After a 25-year finance career, Lucas Kiely continued his intellectual journey by enrolling in UChicago’s Master of Liberal Arts program.
After an MBA and a 25-year career in investment banking and hedge funds, Lucas Kiely chose to continue his intellectual journey by enrolling in the University of Chicago Master of Liberal Arts program in 2020. While living in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 lockdown, he was able to stay connected to a global academic community through the program’s online format.
For Lucas, the MLA was an incredible opportunity because it offered the flexibility to delve into the quantitative problems that intrigued by taking courses remotely from across all four divisions of UChicago. A custom-built curriculum on financial mathematics and computing advanced Lucas’ knowledge of machine learning. This intellectual exploration eventually culminated in a thesis project on tennis ranking that brought together his professional skills and personal interests.
Lucas followed his curiosity and applied his technical know-how to challenge the rating methodologies widely used by tennis governing bodies. His research, now under review at a scholarly journal, could transform the experiences of young athletes like his own children. Lucas’ UChicago MLA experience illustrates how the in-depth exploration of a thesis or special project can result in real-world impact.
Lucas first became interested in rankings for junior tennis when his son set out to play in an international tournament in the U.S. A player’s rating determines eligibility for tournaments and what competitors they’re matched against.
There’s no single rating system used worldwide, but many governing bodies rely on either the World Tennis Number (WTN) or Universal Tennis Rating (UTR) to set standards for international players:
When Lucas’ son almost missed out on a slot in the U.S. tournament, it became clear that rankings didn’t align across different systems.
“I looked at it and said, ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’” Lucas explained.
By applying his analytical skills, he confirmed his suspicion that the most widely used algorithms did not reliably assess which player would win a match. That meant his son and other young tennis players might be incorrectly denied entry to certain tournaments or play against opponents that didn’t fit their skill level.
By the time Lucas started on his MLA thesis, he had relocated to France. There, he sought to turn his longtime pet project of improving tennis rankings into a rigorous thesis.
To MLA Program Director Tim Murphy, Lucas’ story exemplifies how UChicago offers endless possibilities for seeking knowledge and confronting challenges with support from a community of renowned experts and engaged peers.
“While in the MLA, he encountered a problem in the real world and boldly thought he could remedy it, so he decided to take advantage of all the support and resources afforded him by his status as a UChicago graduate student and did just that,” Tim said.
Though his focus on data and mathematics stood out from other MLA thesis projects, UChicago faculty and staff were eager to help bring the project to fruition. The program’s writing advisor, Millie Rey, helped Lucas to refine his proposal and connected him with Abid Ali, an instructor in the UChicago Data Science Institute.
“MLA students know they can come to me when it’s just the germ of an idea if they want to brainstorm,” Millie explained, “Once the proposal is tight and we both agree it’s ready for prime time, we shop it out to different professors who are the content advisors.”
Lucas also reached out to William J. Mayew, the Martin L. Black Jr. Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the Duke University Fuqua School of Business. Professor Mayew had published research that assessed the WTN and UTR systems. He and his coauthor found that both systems were equivalent predictors of match outcomes, each over 70% accurate in predicting the victor in a head-to-head match.
Lucas noticed that Mayew’s sample focused solely on U.S. players competing in the U.S. Tennis Association Junior National Championships and conjectured that the results may not generalize to international tournaments with players from many countries. Additionally, Lucas thought relying on existing rating systems may be too limiting.
This curiosity drove Lucas to set out to offer a better solution. He wrote software to review results from thousands of matches played around the world and developed his own model for international junior tennis that offered what he reports to be predictive accuracy of about 85%. Along the way, he reached out to UChicago’s Department of Statistics and the tennis governing bodies themselves to garner their feedback on his methods and findings.
“I got to learn a lot more about machine learning and statistical methods around binary outcomes,” Lucas said. “For me, that was just amazing because it actually helped with my work.”
Ultimately, Lucas produced a thesis that synthesized the knowledge he’d gained about machine learning, statistical methods, and coding to challenge the predictive accuracy of player rankings and ratings in junior tennis matches and propose a better way forward. His work drew data from over 2,000 matches played on the UK National Tour, Tennis Europe, and ITF Juniors by 1,600 young athletes between the ages of 11 and 18.
“It was a really rewarding process to put into words the things that I’d been seeing, and I now had empirical evidence to back up my claims,” Lucas said.
Based on the findings in the thesis, Lucas coauthored a scholarly paper for publication in a peer-reviewed journal with Professor Mayew that identifies settings where existing tennis rating systems struggle to measure player quality. By sharing what he’s learned, Lucas is bringing attention to the flaws in the current ranking systems and advocating for changes that could have a lasting effect on the sport.
“Working with Lucas has been an absolute pleasure,” Mayew said. “He is smart, diligent, and impressively well equipped to do high quality research. Unlike a faculty member whose job it is to publish papers, Lucas did not have to try and take his thesis findings to a scholarly journal. But he wanted to in order to provide credible evidence that can make a tangible difference in the tennis world.”
The UChicago MLA helps students like Lucas delve into the ideas and projects they’re passionate about with multidisciplinary courses and vast resources. If you want to explore your own areas of interest with a community of accomplished peers and eminent faculty, learn more about the MLA program.
Lucas has since published a paper on junior tennis in the ITF Coaching Journal click here to read it.
Mary Jo Griesenauer has built a successful career as a financial analyst, specializing in IT financial planning and analysis. While she has dedicated her professional life to quantitative problem-solving and leadership, she has also maintained her interest in exploring questions about life and spirituality.
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