Sport Coats Podcast

Devin is the co-founder and CEO of Prediction Strike, a fantasy sports stock market that allows users to buy and sell shares of pro athletes as if they were stocks. Starting in 2018, Prediction Strike has already completed over $5.5 million worth of transactions on their network. Prior to co-founding his company in 2018, Devin worked for Nike as a cyber security analyst. Deven is a 2018 graduate from Harvard with a degree in bioengineering. Join Deven and host Will Jurgensen as they discuss the world's first sports stock market, its creation and its future!

Meet Duncan

Duncan, formerly a professional golfer currently serves as CEO of Littlefield, a company that owns a variety of other companies as well, such as the Littlefield Company, Paper Airplane, Large Forests, Sidecar, and is a critical equity partner contributor to profit focus startups. Duncan's mission is to always be a part of a larger conversation and to support everyone to become obsessed with their life. 

Since we’re in the middle of the Olympics, I’d like to start off by asking you about your opinion on golfing in the Olympics.

Initial thought on golf in the Olympics is I love it. I think it does so much to expand the game because it connects to audiences. You look at players in there that have recently said that it's one of the coolest things I've ever been a part of. Because you look at the team sports where they represent their country, Ryder Cup, Presidents Cup where it's a 12 man team with a captain and vice-captain. It's really fundamentally different. I don't think that they have the correct format. That's my opinion. I think the way they source players is a very fascinating way to look at it. and I know a lot of people on the back end when they were first bringing it to Rio spent a ton of time examining it, where they went through going, "Hey, if we went this route, who would be in it?" I think they have it close, but I think there are a few ways to make golf better in the Olympics, to embody the game of golf, but also to embody the Olympics as an overall organization. So I think they're close, but it's a pretty special space. Again, using the example of 2020 Tokyo is you watch seven guys go into a playoff for the bronze medal, and they fought for that. That was amazing and I'm not saying like Xander taking gold was not the highlight because I think the storyline for Xander was just spectacular. But the reality is seven guys going into a playoff to fight for the bronze medal was riveting, like absolutely riveting. I'm so, I don't wanna say happy that it came out this way, but I think for C.T. Pan to win in the fourth playoff hole, taking down Rory, I think it's awesome. So the game of golf is in a good place, but I think golf in the Olympics is really special and it's only getting better.

If you were on the Olympic Committee, how would you improve the golf event?

I would take it into a five-day event and I would model it after what they do at the USGA, US Junior Tournament, where they play a 36 hole qualifying stroke play to then go into singles match play. I would really like to see that the only other kicker because they also do this with college golf now, in the playoff where they take all the teams, they go match play for two rounds, and then they go down into an eight-team match-play bracket. I think if you do a very similar structure, then it offers everything you want it to, but also it keeps some core, old school golf tradition in the mix, but then it also kind of embodies a little bit of the Olympics as well. You look at swimming, for example, how you go qualifying down into the major heat, and I think it keeps aligned with it. But then you can also crown a team champion as well, long term. So I think a 16 man field or women's field is good. I think that you potentially could have it where you have a team event attached, where you at least have two representatives from every country, and potentially an A and B team, from the major countries that would represent. But then at that point, I think you can also play a team route into this if you even open it up to maybe 80 players in that space to then get it down to a field of 16 to play match play after.

Not often have I heard about the process of someone going from a professional golfer trying to achieve their amateur status back right. How does that work?

The process is you write the USGA saying, "Hey, I would like to receive my amateur status back," and normally, depending on where you sat in the world rank you go into a two-year waitlist. So you have to kind of say that you're taking a two-year ban from playing competitively and from there, then you receive your amateur status back. So you get a letter from the USGA saying, "Hey, we've recognized that you've really committed to taking your amateur status back, you have gotten your amateur status back." Now, if you ever want to go professional again. So if I went from a pro to an amateur, and then went pro, again, I can never go back to being an amateur after the second time I turned professional. So that's the kicker, but it's a two-year process you write to the USGA, you do all the paperwork, you fill out when your last tournament was, what your world rank was if you get if you received one, all that, and then two years and you're back on it.

Could you tell us a little bit about your golfing journey?

I mean, the reality is that when you're trying really hard to achieve something really big, and you have to go through the ups and downs like you have to go through it. But when you put everything on the line, and you bet the house on your game, you put the house in yourself, there's really nobody to turn to but yourself. I had a phenomenal support team around me, my parents were so encouraging. The only time it was negative was when I wasn't putting the effort in. Like that was the only time it was ever negative, or not positive. My coach was great. Yeah, I had a great group of people, like  PGA veterans that were mentors of mine. I got really lucky and I truly say that I feel like I'm one of the luckiest people to ever walk this earth and I'm definitely not letting it go to waste. But the peaks and valleys were amazing and I say that with a laugh, because the reality is that as a Mini Tour player, when you're driving cross country, you play a tournament in Georgia, and next week, you got to get to Washington DC, or you got to get to Bangor, Maine there's a lot of windshield time. There's a lot of road time to think about life, your game, what's bad, what's good, all the above and I think that's really helped me become the person I am today and not so much of what happened on the course, but what happened, when I actually had time to process it. I took the traditional Mini Tour route. The reality is back in the day, everyone goes like, "Alright, what would you have changed?" And I said, I would have changed two things: I wouldn't want a few more times, no question about it. But the only other thing I would have changed is how I invested. So now looking as a business owner, I recognize the differences of how I would have invested into my last career of being a professional athlete, compared to what I did. So right now, like when you get on to the Mini Tour status, is the only thing you hear is just make your dollar last the longest. Just make it last because the reality is that the average PGA Tour pro is about 31 years old. When you look at that, when you walk out of college, when you turn professional, whatever it is, it's like you're sitting back, you're going, Okay, I gotta make this last the longest. You know, it's peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, it's sharing a hotel room with four guys, it's cutting my costs down as much as I can to get to the 38th tournament of the year to give myself one more chance compared to investing a little more and not having the entry fee for that 38th because you can only get to 35. So for me now recognizing how I invest in the business here, I would have put a little more into myself. I would have eaten a little better, I would have stated a little nicer of a hotel, maybe had three roommates compared to four, or vice versa. Because then at that point, I would have been able to maybe show up a little better compared to just absolutely grind it out, I maybe would have shown up a little better. That's where I would have invested in myself a little differently and I'm recognizing that in business now, where I don't hold on to big money. I definitely don't spend it like it grows on trees, but I'm a little more aggressive right now than I was back in the day and I wish I recognized that earlier, where I could have invested a little more of myself.

What kind of recommendations do you have then for being money conscious, but at the same time, not holding on too much that you're actually doing yourself a disservice?

