Last month, Ben Alamar, who founded the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports eight years ago, announced that he would be transferring the editorship of the journal to Jim Albert, professor of mathematics and statistics at Bowling Green State University.  Ben started the journal at a time when the field of sport statistics was in an embryonic stage — academic papers in the field had been around since the 1950s but were sideshows in scattered journals.  Few academics made the jump to offering advice to professional sports teams, and fewer saw their work taken seriously. Sports conferences like the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference did not exist, either.  That the landscape of quantitative sports analysis has changed so dramatically, from dedicated conferences and journals to increased interest from professional (and amateur!) sports teams, the media, and the general public, is the result of people like Ben.

I've had the pleasure to meet Ben at NCSSORS and work with him on a couple of projects.  I thank him for his service to the sports analytics community, and I expect that JQAS will continue to highlight the state-of-the-art in this field in the years to come.