Sports & Athletics

David Amber, BA’93, has covered the Olympics, the NBA Finals, and the World Series, but the Hockey Night in Canada host says there is no sports event that quite matches the intensity of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. “It’s amazing to watch the sacrifices the players will make this time of year.”

The Carolina Hurricanes are one of the best hockey teams in the NHL, thanks, in part, to their commitment to analytics. Jonathan Arsenault, BEng’17, MEng’19, PhD’23, a data scientist for the Hurricanes, plays a key role in uncovering below-the-radar information that might help the team earn some extra wins.

A former Olympic gold medallist, Jennifer Heil, BCom’13, knows all about the pressures that the Canadian athletes taking part in the upcoming Winter Games will have to contend with. She is drawing on that experience to serve as Canada’s chef de mission for the Games.

When Mathieu Darche, BCom’00, the new general manager of the New York Islanders, was studying management at McGill and playing for the University’s hockey team, he couldn’t have imagined how those two sides of his life would end up being combined.

Sam Greene, BCom’20, MMgmt’21, studied analytics at the Desautels Faculty of Management. As the assistant pitching coach for the Toronto Blue Jays, he has been using that expertise to help the pitchers on one of baseball’s best teams gain an edge over the opposing hitters they face.

McGill doctoral student Dimitri Sinodinos, BEng’21, is looking forward to a career as an AI scientist and entrepreneur. But right now, he’s busy making sports history as the first Canadian to play professional football in Japan.