PITTSBURGH — As Sam Ventura packed his bags and headed to New York City in the summer of 2009, he thought he had it all planned out.
He was breezing through a computational finance degree at Carnegie Mellon University and had landed a prestigious internship on Wall Street. The opportunity was intended to open a door and offer a glimpse into Ventura's lucrative future in finance.
Well, that summer was formative ... just not how Ventura imagined. Turns out, he hated it.
So now what? Ventura thought back to his childhood in Swissvale, Pa., where he'd round up neighborhood kids for a game of street hockey on the tennis court or scour through box scores in the morning paper. He began to shift his focus with the help of Andrew Thomas, a CMU professor and accomplished researcher in the sports analytics field.
Now, 10 years and three CMU degrees later, the 32-year-old Ventura has found his calling. Instead of Wall Street, Ventura makes his living at 1001 Fifth Avenue as an analyst for the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Since joining the club as a consultant in 2015 and later a full-time employee, Ventura's voice within the organization has grown and evolved. This upcoming season, the Penguins might get to tap into Ventura's expertise more than ever.
Ventura added to his job description this offseason when Jim Rutherford named him director of hockey operations and research. The promotion coincides with the NHL preparing to introduce puck and player tracking, a new frontier that will give data scientists and analytics experts more information than ever.
To understand why the Penguins added to Ventura's list of responsibilities and what the tracking data means, it's important first to understand how we got here.
