We had planned a terrific March Huddle featuring Alison Lukan, a hockey data expert and writer for The Athletic Columbus. Since we had to cancel her live visit, we instead have this terrific interview by intern Savannah Deuer:

Alison Lukan’s job may be as a contributor at The Athletic and hockeyviz.com, but around the hockey world she has a more appropriate title: the analytics queen.

The journalist and hockey analyst focuses on data-driven storytelling, a method used by journalists focusing on taking analytical information to tell the story of a specific event, and in this case, it’s a hockey game.

Lukan is considered a pioneer in this field, and she was instrumental in organizing and presenting at the Columbus Blue Jackets Hockey Analytics Conference earlier this year.

While Lukan was organizing the conference, she made the diversity of the presenters an important priority, and more specifically, having women present in her continuing quest to enhance the roles of women in sports.

“There were so many qualified women to present at our conference, and that’s why they spoke,” she said. “Having women present at the conference not only encourages women but challenges the paradigm of men in the industry as well.”

While Lukan demonstrated the power of women in hockey during the Hockey Analytics Conference, her mindset is not universal across sports.

“Most teams in all leagues don’t do a great job of diversifying their staffs, and it does become very male-dominated, especially in the private sphere.,” she said. “Publicly, there is a much more female-heavy influence.”

While there are those pioneers in public sphere of the industry, such as Ryan Stimpson, who runs a hockey analytics conference in Richmond, Virginia, and Asmae Toumi, who edits for hockeygraphs.com, there is still some progress that needs to be made.

At many NHL arenas, the only female workers that the public sees are ice girls and cheerleaders, and many other opportunities aren’t shown to those women who are interested, Lukan said.

“It’s so important for women to see themselves in hockey in a variety of ways, and a woman has the right to choose if she wants to be an ice girl or an analyst, but it’s even more important to show that a woman can lead, speak, research and study hockey,” Lukan said.

While women have often been discouraged to pursue fields such as STEM and sports, Lukan and other pioneers of the industry are making impressive progress of breaking down barriers.

“We need to continue to open men’s and women’s eyes to the fact that women have the skills to be successful in those fields. Women add a new perspective and will ask different questions,” Lukan said. “At the end of the day, the entire goal is to understand the game better, and women can help to reach that end goal.”