At 25 or 24, you think you know everything about the world. I did. Like when I was 23, and professional golfer, like, I thought I was the guy. I thought I was the guy who was just gifted and talented and I was bound to be great. I worked really hard at it. When you're 23 years old, and a professional golfer you have to have a little bit of cockiness to yourself. But like, most 23-year-olds don't know who they are. So it's like, for that same point, I didn't know who I was. I thought I needed to walk into the room and have everyone recognize that I was a professional golfer. It didn't matter who Duncan was, what mattered was I walk in the room, and they go, "Oh, he's sponsored." I did a lot of things really well. Now, if I went back into the game right now, I really believe that.

I feel like when we talk about investing in ourselves, it's so easy to think of it as a monetary thing, as opposed to an investment from so many other grounds.

Right! Right now, one of my favorite quotes that I've really held on to recently states, "Just because you can carry the weight well, doesn't mean it's not heavy." So for me, I know I carry weight well because around my company, I have to carry the weight like no one will outwork me and my company. No one should ever outwork me in my company and I own that fully. It's not a pissing battle, but the reality is that I should outwork everybody in my company and I'm happy to because I love what I do. I love who I get to serve, I love the stories we get to tell, I love building the business that I see. But to carry the weight for everybody else is a lot, to carry the weight for my team members, to carry the weight for my wife, to carry it away from my family and friends. It's a lot when you're trying to grow business and you also have families who really rely on your vision and rely on your leadership. So what I found is that if I give myself about two to two and a half hours in the morning, for myself, I'm good for the rest of the day no matter what. So what my routine is I get up at 4 am. I'm in the gym by five, at that point I work out for anywhere between 30 and 60 minutes. Now at that point, I get into a sauna for 15, I take a cold shower, I have breakfast, and I am ready to rock by seven and I can carry the weight for everybody else. But if I'm not selfish enough to do that every morning, I'm not going to carry the weight as well as I should and that's where you have to be selfish for yourself because that is arguably the least selfish thing you can do because you're showing up for everybody else in the best way possible. So you know the investment into yourself is the least selfish thing you can do. Even if it's five minutes a day, if it's 10 minutes of meditation, if it's a journal, if it's prayer, whatever you want to call it, if it's legitimately a $6 cup of coffee every single morning because that sets your day correctly to show up for everybody else for the other 23 hours and 55 minutes, but you have that five minutes of a $6 cup of coffee that you enjoy thoroughly, then it's worth every $6 cup of coffee every single day of the year, because you're showing up the right way for everyone around you. So you can carry the weight of other people. The world's heavy right now. COVID has been heavy. Everything going on, it's changing, it's evolving and if we can't show up for ourselves, we can't show up for our people, then you know what? If a $6 cup of coffee is the best investment that you can make and just make it a priority for yourself and own it and just know it. Call it as you see it be vulnerable and budget that $6 cup of coffee every single day because it is the exact thing I need to show up and I will do everything in my power to work around it to make sure I can get that for myself. That's called investing in yourself. It doesn't matter what investing in yourself looks like for you, but know what you need to show up. Know how you get to that start line every single day.

And make it your own, right?

Absolutely! 

And so much more...

Meet Charlie

Charlie Larson serves as the Vice President of Communications for The Milwaukee Admirals. The Admirals are a member of the American Hockey League, equivalent to  AAA baseball for those who are trying to understand and serve as the farm team for the Nashville Predators of the NHL. Charlie has been working hard as of late launching a brand new website for The Admirals, premiering the brand new third jersey that The Admirals will be wearing this upcoming season, and the schedule is out preparing for puck drop on October 16 against the Grand Rapids Griffins at Panther Arena in downtown Milwaukee.

On your LinkedIn, it looks like you went straight from college to working with the Admirals. How long have you been with The Admirals?

I will celebrate 21 years on August 23. So I did work for a minor league baseball team, the Michigan Battle Cats, which are now defunct, and probably the worst run professional sports team in history! I'm not joking, it was a race to get your checks cashed because if you were last it might bounce. Luckily, I was making so little money $233 after taxes every two weeks as a full-time job, that it didn't really matter that much. But I had to send my checks back and I had to put it in along with the deposit slip, I'd sign my check, mail it to M&I bank in Milwaukee and they would deposit it. You couldn't just take a picture of your check and deposit anymore. I knew I wasn't going to be there for too long after a couple of days so I didn't want to get a bank there. So I kept M&I, which doesn't exist anymore. It was interesting without a doubt.

So how often would that happen where checks would bounce and your counterparts would come in shaking their head and be like “Nope, this week’s check isn’t going.”?

As far as I know, it never happened during the season when there was a little bit of cash flow. It was the offseason and I wasn't really there for much of any offseason. They were in the same league as The Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, who are now the Class A affiliate for the Brewers. Back then they were the Class A affiliate of the Seattle Mariners and I had worked for them as well the year before. It was a wide discrepancy. The Dayton Dragons hold the most consecutive sellouts in any minor league sport. They've sold on every single game since the year they were formed and they're in the Midwest League with The Michigan Battle Cats when I was there, and we averaged like 300 fans a game and could barely even function. It was just this weird discrepancy. But I'll tell you this, living in Michigan, a couple of times a year we would have firework games on Saturday nights so we get big crowds of about 5000 fans which would have bumped our average attendance up to close to 1000. They would buy their sodas and their bottles, and they would drop them under the stands and if you ever lived in Michigan, or if you've seen Seinfeld, you would know that you get 10 cents per bottle and I was making so little money and so were the grounds crews that we would go underneath the bleachers after those games, and it was so disgusting, but it didn't matter. Then we go across to the Meijer store and we throw them in the little chute where you exchange your cans and I come out there with like 100 bucks 125 bucks. It was great cause that's literally half of my paycheck!

Did you know when you were at Ripon College that you wanted to get into the business side of sports? 

Not really. I was at the NCAA Division Three Tennis Tournament my sophomore year, and if you know, tennis tournaments, have a lot of downtime, right? I got to talking to the NCAA Rep there because the NCAA sends a rep to every church championship. This guy played basketball at Brown. Let me take a step back. I worked for the sports information director at Ripon so that was sort of my introduction. I liked it but whatever, I never thought about that as a career. Then I got talking to this NCAA rep and I was like this actually sounds pretty good. From there, I applied with her for a job with The Timber Rattlers as an intern and got that and spent my summer up there working like 80 hours a week. No pay, none! I loved it though, I was like, "This is what I want to do!" But at the time, the only school in the state of Wisconsin that offered sports management classes was UW Lacrosse. So Ripon didn't offer a sports management class much as a major. It was right at the beginning of sort of the sports boom if you will and I was a history major, philosophy minor. I tell kids all the time, it doesn't matter what you major in. Do what you want to do, find your love and you'll get if you have that passion for it, you'll find a way to make it work.

