Jana has over two decades of experience working in media, as well as more than three decades of field hockey experience. She played field hockey at South Western High School in Hanover, Pennsylvania. In her senior year, she was recruited by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she continued to play defense for the Division I program. She left Amherst in her senior year to work as an editorial assistant at The Boston Globe.

Among her accolades, she won second place in North Carolina’s 2007 winter writer’s competition for investigative journalism at the age of 28. The following year, she started an adult field hockey league, which grew into a youth league and first public high school field hockey program in Guilford County, North Carolina. She handed off the program in 2011, after her team claimed first in its conference in 2010 and a fourth-place state finish.

The Pennsylvania-native returned to the commonwealth in 2011. She started umpiring field hockey in 2014 and is now a rated USA Field Hockey, NCAA, and PIAA umpire. Additionally, she won a Pennsylvania Broadcast digital media award in 2017 for a show she created, produced, and directed about the heroin epidemic.‍