Megan Glass’ Journey to the Cincinnati Reds
Author: Marshall V. King
Megan Glass – Notre Dame MSBA class of 2024
Pursuing Dreams in Sports Analytics
Megan Glass never dreamed she’d end up at the University of Notre Dame.
Over the last few years, she has dreamed of a job in sports analytics and landed one in her hometown after finishing her MSBA-SA at the Mendoza College of Business.
This summer, Glass will join the Cincinnati Reds baseball team’s front office to work in the business analytics department. She’ll join a team that will analyze data on ticketing, concessions, and other aspects of the business operation.
“The Reds are the heart of Cincinnati,” says Glass, who grew up going to games and is delighted to land a job with a pro sports team.
In high school, Glass was one of the fastest swimmers in the state of Ohio. Her parents both swam at the University of Michigan in the 1990s and she followed their path to the pool in Ann Arbor after graduating from high school in 2019. She succeeded as a collegiate swimmer — serving as a captain on the swim team, becoming a Big Ten champion, and swimming at the NCAA Championships.
Combining Data Science and Athletics
As a student, she joined the College of Engineering and started coding. When she learned about how athletes with wearable devices were collecting data that could be analyzed, she got more interested in data science. She interned with Women In Sports Tech Inc., a nonprofit focused on helping women succeed in the field, and with another sports video and data software company as a data engineer. U of M didn’t have a sports analytics program, so she graduated with a degree in data science and a minor in economics.
The COVID pandemic afforded her a fifth year of swimming eligibility.
She came to South Bend last summer, joining the swim team and becoming a Masters of Science in Business Analytics candidate. “I fell in love with Notre Dame,” she says. “I got here in May of 2023 a month after I graduated. And not until my orientation at Notre Dame for my master’s degree did I realize how big the rivalry was.”
A Student-Athlete’s Perspective on Balancing Sports and Business
Whoop Band, similar to the one Glass used to track data
In the pool at Notre Dame, she’s helping a team on its upward trajectory and looking at what comes after her swim career ends. She’s dipping her toe in the water of analyzing her own data as a swimmer. She gathers data using a wearable Whoop band. “In one of my classes at Notre Dame I was able to download my data and start to analyze it,” she says. “I’ve looked at meets that I thought were successful and meets that weren’t, and how my preparation was leading up to that.” She’s had conversations with folks at USA Swimming about data analysis in the sport, but wants to focus her own work at this point on the business side.
She’s loving her studies in the MSBA program. “Notre Dame wants to help each student succeed and like maximize their potential. It really spoke to me and I knew I had made a really great decision in choosing the program,” she says.
In the MSBA-SA cohort, more than half of Glass’s classmates are also student athletes. “That’s another thing that I really appreciate is I have 6 a.m. practices and 3:30 p.m. practices almost every day and the teachers know that and they know that they can’t assign us something due the next day,” she says. “All of us are very good at time management, but we just need time to be able to manage so the teachers have been very accommodating and understanding our schedules and making it a learning environment that we can succeed in.”
From Data Science to Business Analytics in the World of Professional Baseball
Cincinnati Reds Baseball Team Logo
She applied for the job with the Reds in late 2023 about the same time she participated in an immersive field trip with the cohort in Chicago. That solidified her interest in working for a franchise in business analytics. Her background combining data science, economics, and now business analytics helped her land the job, as well as what she’s learned both in the classroom and that field trip.
Though she won’t be directly involved in the sports analytics that is now inherent in Major League Baseball, when a club brings up a rookie star like Elly De La Cruz, it affects the entire operation. That’s what happened last summer at the club where Glass will be going to work.
“Watching this past summer how bringing in new players drew the marketing value up and everybody was coming back to the stadium — that interests me a lot and I can’t wait to get started,” she says.
