot of time in the past working in database management, which sounds extremely boring but has been something I’ve really enjoyed. For me, database management is the building block for all of the apps we use today, so understanding that and learning how to be great at that has given me the ability to build things faster because I know how to lay the foundation faster than most.

I had some programming classes in college, but the programming I’ve done in my career has all been self taught. One of the first apps I built on my own was called Slugger Report, which was based off of the lack of scouting reports I had playing D2 college baseball. I had just started to learn about how to write programs, so I spent a summer building an application that would scrape the play by play data from my old baseball games and build out my hitters profile. After building that app, I really found my passion for building programs which I didn’t know I had inside me. Those kinds of things, like working on applications on the side either personally or to share with others, has consistently put me in great positions.

For example, in my interview with Sony PlayStation, the last interview I had took me by surprise. I walked into a room, and up on the board was my Slugger Report website. They asked me to explain to them how I built it from start to finish. I don’t even remember telling them about that app, but it impressed me that they did their research and found something that I built, and allowed me to explain how much time and detail I put into it. I don’t know if I get that job if I don’t build that app. I’ve felt proud about working hard and continuing to do what I’m passionate about because it has consistently put me in good positions in my career.

The personal apps I’ve built so far don’t change the world or produce endless streams of money, but I continue to do them because I believe they give me a leg up against others in my career. The best programmers I’ve met are those who have run into the most errors and issues. They know what to do when they see something wrong. I know from all the struggles I will go through when I build a project or application, it will accelerate me in my career even more.

Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
I really enjoy to cook. I think of cooking similarly to how I’ve learned to program. I’ve become comfortable learning how to cook dishes that look great, and know that I will not get it right the first few times. It has been harder lately to cook with two small children in the house that need constant attention, but if I have a few minutes, I really enjoy to cook a big meal for everyone.

I can also eat more chocolate chip cookies than anyone else and I take way too much pride in that fact.

Pricing:

• Free

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.rankingsrightnow.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rankingsrightnow/
• Twitter: https://x.com/RankRightNow
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@RankigsRightNow