Zach Welch is a basketball professional with experience in scouting, intel gathering, video work, and analytics. He always aims to innovate and identify areas of synergy while maintaining a commitment to doing whatever needs to be done, to the best of his ability.
Growing up in Massachusetts, I have long been enamored by the NBA Draft. In selecting which college to attend, pursuing a path in scouting and basketball operations was paramount. I chose to attend Cornell University, majoring in Industrial Labor Relations and minoring in Data Science and Business. Through my academic, extracurricular, and professional pursuits, I have worked to build as versatile an arsenal as I can.
About Me
I have been fortunate enough to learn and grow with some innovative scouting minds. My first experience came with Sports Info Solutions, who maintain a mantra of trying to revolutionize scouting, quantify the intangible, and espouse scouting and analytics. Soon after, I was introduced to Eric Weiss of Sports Aptitude, who used to be one of the main contributors at Draft Express. At Sports Aptitude, I worked with Eric and a host of other prominent minds in the industry to develop a scouting methodology rooted in the philosophy of context-based evaluation and projection. At ProMondo Sports, I work for a long-time NBA executive and former Milwaukee Director of Scouting, Matt Bollero. Matt has both taught me a great deal from his experience and given me the opportunity to conduct a great deal of scouting work, specifically focusing on identifying under-the-radar college prospects and prepping scouting reports on our clients. In working for him, I have evaluated dozens of prospects, focusing on high school and college film, as well as approaching their analytical profiles.
My Scouting Experience
My Scouting Work
Every year, I conduct a thorough scouting process involving as much high school, college, and pro scouting as possible, combined with a consideration for analytics and intel. I developed my own scouting report template, harnessing my academic background in design and professional background in scouting to form a new way to evaluate and project prospects. I aimed to strike a balance here between being concise and effective, but also diving in-depth with each prospect. The result was a seven page report in which the first page can be taken as a standalone and complete report on the prospect in and of itself, but for readers looking to understand the prospect in greater depth, each of the ensuing pages presents color-coded evaluations of categorized microskills.
My 2023 Scouting Portfolio
I quickly came to understand the importance of intel through my time at the Tatnuck Group, which is a consulting organization dedicated to conducting background character and cultural fit assessments on prospects in several different sports. Within my first year there, I was in the virtual war room with an NBA Draft lottery team presenting my background research and suggestions about dozens of prospects. Since then, I have also done so with MLB and NFL prospects, conducting intel calls, observing interviews, and undergoing detailed background research processes. I soon extended my experience further by starting an initiative that I have expanded each year since 2020. It is a directory of student managers, graduate assistants, and young international staffers who all specifically signed up for intel-based networking with NBA teams. Over 20 NBA teams use this directory now, with hundreds of contacts having been involved each year. Several teams have raved about the insights they have gotten from contacts found on the directory and some have even started using it as a hiring shortlist. With this network of hundreds of young contacts in the industry tied to top tier talent, I have been able to harness my connections to assist with the talent recruiting process at ProMondo Sports. I have systematically learned about the importance of intel, developed a cutting-edge initiative that has helped over 66% of NBA franchises for years now, and- in the process- assembled a strong, reliable network that I can tap into at any time.
Intel Experience
I have been fortunate enough to sharpen my video skills in a diverse array of contexts. I have applied it to advanced scouting, draft scouting, and self scouting in men’s and women’s college basketball, the NBA, and international professional leagues. Beginning with Sports Info Solutions, I familiarized myself with InStat in order to conduct quality assurance checks on several of the 2020 NBA Draft Prospects. Meanwhile, the University of Houston Women’s Basketball team gave me the opportunity to be a video assistant and I quickly learned the ins and outs of Synergy and SportsCode alike, as I helped with preparing scout edits analyzing both personnel and scheme for 30+ games. In this stop, I learned about some advanced coding window options and also conducted some player development projects. Then, I was able to further build upon these skills with the Cornell Men’s Basketball Team, live-coding every practice for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 seasons and every game of the first season. Beyond all this, I have conducted several in-depth video projects in my time with ProMondo Sports, including player development edits, highlight reels, and video scouting reports on current and prospective clients.
Video Experience
While I have always considered myself analytically-minded, my passion for exploring the bounds of analytics in basketball was ignited by my time at Sports Info Solutions. Their dedication to finding unique new ways to quantify previously intangible qualities demonstrated the importance of analytics and inspired me to build my skillset within analytics. This led to me becoming a Data Science minor taking classes that built my skills in Python, R, SQL, spreadsheet modeling applications, and design. While I have applied this to many projects since, the group of which I am most proud of are those that I have done for the Cornell Men’s Basketball Team. The primary project is a lineup analytics database and interactive tool, for which I managed a team of data loggers and conducted all the modeling, coding, and construction. The final product includes, among many other tools, an on/off dashboard through which users can dynamically see season statistics with different combinations of players. The coaching staff embraced and came to put a lot of faith in this tool, consulting with me especially in the 2023-24 season to use it in determining the starting lineup and substitution patterns. Beyond this, I have also conducted several projects to help with player development, attempting to quantify chemistry and consistency, and shot selection.
