“When I think about my journey with soccer and what really inspired me, one of the biggest moments I can remember growing up was just watching Brandi Chastain in the ‘99 World Cup,” said Skye, a 2014 Marshall University grad and former Marshall soccer player. Chastain’s penalty kick won the World Cup for the United States in 1999.
“I have her book and her autograph, and I had posters of her on my wall,” Skye said. “It’s funny now to look back and see – I was so impacted by that.”
Little did Skye know that, one day, she would be working as senior director of data science for U.S. Soccer preparing for the 2026 men’s World Cup. And she most certainly didn’t know she’d land a job that combines two of her favorite things – mathematics and soccer – while being able to raise her family in her hometown in West Virginia.
“I did not know this job existed when I was growing up,” said Skye, who was named West Virginia Midfielder of the Year and helped take the Hurricane High girls soccer team to the state finals in 2009. “I never considered working in sports. It’s been a dream job for me. It doesn’t feel like work.
“I wake up every day and think about the things that I’m passionate about, and it’s very easy to love the work and really put the right amount of effort and thought into it.”
Marshall played a prominent role in Skye’s journey, even though she came as a transfer student and with career goal, at the time, that was completely different.
“I went to Washington and Lee to play basketball and missed soccer, and I missed home,” she said. “It was only a few hours away, but I’m such a homebody. I ended up transferring back here to Marshall, and that’s when I started playing soccer here at Marshall.”
Along with joining the soccer team, she registered for all the math she could take – as she had plans to become an actuary.
Is she glad she chose Marshall?
“Yes. I love talking about this. I love Marshall,” she said. “When I got here, I felt my professors were very invested in my personal growth. I loved all my classes, all my professors. I felt that I had the support that I needed here.
“There was never a time when I couldn’t just go into one of my professors’ offices and get extra help or have a conversation about my future. It felt very connected, and like they were molding me for my future and had a vested interest in that.”
She spent so much time in Drinko Library that some staff members let her keep her lunch in the breakroom.
“I was literally there all the time. One of my friends called me the Drinko Troll because I was constantly in there,” she said.
“I think those moments really shaped how I approached academics and how I approach my work life. I can’t say enough about the support that I got from the staff here at Marshall.”
Her statistics classes were among her favorites, “which makes sense now. I really enjoyed those and was challenged by them,” she said.
Some other favorite memories include the friendships she formed.
“Math is such a special department because you get in with a pretty small group that goes through that journey with you,” Skye said. “The relationships that were formed in that program were really pretty special. Some of my best friends are people I met in the math department. My maid of honor — I met her in my calculus class.”
And though she stopped playing soccer after her junior year, she loved watching her now husband, Brady Reymond, play for the men’s team. “I really enjoyed watching him push himself in the sport,” she said.
After graduating, Skye got the job she wanted, working as an actuary, but realized quickly that it wasn’t a good fit. She then took a job at Service Pump & Supply in Huntington, where Patrick Farrell — who was company’s president at the time before being elected mayor of Huntington — encouraged her to look into data science.
“I had never considered data science before. I loved math but had not coded previously and never really knew it existed,” she said. But the more she delved into it, the more she loved it.
As Skye explains it, data science is the process of using historical data to train models that project potential future outcomes.
“We use statistics, machine learning and data together to create predictions that allow a business to optimize their decision-making,” she said.
She earned her master’s degree in data science at Northwestern University, with a specialization in forecasting and modeling. Her next job was in cybersecurity with Terbium Labs, monitoring the dark web, and then she started her own data science consulting company, which provided her an opportunity to work with the Marshall men’s soccer team.
“Their staff is so advanced, smart and tactical, especially around data,” she said. “They’re very data-driven. It was such a fun project to work on that.”
Then Skye got an email from U.S. Soccer, offering her a position. She had previously been offered a position with U.S. Soccer, but turned it down because it would have required her to leave West Virginia. When U.S. Soccer called the second time, it was with the green light to work remotely from West Virginia. She snapped up the opportunity to combine two of her passions – data science and soccer – and work from her home state, where she and Brady are raising their two daughters, ages 3 and 5.
Skye works on the business side of the organization, creating models that help optimize decision-making on things like events. The models help decide ticket prices, how to optimize attendance, or the best location of a match.
“We also look at community impact – like what impact we might see from World Cup, even down to the community level,” she said. “We also work with participation and environment — that’s things like who is likely to become a coach or become a ref, and can we support them in that.”
She can’t wait to see the impact of this year’s World Cup on the sport.
“The research shows that we have a 90-day window to capture the causal fans that come in and turn them into actual fans. A lot of work right now is how do we take advantage of that window,” she said. “I think I think it’s fun to note that this World Cup is going to be the largest sporting event in history, full stop. It’s a new format, with 48 teams.
“The last time that we hosted a men’s World Cup in ‘94, it was the most successful World Cup in history, and so now, fast forward, the game is bigger than ever, and we think we’ll see that and more as an impact from this World Cup. It’s exciting to see what’s going to happen.”
