Jordan Pennella
Jordan Pennella, a former rising star on Wall Street, is the Assistant Manager of Applied Sport Science for the LSU football program. He joined the staff in January of 2022 after one season on the strength and conditioning staff at Southern Cal (USC).
Pennella works with Scott Kuehn on data science practices gathered on the Tigers with the goal of maximizing game-speed, optimizing training and reducing injury risk. He also works on talent identification through a proprietary model with the goal of identifying undervalued high school players. He also assists with the strength and conditioning/speed and power program as part of the athletic development staff.
From July-August 2024, Pennella served as the Interim Head Strength & Conditioning Coach for LSU Baseball.
At Southern Cal in 2021, Pennella served as strength and conditioning coach where he also worked with Trojan wide receivers on change-of-direction and agility training. He also implemented a return-to-play program for the team. Pennella provided assistance in several data science projects at USC, including athlete performance monitoring and reporting.
In 2020, he worked as an intern in strength and conditioning at Air Force where he trained the baseball, men’s water polo, men’s golf, men’s swimming, men’s lacrosse and the spirit squads.
Outside of the Air Force Academy, Pennella worked as a private performance coach at Pinnacle Weightlifting in Colorado Springs where he trained powerlifters and high school rugby athletes.
An outstanding student at Penn State, Pennella’s first job out of college was on Wall Street where he was a bond trader at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch from 2016-18. He worked on both mortgage-backed securities and global credit/special situations trading desks during that span.
He spent 2018-19 as an investment banker at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, focused on financial modeling and advising on IPOs and mergers and acquisitions. In 2020, he was a private equity investor for Brightstar Capital Partners in New York City where his focus was on complex quantitative investment modeling and executing majority stake buyout investments.
He graduated summa cum laude, with his bachelor’s degree in finance with a concentration in macroeconomics, from Penn State in 2016.
He is a certified strength and conditioning coach (CSCS) by the NSCA and certified by USAW as a level one weightlifting coach.