How then, do you find your way to The Milwaukee Admirals?

Honestly, it's as simple as my girlfriend at the time was living in Milwaukee. We had dated for three years at Ripon and I moved to Michigan, and she moved to Milwaukee and her mom was like, "What the heck is going on here?" So she was there and I was like, "Well if we're gonna if we're going to make a go at this, we could at least live in the same timezone," and so I just started emailing and calling all the teams and I had actually called The Admirals once, they said nothing's available and then I call them back and they said, "Oh, yeah, we've got a sales job open, send in your resume." I did and I interviewed some time, at the beginning, August, and I got offered the job a couple of days later, and then I started August 23. 

Was the league The Admirals played in called The AHL back then?

It was the IHL. It would turn out to be the last year of the International Hockey League. It was an interesting time because both the IHL and the AHL developed players for the NHL, but the AHL had branded themselves as THE Developmental League. They weren't bringing in guys that were on the downsides of their NHL careers and that's what the IHL was doing. The IHL made some atrocious business decisions expanding all over the country. In the NHL lockout of 94-95, the IHL decided that they were going to replace the NHL and that they were going to compete with the NHL. That was a bad move because yeah, they had a TV contract and games run ESPN and it was cool at the time and San Francisco spiders, got some really cool jackets, but there was no vetting process for the ownership. It was just really about getting the initiation fee if you will and we'll go from there. There wound up being teams that were folding midseason, and it was bad news. By the year 2000, it was clear that the AHL, their business model was gonna win.

Was that a fascinating time to be around the game where some of the IHL teams were folding?

Yeah, so we had 11 teams in our league that year and six of those teams were absorbed into the American Hockey League. So it was us, Chicago Wolves, Grand Rapids Griffins, Houston Aeros, which no longer exists, Utah Grizzlies and they are now in the ECHL, and the Manitoba Moose. So now that those teams go into the AHL, and that's we've been there ever since.

What did your job look like the first year working with The Admirals?

So I was a Sales Account Executive and I did that for two years and then I was promoted to Director of Ticket Sales. Also, Jane Pettit, who is The Admirals owner and the greatest philanthropist the city of Milwaukee has ever known probably one of the greatest philanthropists ever died on September 9, 2001. This was the beginning of my second year, and it was almost fitting because two days later, September 11 happens and so her death was overshadowed and that's sort of the way I think she that she liked it, that's how she lived her life. She built so many buildings in Milwaukee, I mean think of all the buildings that have the name, Pettit or Bradley. So Jane dies and she leaves The Admirals in her estate and she leaves basically a set amount of money. So once we blow through that money, that's going to be about it. So when I started with the animals, we probably had 15 full-time people and by the time our current owner, Harris Turer bought the team in April of 200 we were down to four full-time employees. What's sort of a shame is those were the best teams that The Animals have ever had. We won tt Caler Cup in 2004 with six full-time people, and I was doing things that I had no business or idea what I was doing. It was literally flying by the seat of my pants.

Where were The Admirals playing then?

They were at the Bradley Center. So The Bradley center was built by the Pettits to attract an NHL team. Bradley is Jane Pettit's maiden name and she built the Bradley Center for 2 reasons; because The Bucks were gonna move because they were playing at The MECCA right which didn't have the revenue streams that they needed and because they wanted to lure an NHL team to Milwaukee. The Bradley Center when it opened in October of 1988 was the best arena in the country. The Bucks moved and The Admirals, it was a hockey game that started it. So the Edmonton Oilers vs. Chicago Blackhawks and The Admirals had been averaging about 3000 fans at the mecca they didn't know how this was going to go and so they've really been pumping Wayne Gretzky coming in. Wayne is coming in he's gonna play and in beginning August Gretzky got traded to Edmonton which is crazy because the Bradly Center had a contract that said Gretzky and a bunch of other big players had to play in the game. So they sold out the building and it was a spectacle. It was awesome, but it was like a real snake bit and Wayne was supposed to be there and he wasn't. Now coincidentally he did play next year. Wayne did come and play the next year as a member of the Kings. The Kings played the Blackhawks in a preseason game that year. 

So The Bradley center is where we were playing and the NHL team never happened for a couple of reasons. It's not because of the Blackhawks, everybody thinks it's because of the Blackhawks it is not because of the Blackhawks, so please get that out of your head! So we came into the league at the same time as Tampa Bay and we were up for expansion that same time as Tampa Bay and Ottawa and those were the two teams. Eventually, Milwaukee dropped out and a couple of other cities dropped out of the expansion bid and those are the only two teams left. So the NHL really only had the choice to give them to Tampa Bay and Ottawa. I think the admirals dropped out of the bidding in 1989, somewhere and there were a couple of reasons they did it. One was the expansion fee the NHL had pitched was $30 million and that's nothing compared to Seattle who just paid $600 million. But then The Animals General Manager had gone to Quebec City to see a Nordiques game, ostensibly to see sort of how they ran or how they were running their operations, and it was really because he was meeting with some of the owners on the expansion committee, and they told them like, "Hey our math is a very good and that $30 million expansion fee so sorry, it's actually $50 million." So basically doubling it. The Pettits had a lot of money and they could have paid it, but they also saw that the team was going to be really bad to start the year because the way they did the Expansion Draft and if anybody hockey fans out there, they know how the Seattle and Las Vegas have done it over the last couple of years. But the way they did the Expansion Draft back then was gonna make the team really bad for a really long time and they didn't know if Milwaukee would support a bad team for seven or eight years. As it turns out, Ottawa and Tampa were horrible for the first few years. But by 2004, Tampa had won it and I think in 2003 Ottawa made it to the finals. So we never got the team and it was very sad. It was a tough thing for the Pettits to admit, especially Lloyd Pettite as a Hockey Hall of Fame announcer with the Blackhawks, that was his goal and it just didn't work out. So Jane died and we had no money and we had no employees and we had this great team. Three times we had been this is the last season of The Admirals, your health insurance is gone and we're done. So it was a challenge, but it was a blast because every day was different and it was an adventure and we had an awesome team. So we just kept putting one step in front of the other end, you can only take it one day at a time, like literally one day at a time. 

What was it like winning The Calder Cup with 6 full-time employees? 

