THE GAME CHANGER

Carly Fennell is slowly making NFL football a safer game-one tackle at a time 

- Rosemary Counter

IN THE SUMMER of 2022, a group of women gathered in Brooklyn to discuss the science of athletic performance. The Women in Sports Data Symposium's panel comprised two directors of performance science, one from the Detroit Tigers and another from the Los Angeles Dodgers; the performance-data analyst from the Indiana Pacers; and, in what her industry might call a trick play, the senior director of health and safety data management at the NFL, Carly Fennell a 38-year-old based in London, Ont.

Currently on mat leave, Fennell is most often found these days walking her newborn daughter and her rescue dog, Lenny, around the park. But when this tired mom's phone rings, it could be NFL bigwigs calling for her thoughts on very tall orders: How can football be made safer for players? How can the league prevent injuries before they happen? When and how should the rule book be tweaked to protect the game's integrity and appease diehard sports fans who resist change?

Fennell's methodical take was on full display in a talk she gave in 2022 at her alma mater, the University of Guelph, about women in sports analytics. Typical of a data scientist, Fennell had charted her career trajectory ("graduate biological engineering." "masters in mechanical engineering") and her life's milestones ("travel across Canada," "become a parent") into a graph. She organized those moments by her confidence level at the time; the further south on the graph an accomplishment landed, the more clueless she felt. But "that sometimes paralyzing feeling just means you're in a high-intensity growth period," she tells me.