In this panel, four UNC Charlotte students share why the School of Analytics is an ideal launchpad for a career in sports analytics. They highlight the abundance of local professional teams—the Carolina Panthers, Charlotte Hornets, Charlotte FC, and Charlotte Knights—that each employ dedicated analytics staff, creating diverse career pathways. The students discuss how their varied academic backgrounds—business, mathematics, computer science—combine with personal passions, especially for soccer, to fuel their interest in data-driven sports work. Repeatedly, they stress the value of industry exposure through guest speakers from organizations such as ESPN, the Hornets, the Panthers, and MLS, noting that these connections provide real‑world insight and networking opportunities. The overarching message is that Charlotte’s reputation as a “Southern Wall Street” offers a unique blend of sports and business ecosystems, making the university’s analytics program a compelling choice for prospective students.
Chapters
Every single team has a sports analytics person, a sports analytics department, so there's so many ways and examples of how you can really have a career in sports analytics. We have the Carolina Panthers, we have the Charlotte Hornets, and we have Charlotte FC, and that's not including the Charlotte Knights.
As far as sports analytics, I love soccer. It's my main sport. I watch it every weekend, and so putting the two together, loving soccer and numbers and putting them together, has been really awesome.
As a business major, they call this the Southern Wall Street down here in Charlotte. There's just so many opportunities to go in the sports industry, but as well as the business industry.
Well, I've always kind of just been like a math girl. Like, I've always done really well in those classes. I took some minors for undergrad, and one of them happened to be computer science. And hearing that data analytics was really taking off and that it was offered here, somewhere where I really wanted to go, I figured it was like just a good sort of pathway to try something new and try out Charlotte.
You know, we usually have guest speakers from the Hornets, the Panthers, ESPN on multiple occasions, the MLS team, and it's just meeting people in the industry as well as someone who's currently working in the industry has been pivotal in, you know, my future for what I want to really go into.
Experience is so key, so I think it's very important to where I have guest speakers, whether they're from ESPN or whether they're from the Hornets, so the students can have a much better understanding of what the sports analytics world is really like.
I think the opportunities that this school gives you just by being in Charlotte and the connections that the major corporations and businesses have to the school is unlike any other. That's really what sold me when I was making my college decision.
I've always played sports and always been the math girl, and then finding out that data analytics was a route I could go and then finding out that sports analytics was an option, I feel like that would definitely be the ideal dream job if I could continue to stay around sports for the rest of my life and do something that I think I'm pretty good at.
