Leadership is not a personality trait. It is a skill.
ELEVATE trains student-athletes to lead the way anything else gets built in athletics — through consistent reps, honest conversations, and real relationships. Not a speech in August that nobody remembers by October.
A full-year pathway, not a one-time talk
ELEVATE supplements what your coaching staff is already doing. Four components work together so leadership becomes ongoing work — with rhythm, structure, and momentum.
Recurring Leadership Sessions
The backbone of the program. Consistent sessions throughout the year, with students grouped across sports to build cross-team connection. Themes include:
- What leadership actually is on a high school team
- Leading when you're not playing well — or not playing at all
- Accountability and confrontation skills
- The difference between team comfort and team growth
- Owning your role, not comparing roles
Two Laps Walks
Genuine, individual relationships built in a low-pressure, conversational environment — first lap light, second lap deeper. Students talk more honestly while walking, and the walks give ELEVATE the insight that fuels better leadership instruction.
Leadership Summit
The spring capstone — a culminating experience where everything learned during the year is reinforced and expanded. Keynote speakers with strong leadership backgrounds, breakout group sessions, cross-school interaction, and opportunities for student leaders to present, reflect, and challenge one another.
Support Between Sessions
ELEVATE is not a program that disappears between meetings. Direct communication with student leaders, leadership challenges and reflection prompts, attending games and practices to observe team dynamics, and helping captains navigate conflict when it arises — embedded in the athletic culture, not visiting it.
Two laps. No desk. No office.
Bring someone into an office and they walk in defensive. Walk two laps around a track side by side, and the guard comes down. That fifteen-minute walk is the foundation of everything ELEVATE builds.
Earn the right
The first lap has nothing to do with the team. It puts them at ease and tells you who they actually are. You are not interrogating them — you are getting to know them. There is a difference, and they can feel it.
Go deeper
By the second lap, the guard is down enough for a real conversation. What they are actually thinking. What they are worried about. What they want that they have not said out loud yet.
Written from the trail, not the mountaintop
Two decades in athletics — from team manager to assistant athletic director, with state Final Four runs along the way — distilled into a field guide for anyone who leads people. Not a prescription. A tool meant to travel with you, be written in, and returned to when you hit a fork in the road.
About the Book
Walk with us
Join the ELEVATE list for leadership tools, Two Laps conversation starters, and first access to the Field Guide.
No noise. Just honest tools for people who lead people.