It was crazy! We win the Calder Cup, we had no money so we had to rent a 15 passenger van to drive out two of our staff out to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. So Mike Wojciechowski, who has been with the animals for 40 years, he's driving it. Funny story, we get pulled over and driving through the mountains out in western Pennsylvania and we get pulled over go like 95 miles an hour in a 15 passenger van. Woj, as you can tell by his last name, he's Polish and the officer is Polish to it and Mike says something like, "Come on, can't you help a fellow countryman out!" So we got the ticket and went on our way and we won it and had a turn around the next day and get right back in the 15 passenger van. We won it on a Sunday, June 6, 2004, and had to drive back because on Tuesday night we're having a party at the Bradley Center. So we met the team at the airport because they flew because that was actually paid for by the league, the league pays for travel in the playoffs. So we met the team there and it was awesome because there were so many fans at the airport. Back then, sure it was a thing for major league sports, but that didn't happen in minor league sports. 26 years, The Admirals had been a professional team at that point and never won anything made it to the finals and it was so cool. The next night we had a big event at the Bradley Center and it was just amazing. Then the following year Harris Turer bought the team and literally saved The Admirals. If it's not for Harris Turer, The Admirals are gone, there are no Admirals, and he led a consortium of about 15 local business people and hockey people to buy The Admirals and, and he realized this is a community and we were a community Now we're back up to over 15 or 16 people, it's crazy! I think to myself sometimes like, "How did we possibly do it?" And it was different to like, there was no social media, we had a website, if you updated it the next day, that's fine. So there wasn't as much immediacy, but still, there was a lot, a lot, a lot to do.

When did you officially move into the role of Vice President of Communications?

So I was a Director of Ticket Sales for one year and then the next year, the PR guy left and so I had to take over his duties. So I really never got the official title of Communications Director and then after Harris bought the team, I knew I wanted to do communications, that was what I was passionate about. So I went and saw John Greenberg, who was brought along as Team President by Harris and we had some chats and he said, "Well, let's take the ticket sales off of your plate, and you can go be the Vice President of Communications."

And so much more...

Be sure to click the link below to check out The Admirals’ website!

https://www.milwaukeeadmirals.com/

Meet Kevin

Kevin is joining us today from Des Moines, Iowa where he has lived, worked, and coached most of his life. During work hours, Kevin serves as an Account Manager for AssistRX which is a specialty therapy initiation and patient support company delivering informed access and improved outcomes for their customers. After the work hours or potentially sometimes before the work hours, you can find Kevin in the gym, teaching the game to the next generation of players and mentoring those players to become even better men and women away from the court. When Kevin isn't working, coaching, or playing uncle to as many nieces and nephews, you can find him searching for his golf ball in the woods to the right where he typically slices.

I want to start out with just the evolution of the high school player because you have been a high school basketball coach for 20 years now. In your opinion, what has been the evolution of the high school player, not just on the court, but also off the court throughout that those 20 years?

Yeah, so it's been very interesting to see firsthand way back 20 years ago, where, when you thought kids were bigger, faster and stronger, and they were at the time, and then you fast forward 20 years, what that bigger, faster, stronger looks like, it's insane. Back then, I would say the game was kind of an inside-outside game where you're trying to hit the posts and you're trying to get double teams in the post to kick out to guards for shots and stuff like that. Over time, the game has evolved. I mean, we literally in our practices, now we spend so much time shooting threes, and it's free throws, layups, and threes. We will shoot mid-range shots and stuff like that, but we spend a ton of time on threes because the game, not that it's not post oriented, but it's extremely guard-oriented where way back I would say you needed one or two really solid big men to play the game and to have a good opportunity. Now, you still need that and you saw it with Baylor a little bit in the championship game where they have guards for days and strength and conditioning programs, they're insane now. Two or three days a week, our kids are up in the morning, and they're doing speed and agility drills from boxes, to cone work, to jump rope, and then they're lifting weights a couple of days a week. It's just crazy where the game was, and where it is now. You talk about off the court and stuff like that and back then there weren't the distractions of social media and things like that or your phone. These kids nowadays are on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and if they're not watching somebody else, or posting something about themselves or someone else then something's wrong. They spend so much time on their phones these days and they're always trying to see the next highlight or become the next highlight. There's a lot of distractions that I think take kids away from what they need to be spending a lot of their time on, whether it be academics, or their craft, or skillset, so we emphasize that and talk a lot about that stuff.

It seems like your game might have been better suited for today's style of play a bit. Has it ever clicked for you in your head where you wished you could play in today's game with the style being more guard-oriented?

So the funny thing is when I was about 25 years old, my best basketball that I've ever played in my life was 25 to 35 without question. These were competitive leagues that we played in, and I think you hear a lot of guys talk about that nowadays is, I think the game slows down a little bit for you, you're more mature, you figured out the ins and the outs, you don't have a coach screaming at you and telling you this or that. But I mean, 25 to 35 was my best basketball by far. You're not running plays, there's not all this structure, and then to come back to it, I think the game just slows down and you figure things out a lot more as you get older.

How do you transfer that knowledge that you have to your current players?

So we talked about it a lot. For me, conditioning has always been a huge thing. It was funny, we'd go play these pickup leagues, my brothers and all of our friends and I would walk into a gym, this is no joke, people were like, "Oh, no, there's O'Hare, I'm not guarding O'Hare." The thing was that it had nothing to do with me being good, nobody wanted to chase me around. They just knew I was going to run nonstop, whether it's off a bunch of screens or constant defense. You think about it, when you get older people aren't here to guard you or work hard, they're just there to get some shots up. So the conditioning was huge. So we condition a ton at Dowling Catholic High School and the kids ask if I'm the basketball coach or the track coach, that's kind of the joke at the school. In order to do what we want to do, which is put a lot of pressure on the other team by pressing, or trapping, we need to be really good in the second half, and we need to wear people down and I can't guarantee wins and losses, but I can guarantee that we'll be the most conditioned team. More times than not, it has worked out on our behalf. That was something that I learned later in life, understanding why I'm doing all the movements and why I'm reading this screen like that. So we talked about that stuff daily so we aren't just doing these things to do them, but also why we are doing them.

How important was life after basketball for you while you were in school and playing at St. Ambrose? The second aspect of that question is how much emphasis did St. Ambrose put on that and what kind of support did you feel like you received in college to prepare yourself for the next step?

The short answer and listeners want to learn from my mistakes is I probably didn't put a lot of emphasis on what's gonna happen after college while I was there. I just always thought I would find a job and life would be great, blah, blah, blah. I can honestly tell you, I thought I was gonna play in the NBA all the way up until my senior year when I was only playing 17-20 minutes a game on my college team. I still thought somebody was going to pick me! 

Where does that mindset come from for you?

