The Journey into an Unexpected Career in Sports Tech

WiST talks to women and men in sports and sports technology who are setting the benchmark for their peers and future generations.

By Mindi Bach, WiST Content Contributor + Consultant

DISPELLING THE MYTHS OF SPORTS TECH CULTURE

Sarah Schell has a curious mind. She’s a tinkerer, a problem solver who loves to learn and understand how things work.  They’re invaluable attributes that led to Sarah’s current position as the Director of Engineering at GameChanger, a technology company that keeps fans connected with their favorite youth athletes and teams through live scorekeeping, stats and streaming video via its mobile app.

Sarah’s path into the world of sports tech was a circuitous one. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis and a Masters in Public Health from Columbia University, atypical areas of study for a technology-focused “engineer.”  Understanding the sports component of the profession is second nature. 

Sarah started running the courts around Lexington, Kentucky, as a three-year-old while her dad coached her older sisters’ basketball practices. At age six, Sarah joined her first league at the local YMCA. She dabbled in T-ball, but basketball was always the focus.

“I don’t ever remember deciding to do it,” Schell told WiST. “It was just something that was part of my life.”

“I had two older sisters who I adored, and they played. My dad coached our AAU teams or was yelling from the stands and was pretty involved. It was the way my family spent time together.”

It was time well spent. As a sophomore guard at Lexington Catholic High School, 3,800 fans watched Sarah rebound her own miss and launch the buzzer-beater that clinched the state title in the Kentucky State Basketball Tournament.

In her senior year at Washington University in St. Louis, Sarah put up 26 points, along with four rebounds, four assists, four blocks and a steal, to seal an overtime win against the University of Chicago and the University Athletic Association conference title. The Bears made it to the NCAA Division III Championship, a game they lost by three points. Sarah started all 31 games that season and led the team in steals and assists.

With a successful basketball career behind her, Sarah’s future was not as certain.

“I did not have a career in mind, admittedly, when I first started college, or even when I graduated,” Schell said.  “I thought I might like to go to med school, because that's what my sisters did, and I always did everything they did.” 

Yet, Sarah’s willingness to try new things led her on a different path. With no career game plan in place, she started where most talented players and coaches begin; she followed her strengths.

WiST: What does your job at GameChanger entail?

GameChanger is an app that provides game coverage in baseball, softball, basketball, and, increasingly, other sports, through scorekeeping and video streams, for people who can't be at the game. If you were to go to the typical Little League field, you'd see an assistant coach or parent on the sideline, plugging in data to GameChanger. We then use that information about what's happening on the field and broadcast it live, play-by-play, and via a live stream if they’re filming it, to the folks who want to follow their favorite kid, like parents or grandparents.  On the other side, coaches use this data for coaching and skill-building. We create player and team-level stat summaries for them to use after the fact.

To build our product, we have five cross-functional product teams. That essentially means a bunch of engineers, a product manager, and a designer working on different segments of the app. I oversee three of our product teams and our data team. The engineering managers of those teams report to me.

WiST: How would you explain the specific requirements of your position?

While I work with and manage a lot of engineers, my background is as a data scientist. Fundamentally, what we do is build things that solve problems for our users. It's a very empathetic act. It forces you to think about how we can make their time using our product delightful and bring something good to their lives. That’s the motivation part of it, but it’s an important piece to be good at this.

Then, there are more technical skills that require an eagerness to understand how things work, solve puzzles, and figure things out. Every day, engineers are handed ambiguous problems, and they have to come up with solutions. If you like that type of reward for solving problems, it's a good career.

WiST: What is a typical day on the job for you?

Day-to-day, I am thinking about how to make everyone on the team more effective. Are we hiring the right people? Are we giving them all the resources they need to grow and do their jobs? Are we clear about the picture we’re painting and where we're going as a team?

On the data side, we're trying to understand our users. Who are the users in the app? How are they using it? Are there places where the app isn’t performing? Which users are paying us? That's a big question. All of that falls within my time when I’m with the data team.

WiST: What aspects of playing basketball on the collegiate level have carried over into your professional career?

I went to a school that was really academically challenging, and when it came to our basketball program, we all took our jobs seriously there, too. The experience definitely taught me to prioritize my time. I couldn't be in the library 10 hours a day like my peers. I had to study and make it work whenever I could, even in the airport on the way to road games if I had the time. It forced me to have a lot of discipline early on.

But, I think more than that, it was the source of some of the best friendships in my life. I think there's something about being on a team where you work hard together and share a goal. I'm somebody who's more motivated if I'm part of a group working toward something than if I were to do it on my own. I think about that a lot, and I have that same approach with my job. There are moments when the team's clicking, and we're greater than the sum of our parts. It's something that I first saw when I was playing basketball.

WiST: Did your leadership skills as a point guard translate to your managing style with your GameChanger team?

I think so. As a point guard, you are an implicit leader. You have to take responsibility for the full outcome, even though you can't do all the things required on a project. Finding ways to bring the best out of people is a big part of that.

WiST: How did you transition from an anthropology major into your current position?

First, I’ll say this. There's a kind of mythology around writing code. A lot of people can do it, but there’s this misconception that those types of careers are only for a certain type of person. I have always liked understanding how things work and solving puzzles. Ultimately, programming is writing down a bunch of logic to solve a problem. So, once I understood what it was I wanted to do, it was easy to learn those skills to apply them to the problems that I was working on.

When I graduated, I wasn’t afraid to try new things, and I liked learning. That combination of characteristics led me through a bunch of steps to where I am today.

