{"id":1911,"date":"2026-06-10T13:25:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T13:25:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/?p=1911"},"modified":"2026-06-10T13:25:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T13:25:15","slug":"passion-meets-purpose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/2026\/06\/10\/passion-meets-purpose\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Passion Meets Purpose"},"content":{"rendered":"
The 1999 Women\u2019s World Cup was a life-changing moment for young Skye (Smith) Reymond.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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 \u201899 World Cup,\u201d said Skye, a 2014 Marshall University grad and former Marshall soccer player. Chastain\u2019s penalty kick won the World Cup for the United States in 1999.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have her book and her autograph, and I had posters of her on my wall,\u201d Skye said. \u201cIt\u2019s funny now to look back and see \u2013 I was so impacted by that.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>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\u2019s World Cup. And she most certainly didn\u2019t know she\u2019d land a job that combines two of her favorite things \u2013 mathematics and soccer \u2013 while being able to raise her family in her hometown in West Virginia.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did not know this job existed when I was growing up,\u201d 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. \u201cI never considered working in sports. It\u2019s been a dream job for me. It doesn\u2019t feel like work.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wake up every day and think about the things that I\u2019m passionate about, and it\u2019s very easy to love the work and really put the right amount of effort and thought into it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marshall played a prominent role in Skye\u2019s journey, even though she came as a transfer student and with career goal, at the time, that was completely different.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went to Washington and Lee to play basketball and missed soccer, and I missed home,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was only a few hours away, but I\u2019m such a homebody. I ended up transferring back here to Marshall, and that\u2019s when I started playing soccer here at Marshall.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along with joining the soccer team, she registered for all the math she could take \u2013 as she had plans to become an actuary.<\/p>\n

Is she glad she chose Marshall?<\/p>\n

\n\tI can\u2019t say enough about the support that I got from the staff here at Marshall.<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t- Skye Reymond<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n\n

\u201cYes. I love talking about this. I love Marshall,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was never a time when I couldn\u2019t just go into one of my professors\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

She spent so much time in Drinko Library that some staff members let her keep her lunch in the breakroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was literally there all the time. One of my friends called me the Drinko Troll because I was constantly in there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think those moments really shaped how I approached academics and how I approach my work life. I can\u2019t say enough about the support that I got from the staff here at Marshall.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her statistics classes were among her favorites, \u201cwhich makes sense now. I really enjoyed those and was challenged by them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Some other favorite memories include the friendships she formed.<\/p>\n

\"Skye<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cMath is such a special department because you get in with a pretty small group that goes through that journey with you,\u201d Skye said. \u201cThe 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 \u2014 I met her in my calculus class.\u201d<\/p>\n

And though she stopped playing soccer after her junior year, she loved watching her now husband, Brady Reymond, play for the men\u2019s team. \u201cI really enjoyed watching him push himself in the sport,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

After graduating, Skye got the job she wanted, working as an actuary, but realized quickly that it wasn\u2019t a good fit. She then took a job at Service Pump & Supply in Huntington, where Patrick Farrell \u2014 who was company\u2019s president at the time before being elected mayor of Huntington \u2014 encouraged her to look into data science.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had never considered data science before. I loved math but had not coded previously and never really knew it existed,\u201d she said. But the more she delved into it, the more she loved it.<\/p>\n

As Skye explains it, data science is the process of using historical data to train models that project potential future outcomes.<\/p>\n

\n\t Math is such a special department because you get in with a pretty small group that goes through that journey with you.<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t- Skye Reymond<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n\n

\u201cWe use statistics, machine learning and data together to create predictions that allow a business to optimize their decision-making,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She earned her master\u2019s 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\u2019s soccer team.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir staff is so advanced, smart and tactical, especially around data,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re very data-driven. It was such a fun project to work on that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 data science and soccer \u2013 and work from her home state, where she and Brady are raising their two daughters, ages 3 and 5.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe also look at community impact \u2013 like what impact we might see from World Cup, even down to the community level,\u201d she said. \u201cWe also work with participation and environment \u2014 that\u2019s things like who is likely to become a coach or become a ref, and can we support them in that.\u201d<\/p>\n

She can\u2019t wait to see the impact of this year\u2019s World Cup on the sport.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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,\u201d she said. \u201cI think I think it\u2019s fun to note that this World Cup is going to be the largest sporting event in history, full stop. It\u2019s a new format, with 48 teams.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe last time that we hosted a men\u2019s World Cup in \u201894, it was the most successful World Cup in history, and so now, fast forward, the game is bigger than ever, and we think we\u2019ll see that and more as an impact from this World Cup. It\u2019s exciting to see what\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 1999 Women\u2019s World Cup was a life-changing moment for young Skye (Smith) Reymond. \u201cWhen 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 \u201899 World Cup,\u201d said Skye, a 2014 Marshall University grad and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":198,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moments"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/198"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1911"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1914,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1911\/revisions\/1914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}