Jordan and Kobe, man, like I followed Jordan and Kobe and Jordan like crazy. Their mindsets and their mentality on everything, like it didn’t matter if there was any truth to what you're thinking, nobody cares. If you don't believe it, or if you don't have it then you're behind the eight ball. So just following those guys, and watching them, and listening to them, my confidence was through the roof, whether it should have been or not. But Ambrose was huge for me. When I went there I thought I was the best thing since whomever and you get there and you realize there's a lot of people from a lot of different states that are a lot better than you think. Every year I was a backup point guard and so the next year is going to be my year because that guy's going to graduate and all of a sudden, here comes the new junior college player who's a stud that wanted to move home and be close to family. Then he graduates and now it's like, oh, my God, this is my team, I can't wait to take this team, we're going to do great things, and here comes this other transfer from a D1 school. So that was the challenge of that. These guys just easily put me in my place left and right, but it was great for me. You learn so much from the struggles, and the adversity, and the challenges of trying to accomplish something bigger than yourself which was huge for me. But so I was a business management and economics major and my senior year was probably when I really had to start my plan B. I wish that I would have done internships and all those things in college, and I would 100% recommend that to kids nowadays. I mean, just to get the experience, to build the relationships, and add it to your resume then maybe those companies are going to ask you to work for them full time when you graduate if you're doing what you're supposed to be doing. But those things would be huge, where I was just a gym rat all summer focused on this and that. I don't take it back, but that's a mistake, I probably would have gone back and spent a little more time on my studies and looking for experience. I wish I would have put a little more time and thought into my future plans when I was in college.

Did what happened to you on the court and on the team with feeling like you were number two translate then to the professional world as well?

I think anytime you go into the real world and start working with companies, everybody has a role. We talk about this with our high school players, you have to play your role and you have to do your job, whatever that is in order for the company or the team or whatever to succeed. So translating that from high school and college sports where you learn so much from teamwork and what it takes to accomplish the end goal, and it takes from a sports perspective 15 people to accomplish that. Then when I got into the data processing world, I was on a team of eight and if somebody wasn't doing their job, then our team would struggle. So you find other people helping each other reach sales goals and stuff like that, you know, it's the old, "You can't drive a car with three wheels." I mean, it takes literally everybody on your team in the real world, or on your team in sports, to accomplish goals and there's no one person bigger than the other. So I didn't come into the real world and think that I would head straight to the top right away. There's always a process, and there are always steps before you get to wherever, you're shooting to go to, or you're trying to get to.

What I've had to find in coaching, is that you have to take your own experiences and take your own mistakes, and find a way to slowly implement them into your coaching philosophy and your team's culture so that if nothing else you're adding tools to your players' toolbox, so when life gets a little bit harder, they're more prepared for that. What kind of things have you put in place there at Dowling that you're super proud of that you see?

So here's what I've learned. Being there for 20 years, I think at the end of the day, and I just had this conversation with our athletic director the other day who has done unbelievable things at our school, and he's also our football coach. But if you can get kids or people to understand what they mean to you, from a love, care, and respect standpoint, I think more times than not anything you tell them is going to go even farther than what you would think because they know that you're only there to help them at the end of the day. Everybody's sports career is limited, whether it's one year after your freshman or four years after high school and if you're lucky, you get another four years of college. I try to build and create these relationships with players from day one and even in the summer before they're starting to come in, whether that be with their AAU programs, or with our grade school programs. Again, I'm trying to show them the ropes of basketball, but I'm also very genuinely concerned with what's going on in the classroom and their personal life, like asking what their dog's name is, and things like that. You say those things and it seems kind of funny, but there's 100% genuineness in reality behind them and I don't ask things just to ask them because if I ask somebody something it's because I care. I've found that when you do that with kids, they're gonna run through walls, and they're gonna do everything in anything they can because they believe you and they know you're not trying to steer them in the wrong direction. If they look good, you look good, and if you look good, they look good. So that's gone a long way and some of the things we talked about a lot are the whole "We not me," process. We talk about we not me a lot. We also talk a lot about accountability. That's going to translate to the work world too. Commitment, like, you can't just be interested in doing something and being interested in something doesn't cut it anymore, it might have 15-20 years ago, but if you're not committed, you're doing yourself and your team a disservice, you're going to get passed by other kids. Work ethic, again, you take your work ethic from the sports world, and then you take it into the real-world environment. If you can't hang your hat on your work ethic, you're in trouble, and you're struggling at some point. So those are a couple of things that we talk about daily. Grades are huge and if you don't have the grades, you can't play sports. So we can talk about sports till we're blue in the face, but without grades, you can't play and then without grades, you can't get into the school that hopefully, you want to go to and at the end of the day without being at school, you want to go to your employer more times than not isn't going to give you too much of a look, if you haven't done all these things leading up to the end result. So a lot of steps throughout the process, can't skip one to get to another, details are super important, it takes time, and it takes a ton of work. The steps to get there are insane, and everybody wants to skip one or two to get to three or four, and you just can't do it if you want to be great.

And so much more...

Meet William

William is the founder of Mind Business, LLC, and his calling is to help individuals and organizations remove their own success barriers. How the heck does he do that? Excellent question! He does so by educating them on the mental foundations for success. He has many years of leadership, sales training, and consulting experience and he has come to understand that the most common causes of personal dysfunction within an individual are thoughts and feelings of unworthiness and unforgiveness. 

Let's get the show kicked off here a little bit by talking about your sports career! What got you involved in sports and how far did it take you?