My first job out of college was in a bike shop. I sold bicycles to customers who came in off the street. I did a little bit of light repair work as well. I like tinkering with things, but I knew I didn't want to work in a bike shop forever. So, I thought about the things I'd learned while I was an undergrad. What was interesting to me? Where did I want to go? I began to take steps in that direction.

 I remember that I least hated writing papers for this public health class I took. I liked the idea of effecting change on a macro scale, which is the goal of public health. It's about prevention instead of the treatment of sick people. I got the job at the Public Health Policy Research Center and got exposed to what was required in that space, the research and data collection methods. I started doing some mapping work with geographic information systems [GIS]. I wasn’t programming yet, but that led me to more data-focused and technical work.

I realized there were limitations to what I could do when I'm pointing and clicking on a screen. I kept bumping up against a ceiling unless I could code because you have to access the data and manipulate and visualize it. I realized I had to develop a new set of skills if I wanted to continue to grow in that area. So, I got into coding as a means to an end instead of having an inherent interest in it.

In parallel, I applied to graduate school and ended up choosing Columbia in New York for a two-year program in public health. That's where I got even more formal training in biostatistics, and more exposure to programming and epidemiology, those types of things. I took my first coding class there when I was 26. All of those things still have relevance to my job today. 

Straight out of graduate school, I was a GIS consultant for a few nonprofits around the city. I did a lot of food access mapping, so organizations could plan out their healthy food interventions based on data that I had mapped for them around what folks have near their homes. I worked for the city and the agency that administers food stamps and cash assistance. I worked at a nonprofit research organization that received grants from the federal government to study and optimize how welfare works. I worked on a housing project to understand how Section 8 vouchers can be administered more effectively. They were all academic research-type roles that required working with big data on these important projects.

WiST: What spurred your jump to GameChanger?

Frankly, I either needed to get another job or leave New York. It's a tough place to live on a nonprofit salary. I care about doing things that help people, so I made my move to GameChanger pretty carefully. I didn't want to spend my time on something that wasn’t meaningful to me and didn’t help others. GameChanger was a perfect fit - we connect kids and families through sports. 

WiST: What trends are you seeing in your sports tech space? Where is the growth?

We launched video streaming a few months after the pandemic started. We were bullish on the idea that, increasingly, fewer people could be at games and would want to see the action.  That's an area of a lot of growth, but it’s pretty fragmented.  I imagine there will be some consolidation in that space, ultimately.

We've always used mobile devices as our main data collection device, either through typing in or streaming the game, especially at the youth league levels. That’s going to remain the dominant thing because not every Pee Wee League will pay to have mounted cameras, but everyone has cell phones, and they continue to get better. So, I tend to think live streaming is going to get more common and creep into more junior teams.

On top of that, because we have scorekeeping data and streaming data, we can extract specific plays from our games that occur at the court or field. We think there's a lot of potential there to generate highlight reels for the purposes of social media tagging or recruiting, or whatever the case may be. Further down the line, there may be a future in using computer vision to automate some of the data collection that we do around what's actually happening in the game. Many professional teams are doing this now with very expensive mounted cameras. I think in the future, that type of technology and computation will be more available, even on mobile.

Then there are the insights to be gained from the incredibly large amounts of data being collected. Sometime this summer, we will have 30 million games scored on our app since GameChangers’ inception. If you think about the scale of that, we have more little kid baseball and softball games scored in a few months than all of MLB throughout all of its history. The volume of statistical data we have is huge. We started to do some work to look into how we can extract more insights from this information.

Speaking mostly of baseball and softball, there are a lot of truisms in the sports world, like, if you're batting .300, that's considered good. Or, you always want your best hitter in the third or fourth slot in the line-up. All that knowledge is mostly based on the most elite, professional players. We think there is a lot to be learned that could help coaches and folks that are helping young people develop to understand what's actually happening at the Little League field and how to help those kids grow and stay engaged. We are unique in that we have the data to do that. 

WiST: What’s your journey been like as a woman in sports tech?

Admittedly, when I first started looking at this job, sports and tech, I was like, ‘Uh oh. It’s a confluence of bros.’ That didn't actually turn out to be the case. At GameChanger, the people that work here are more attracted to our mission of connecting families than sports stats, and that is a big piece of what we do. I really like that about the culture here.

I have a hard time untangling what it is about being a woman that is specific to sports tech or just tech in general. In my experience, it’s always been true that I'm the gender minority. Maybe the bike shop prepared me for that life. But I’m lucky enough to work at a place where we are aware of our deficiencies and are trying to do better about seeking out diverse candidates, putting women and people from other underrepresented groups in positions of leadership, and trying to make this the type of place where everybody wants to work.

 It was easier for me to ramp up since I had the experience of playing sports growing up. There's a lot to learn when starting a new job, and that was a piece that I didn't have to understand because I lived it. I have nieces and nephews who use our app, and my parents watch their games. So, it’s easy for me to relate to our users and who we're trying to serve.

WIST: What advice can you share with young women interested in a sports tech career?

More than a love of sports, you need to have the skills to succeed in this space. Whether it’s engineering or marketing, or data analytics, being excellent at what you do will make you stand out and open a lot of doors. 

I’ll also say that you don’t have to love sports to build a great career in sports tech. I happen to have played basketball growing up, but I work with a lot of amazing people who don’t have a specific interest in sports. It’s not the monoculture you might imagine.

A special thanks to Sarah for sharing her journey with the WiST community. Prepare for the moment. Inspiration comes in all forms.

Join the WiST Community and check out GameChanger.