Jordan Pennella

Jordan Pennella is the Director of Sport Science and Return To Play Associate Coordinator for LSU Football, where he also serves as a traditional Strength & Conditioning Coach. He joined the staff in January 2022 as a Strength & Conditioning Coach / Assistant Manager of Applied Sport Science and was promoted to Director of the Sport Science Division in March 2025.

The Sport Science Department acts as a central data, communication, and collaboration hub for all of LSU Football. Pennella divides the program into five main pillars:

[A] Strength & Conditioning: Leverages performance data to guide and enhance the physical preparation of the football team, with the primary objectives of improving physical outputs, developing robust and resilient athletes, and minimizing injury risk

[B] Return To Play (RTP): Designs, individualizes, and tracks all return to play programs to ensure effective data-informed athlete rehab

[C] Football Periodization: Periodizes practice and provides recommendations on team, positional, and individual-level practice volumes & intensities to decrease injury risk and maximize sport performance

[D] Culture: Built and manage the P.A.C.T. System, a proprietary cornerstone framework for culture, discipline, and accountability tracking. The system delivers organization-wide data on non-football performance/discipline metrics, helping align cultural standards across LSU Football.

[E] Recruiting & Talent Identification: Applies sport science and performance analytics to support recruiting

During Summer 2024, Pennella served as the Interim Head Strength & Conditioning Coach for LSU Baseball.

Before LSU, Pennella served as a Strength & Conditioning Coach with USC Football (2021). He also assisted with several data science projects related to athlete performance monitoring.

In 2020, he interned at the U.S. Air Force Academy as a Strength & Conditioning coach where he trained baseball, men’s water polo, men’s golf, men’s swimming, men’s lacrosse, and the spirit squads. Concurrently, he was a private Performance Coach at Pinnacle Weightlifting in Colorado Springs, where he trained powerlifters, supertotal athletes, and high school rugby players. Pennella also ran his own private online coaching business.

Prior to entering collegiate strength & conditioning, Pennella worked on Wall Street as a Private Equity Investor at Brightstar Capital Partners (2019–20), where he focused on complex quantitative investment modeling and executing majority-stake buyouts. Prior to Brightstar Capital, he was an Investment Banker at Bank of America Merrill Lynch (2018–19), focused on financial modeling and advising on mergers & acquisitions. Prior to investment banking, he was a Trader at Bank of America Merrill Lynch (2016-18) on both the Mortgage-Backed Securities & Global Special Situations Trading Desks.

Pennella graduated summa cum laude from Penn State University (Graduated 2016) with a B.S. in Finance (with a concentration in Macroeconomics).

He holds certifications as a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) through the NSCA and is a USAW Level 1 Weightlifting Coach.