Yeah, so for me, sports have been a part of my life since I was nine years old. I began to play basketball watching Michael Jordan back in the mid-90s. I also grew up in Houston, Texas, so I was watching the Houston Rockets win championships with Hakeem Olajuwon, Clyde Drexler, and all those guys. So my very first love as far as sports was basketball. My neighbor had a basketball hoop and I was over there pretty much every single day, hooping and putting my skills together and learning how to do layups from different corners of the backboard, and all those things at nine years old. When I was 10 years old, I tried out for football and made the team and the interesting thing about football is that for whatever reason, it just was something initially that I did not really take to a whole lot,  I would say I was a little timid. I had tons of physical strength and I was physically stronger than the other kids my age, but I was timid and so even though I lived in the suburbs, my mom took me to play with this inner-city team and these guys were knocking me around and things like that. It wasn't that I couldn't hang, I just had that timidity. So long story short, one day I came home from practice, and I had my head, "You know what? I'm done, I'm going to go ahead and hang them up and go back to the basketball court," and my mom was in the kitchen cooking so I kind of walked in there to let her know I'm quitting. So I went there, I said, "Hey, Mom, I don't think I want to go to practice tomorrow, I think I just kind of want to quit, this is not working out for me." She basically said, "You're not quitting," and she turned back around and kept on cooking. She let me know that if you quit with this one thing, then you will basically think that it's okay to quit with other things. So I went to practice the next day, pissed off at her and what I said to myself was, "You know what? I'm going to prove her wrong and I'm going to take out my rage on all these guys out here because this is ridiculous." So I went after that practice, and I was fired up so I went out there and I just started lighting people up. After that day of practice, the defensive coordinator had never seen have from me and they wanted me to bring that same energy to practice the next day. After that, I never looked back with football specifically. I continued to play basketball, but with football, it was just so exciting. It was something that I was good at and so I defensive MVP as a 10-year-old and our team won the city championship! Then after that, I really begin to lose weight. I was a little husky when I was younger and I slimmed off and eventually made my way to running back by the time I got to middle school and did really well in middle school with football. So I got to high school and during my senior year, I'm being recruited by some schools like Kansas State, Rice University, Tennessee, and a few others and I tore my ACL halfway through the season, on this crazy play. At that point, I had to make a decision as I was doing rehab for an ACL tear, am I going to continue to train to try to get back out there by the next fall. I got back to about 90%, but the schools that I was talking to many were trying to do partial scholarships, preferred walk-ons, and many of them were out of state that was still potentially considering a full scholarship, but it was going to be a long shot. In my head, I think it was a combination of being a little immature, but also thinking about my parents are going to have to pay state tuition, which I think was a mature decision and I made the decision to go to university, Houston. So I play some Semi-Pro Football after that, but I never end up playing at the collegiate level. So it was just really interesting how I knew that I could have played at the college level because I was getting recruited to do so, but life had a different path. It really began to force me to think about what I wanted to do beyond sports because I was totally identified with being an athlete. That led me on this life journey that has led me to now being a mindset coach. I began to have this mental transformation, especially in my mid-20s. I just had a calling that there was something more that wouldn't let me go back to the mindset that I am an athlete because there was something deeper within me that was saying that you're so much more than that and you have a different destiny.

How would you describe the switch that flipped that transformed you from a timid little kid into the athlete you became, and how do you carry that same mindset into what you do in your professional career?

I think ultimately, what that moment as a 10-year-old showed me is that there was so much potential within me. Now, of course, this was specifically around sports, but it opened up my mind to where there was more potential and power and ability within me that I have not figured out. It's in there, but I just had to bring it out and I think for me, that experience as a 10-year-old really helped to spray my confidence in many things, not just sports, but with everything from academics to overcoming the adversity that I've had to face in my life. Everybody faces adversity, but it's how you deal with it and so that's really what opened up to me. I could never look at myself as being this limited person that can only do so much because I saw something absolutely explode within me which was a big motivation for me to help to inspire my siblings to really push themselves in whatever they do because when my younger sibling wanted to hang out with me, I was always training so I would be doing cone drills, doing agility work, doing explosive work all the time because I really wanted to be this great athlete and have my mom not have to pay and worry about me going to college. So I did not know that at the time but it actually really lit a fire within them to become competitive and to do their very best and whatever they set their foot in. That one day in practice lit a fire inside me and now it's being transferred into helping to support people to become the best version of themselves. But the energy is the same, it's this unwillingness to compromise, unwillingness to say "this is all I have, this is all I can do, this is all I can become," and because that light burns within me, I have an affinity to do that for other people. When I see people doubting themselves, underestimating themselves, I already know that that's a false sense of self and I always encourage others to be able to find that power within themselves because ultimately when you do that all the things that you need in life are within that space of realizing who you are.

Do you ever find yourself looking at your mom and thinking, “Hey, thanks for making me stick out,” since she was the catalyst for your transformation?

We've actually had that conversation many times so I definitely attribute my mom as a catalyst for my overall success and just ability to stay focused. Her voice has always been echoing in my head. First and foremost, she still reminds me to this day, that from the first time she laid eyes on me when I was born, she knew that I was going to be someone special, she knew that I was different and she knew that I had a great destiny and a great calling on my life and she's always told me that she's always envisioned me being up on stage. She says she would actually have visions of me being up on stage talking to millions of people with them chanting my name, over and over again. It's very interesting to where now I'm on the path of actually utilizing the spoken word to inspire people. She had this vision of me being this great speaker and influencer many years ago, way before social media, anything like that. So who would have guessed it? Of course, we have many years to come to see all those things through, but I think that also just is another indicator of how important parents are when it comes to kids, whether it's involvement in sports, or whatnot, your voice will echo through their heads for their entire lives, good, bad or indifferent. As I teach a whole lot about, subconscious programming is powerful which is your habitual behaviors, thinking, and actions. That's based on what you believe to be true and the first seven years of life is when you're being programmed into that default, whether it's positive, negative and parents have almost complete control of that outcome, and that is carried with children for their entire lives. Even as adults, we are the older version physically of those children and so if we're broken as children, until we wake up, we have no opportunity to become the best version of ourselves, and to let go of those childish thoughts and belief systems that are keeping us held back. You can be in an adult body, but not have an adult mind. To me, an adult mind is any individual that can think for themselves and galvanizes the courage to be able to take action when they have a vision, no matter what. That is something that I've had to learn very early in life, and I struggled with it until probably about age 30. But to be able to think for yourself, and be willing to take action when you have a vision, and you can trust that small voice is overwhelmingly powerful, but it can be scary as hell. So of course, you have to do that in life all the way up, even in sports, as a kid, when you get knocked on your butt and get back up. That decision is made in a split second, but as you get older, as an adult, there are more strategic decisions you have to make that can scare you away from your destiny. If you have a little bit of practice when you're young, you have an opportunity to be able to have some subconscious programming that will support that. Parents are extremely important to kids’ development, and not just to be able to perform on the field, but also in life. Because one day, no matter how you live as a parent, you're not going to be there and your voice is still going to be with your children, and will many times be spoken to their children. So make sure that those words count, because they can be a star athlete, great attorney, or just a great human being, which you're going to help to determine that.

Switching gears here a bit, but you’re very active on social media which has garnered you a large network of followers. How much do you attribute that to your success, the relationships you have been able to create, and Young Guns? 

