Longwood University Athletics

By CHRIS COOK
LongwoodLancers.com

As a senior, Kelsey McDonald '15 seemed destined for big things. She was a star on the Longwood soccer team. She was the first Academic All-American in Longwood's Division I era. She was on her way to winning Longwood's prestigious Sally Barksdale Hargrett Prize, a postgraduate scholarship award presented each year to the valedictorian of the graduating class.
 
McDonald had succeeded at everything she tried at Longwood and gave all indications that trend would continue in the future. But there was one problem, and it was a big one: McDonald, who graduated with a 3.99 grade point average as a business administration major, didn't actually know what she wanted to do for a living.
 
That's when a chance encounter with a national sports icon on Longwood's campus set her on a path that recently landed her a dream job with the Kraft Analytics Group (KAGR), the cutting-edge analytical arm of The Kraft Group, which owns, among other things, the New England Patriots of the National Football League (NFL) and the New England Revolution of Major League Soccer (MLS).
 
Her office looks over the field at Gillette Stadium, home of both the Patriots and Revolution, but it wasn't an athlete from either of those two franchises that pushed McDonald their way. Instead it was Bill James, known in sports circles as the father of "sabermetrics," a unique approach to analyzing sports-centric statistics and data that has been adopted in some capacity by nearly every sports franchise in the country.
 
James visited Longwood during McDonald's senior year as part of the university's Simpkins Lecture Series and spoke to her business ethics class about his career path, his humble beginnings as a stats-obsessed sports junkie, and his rise to reluctant celebrity in the world of sports.
 
"That was actually the start of me seeing that data analytics in sports was a thing, that it was a real job," she said. "I wrote about that in all my essays about why I wanted to go back to school, that meeting him at Longwood that day was the beginning of this entire passion and realization that what I'm doing now was even a job."
 
That visit, organized by Longwood associate professor of math and computer science Dr. Robert Marmorstein, exposed McDonald to a profession she never knew existed and planted a seed that has flourished in the years since.
 
"After I graduated I ended up working at an oil and gas company outside of Philly, and it wasn't a good fit," McDonald said. "If I'm looking at data, I want it to be interesting data, and oil and gas prices didn't do it for me. I started thinking and asking myself what I liked doing. I've loved sports my entire life, so I said, ok, how do I get a career in that?"
 
To become a better statistician and more confident analyst, McDonald went back to school and earned her masters from Duke University's Fuqua Business School in 2017, focusing on data analytics. While at Duke, the seed planted during James' visit grew from a sapling into a sequoia almost overnight when she took part in what she called an "NBA hack-a-thon" with her classmates.
 
"It sounds like the nerdiest thing in the world," she said. "We stayed up all night and coded with a bunch of other people, but it was the most fun 24 hours ever. Yes, I was doing the same thing as my old job, digging through numbers and data, but time was flying because the things I was finding were so interesting."
 
McDonald followed that passion to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytic Conference, an annual gathering of industry professionals to discuss the role of analytics in the global sports industry. Coincidentally, McDonald met James at the conference and shared with him his influence on her, but even more consequential was McDonald's encounter with the conference's founder, Jessica Gelman, who is also the CEO of KAGR.
 
"I was blown away by Jess, her insight into where the industry of sports data analysis is headed and what she shared about KAGR," McDonald said. "When I found out she was in charge of KAGR, I knew that was a place I wanted to work. I reached out to KAGR, and I'm so thankful they took a chance on me."
 
McDonald latched on with KAGR shortly after graduation from Duke and now works as part of KAGR's consulting and data science teams. In her role, she provides ticketing analysis services for several high-level sports franchises, and leagues, including her hometown Philadelphia 76ers.

As a member of the analytics team, McDonald works closely with those companies to help them understand how to utilize data to make more informed business decisions. For example, KAGR helps teams predict which season-ticket holders will renew their membership from one year to the next, producing thousands of dollars in retained revenue.
 
McDonald says the work is fascinating and that the environment at KAGR, which currently employs approximately 50 people and makes frequent use of an office ping pong table, is second to none. She views Gelman, a former high-level student-athlete herself at Harvard, as a role model and in the type of position to which she one day hopes to ascend in the realm of sports data analysis.
 
"In terms of where this leads professionally, I would be thrilled to one day end up in a position like Jess' where I'm managing data for an entire franchise or league," McDonald said. "There are a lot of women who have climbed the ladder in this field and are in prominent positions in pro sports, like Jess and Laura Meyer, the Vice President for Business Intelligence for the Minnesota Timberwolves. To me, it's so cool that it's even a career."
 
It's a career that four years ago McDonald had no idea even existed. Give her another four, and the sky's the limit.
 
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