I would say that the single greatest thing that I have accomplished over the past four months has definitely been the Young Guns main event. Being in the final three initially, and having to compete and get over 2000 votes, and being able to come out on top and have the opportunity to then present my message to the world about the power of the subconscious mind has been the high as far as a singular event. But overall, I would just say, when it comes to the whole social media space, I've been very pleased to have done a deep dive in three different platforms. So it's been on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. On LinkedIn specifically, I've gained huge momentum and it's been really awesome to be able to see the feedback that I've been able to get from people, whether it's direct messages or otherwise, as far as how the content is being able to support them, has been a great reminder to stay focused, to stay encouraged to, and to know who you are, as far as the power that you hold within to become anything that you want. I would say overall, it's been exciting and it's been invigorating, because it lets you know that you're doing something right to help support people and it gives me a tremendous opportunity to give out good energy to as many people as I possibly can touch, knowing that that energy is going to come back to me and manifest in beautiful, wonderful ways that I won't even necessarily even know for some time. But I'm building up tremendous good karma for myself, but also passing it on to other people so that they can be the light for other people in their own lives. Social media gives you an opportunity to get your message out there. Of course, you have a decision on what that message is going to be and mine has just been one of transformation and empowerment. I know people need that anyway because I've needed it many times over the years and I think in a way I'm giving other people what I wish I had at certain points in my life. Thank God I made it through! But if I was able to connect with certain individuals who were publishing this kind of content, it would have helped me so much in times past so I'm also making sure that I'm doing that for that reason. Now, don't get me wrong, I was able to go to YouTube and find some great pastors and other folks who really encouraged me, but there was not anyone that was individual as like a content creator who was like this bigger than life figure, it was some of the more preeminent names, which still helped me a whole lot. So every time I post, I try to think about it from the perspective of what can I present to the world today that is going to help someone? So I have curated content three days a week, but the other one or two days that I post it's literally me sitting in my office or in my room first thing in the morning, and just kind of taking a moment to meditate and say, "I am trusting that the words will come to me that I need to say at this moment for somebody." This may only need to be for one person and that's okay, but it also could be for 10,000 and that's also pretty dope. Either way, I am willing, so let's go! Many times, those messages have been the ones that have impacted people the most. I don't necessarily have this secret formula, it's literally being available and being willing to speak truth, willing to put myself out there, and people may or may not love what I have to say, but I'm willing to do it. I'm betting on myself that this work that I'm doing is going to not only be able to inspire people and to build them up but also build a strong financial future for my family and I firmly believe that both can get accomplished and still be pure.

This show is all about bridging the gap between sports and professional careers and there are a lot of athletes out there who are constantly in this battle of having to figure out how to prioritize themselves. You yourself are working full time while running your business full time as well so what has the journey been like for you? What are the tools that you have put in place to balance those two worlds to ultimately set yourself up for success? 

One of the best things that I can respond within that regard, is what I do each and every day when I wake up first thing in the morning. Most days, I don't have my mind racing with tons of things flying through it. I cannot say that until maybe two and a half to three years ago as far as waking up with a clear mind and I would say that, because I've gotten to this space, it's a little easier to kind of plan my day. But I know most of us to wake up in the morning with racing thoughts about all we have to get done and stress and so on and so forth. There are days that I have that too because I have a lot to get done and I'm balancing two worlds, not even including being a father and a husband and all that. So waking up with a daily practice has been most helpful, meaning what I do every morning, I wake up, I have written affirmations that I've written out that talk about things in the areas of business, of family, and of relationship building that I want to accomplish over the next year. I rehearse that script or those affirmations and speak them out loud to myself every single morning. I also take some time just to pray and meditate to clear my mind as opposed to trying to envision how am I day to go, which is very effective, I try to just clear my mind first. I try to have my mind clear and get some feelings of love and excitement in my energy and then I began to meditate specifically on things that I want to see like envisioning my day, envisioning specific conversations, envisioning this podcast and how it's going to go. It's really about being able to take some time to meditate for me, and envision positive outcomes for my day and positive outcomes for my week, because each and every day, we have things that have the opportunity to distract us. The only question that we have to answer in that regard is how we're going to respond. That is something that's very, very important for me. So having those written affirmations or reading them, taking some time to pray and meditate, specifically on positive outcomes that I want to see come to pass in the next day or the week is also important. Then I end that meditation session with two questions before I get my day started. What do I see for myself and my life and what do I believe to be true for myself in my life? You can believe something to be true, but if don't you have a vision for it, you're in trouble. That's why it says in the Bible, without a vision, the people perish. So I need to be able to see it in my mind and also affirm it through words. There may be something a little different each and every day, but it's consistent with abundance, health for myself, and my family, and peace and goodwill to everyone around me. Now to be a little less complex, especially for those young people who are in sports, one of the best things that you can do to help put yourself in a position mentally to be successful, is to expand the vision that you have for yourself. So if you have specific goals, you have to be able to envision yourself accomplishing those goals in order to get there. All the great athletes specifically at the top of my sports have done it and they talk about it very openly. Whether it's after winning a championship or after winning a big game, they always talk about things like we prepared all week, we knew what the team's defense's weaknesses were and we knew if we execute our plan to perfection, they couldn't beat us. What are they talking about? Not just practice, but they had a vision for what they believe to be true what was going on, and the outcome, right. Michael Jordan talks all the time about he knew where he was going to hit the shot on the court, he practiced this specific shot at the end of the game, it just so happened he got to a spot he knocked down that shot. Kobe and LeBron talked about it as well, they're talking about having a strong imagination and being able to see themselves there in advance. So young people, if you can see it in your mind's eye, you can accomplish it. That also applies to adults. But more than anything, if you don't see it, you can't be it. If you do see it, you have an opportunity to accomplish it and it is very strong from a possibility perspective, that you will do those things, you will accomplish those things in your life. I don't care how big the goal is, that is a formula for success that goes back to the beginning of time. Whether you are a young person or an adult, if you read any of these spiritual books, whatever it is, go back and read it. What are they talking about all the time? Having a vision! God gave Moses vision, God gave all the prophets of vision, a mental picture of what was going to happen, and then it happened because they took action to follow through and believe that it was possible. I don't what the story is, and what the background is, the core understanding is they had a vision and once they got that vision, they were able to accomplish it. There are infinite possibilities within you so there's a whole nation of infinite possibilities, which could be represented in a nation of people who are all unique as individuals that are possible. But if you don't have a vision, a plan, and the ability to see something happening before it happens, you basically disqualify yourself from accomplishing it and if you don't know where you're going, how are you going to get there?

And so much more…

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Meet Marissa

Marissa comes to us today from Visit Milwaukee which is the metro area’s tourism agency. She serves as the Director of Sports Milwaukee which is a brand new division of Visit Milwaukee. Before her role as Director of Sports Milwaukee, she served as the Senior Sports and Entertainment Manager at Visit Milwaukee and has actually been with Visit Milwaukee for over 10 years.

You've been a part of the process of bringing March Madness to Milwaukee, what does the bidding process look like to bring March Madness to Milwaukee, and how does that process ultimately get to the NCAA?

So The Fiserv Forum is actually the host of the men's first and second rounds for March Madness in 2022. So we're very excited and very lucky because I know a lot of our sister cities throughout the country lost out this year because of COVID and having to move all of those games and those economic drivers away from their cities in the spring and now moving to Indianapolis and holding it within that bubble. It's a process and it's beneficial to have great partners in the community. For us, it's Marquette University, when it comes to going for this type of event, they really take the lead on the bid, which is great. Not every city has that. Some of the cities are left to handle most of the work in the bid process. It is a huge undertaking and generally happens about every three years is when we begin the process. We bid on numerous years through the NCAA, they have a championship director that handles the entire bid process. Cities get educated upon what we need to do, going through the system, what we need to have in play in order to make this feasible. Then we get the announcement if we are lucky to actually host one of them and that will be occurring. We actually just found out that we are also hosting the first and second rounds for March Madness in 2025 as well! 

Are you guys optimistic that this will be a complete return to normal environment in 2022 when Milwaukee is hosting March Madness?

Yes, I feel really confident. As each day passes, I feel more and more. We just started hosting youth volleyball tournaments inside with limited spectators at the Wisconsin Center, and that's been really successful. Seeing that the Brewers are at 25% capacity and growing, seeing that the Bucks' Fiserv Forum is increasing their capacity and they're all happening safely and that there haven’t been cases really that trace back to any of these events is only going to continue to move us in a positive direction. Also looking at states that are wide open, like Texas, like Indiana, like Florida, who have been hosting sporting events of the youth and amateur kind, non-bubble, in a very safe way, I think is again, case and point that these events can take place without causing a huge health crisis.

When it comes to hosting events in Milwaukee, how do you guys monitor the economic impact that they have on local businesses and how big of a role does that play in the bidding process? 

That is really one of our key roles is to maintain and track the economic impact of the tourism industry and its effect on the Greater Milwaukee area. So as an event comes in, sometimes they'll have data from other cities that we're able to look at and base our bid upon. Understanding how many hotel rooms that they fill every single night, understanding how many nights they're staying, because every night that they stay, they are going to be out and about in our city spending money at restaurants, going out to eat going into our museums, experiencing everything that we have to offer, and bringing their money with them, which is really nice, because that is what employees the waitstaff, the housekeepers, the people working in the museums or attractions. It keeps people working! Tourism is a huge business and especially within sports tourism alone, you're looking at about 45 billion per year total associated with youth and amateur sports which were put together by a group that I work with Sports Events and Tourism Association, I actually serve on their board. So we take that number down in regards to the impact on the Milwaukee area, which was about 30 million in about 2019.

How big of a priority is bringing youth sporting events to Milwaukee and what kind of economic impact do those events have?

Absolutely, I'm a huge advocate of sports on all levels, especially since I played. I played all sports but started focusing on volleyball when I was about 14, playing club, and then going from there, traveling throughout the country, playing in different tournaments, seeing different cities. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship to play at a D1 school in New York and experience that for several years. So I can kind of talk the talk and walk the walk firsthand. To see it from the family side, to see from the participant side, to see it from the business side. Youth sports is just a huge business and continues to grow. I don't think some people truly understand the impact because they don't have huge marketing dollars, you're not seeing it in commercials, you're not seeing it all over the place, you really have to kind of be in it to understand it or have a kid or a nephew or some relative that's playing club baseball or club soccer, any one of the club sports. With professional sports, it's a given and we're blessed. We are lucky in the city of our size to have the professional sports teams that we do with the Milwaukee Bucks, with the Brewers, with the Admirals, and so on and so forth. Those are all economic drivers. but there are different basis than the tournaments that we bring in. The tournament's really fill in those voids on those weekends when there's not much going on. Not a lot of people are coming into the city, great, there's a group that's hosting a soccer tournament that needs these particular dates, filling those fields, and then there is that that that trickle-down effect of the economic impact of again, paying the rental, but then all of the kids that are there with their families, families spend money. They're staying in the hotels, and then they're taking their kids out to dinner or buying them things while they're here, the gas during their travels. Again, it's also when you look at the indirect spending as well. So you've got your waitstaff or people that are working in the restaurants that are then getting paid additional tips because of these outsiders that are coming in. Then because they have more revenue and better finances, they live out in Waukesha County, they live outside of the area, they're spending that ancillary money on something else, which is helping then another business. So it really does have a huge impact and sometimes people don't understand how important this business is. It really does affect a large group of people.

What has made our city (Milwaukee) successful and what are those selling points that Visit Milwaukee will take into a bid to say, "This is why Milwaukee is a great candidate to host this event."?

I think two simple things, we go back and forth. Everybody has their own ideas on how to market Milwaukee. Everybody has their own opinion on whether we hold on to our qualities like we're known for our old fashions we make cheese and sausage. I mean, Milwaukee is so unique, but it's so much more than that. Every person that comes in that has never been to our city that we bring in for tours or site visit say, "Wow, I had no idea that the city was like this," and it truly is about expecting the unexpected. It has a gorgeous lakefront that you don't even know it's a lake. The best story ever in my last 10 years was somebody going to our concierge at one of the hotels and saying "Could I get a map for the route to run around the lake?" I mean, sure you could but he did probably take you about a year! Our lakefront is just like no other and of course, you can say going down to Chicago or going across to Michigan, but having how much Parkland that we have along the lake and how accessible it is to the public and with the gorgeous museums and Calatrava providing the backdrop, I don't think there's a city that compares. But I think the other thing too is we are the biggest small town in the country because we all know each other somehow, we are appreciative, I think of every day and have unbelievable Midwest charm and manners and love welcoming people. I think that's very unique to who we are.

Do you like the mentality that people don't know about Milwaukee, but when they come they enjoy it, or do you wish that there was some reputation on a national level about Milwaukee that was more apparent to people?

That is the fine line we walk on every single day. As residents or as visitors, it feels like, "Oh, my gosh, I love that people love our city." It's almost like you take it in like, "Oh, yeah, I know, that's why I live here." Okay? Because this place is so awesome, how did you not know?! But, at the same time if we don't embrace the change, which I think I have found sometimes within our city is that we are a little afraid to adapt, and to change because we do hold on to our history and it's hard because holding on to that history is what makes us so charming. But if we don't take those steps to move forward, we'll kind of get lost in the shuffle. So we have to continue to have that balancing act of making sure that we are being showcased in Vanity Fair, which we had an article about Milwaukee, making sure that we're known as the best-kept secret, kind of like Portland went through that whole transition or Nashville. Nashville now is just "Nashvegas", as some people will say, it went from 0-10 and 2.5. I don't know if that's necessarily the direction we will be in but I think we need to find that happy medium and continue to ride that wave. Because we are cool, we are underrated!

Can you talk a little bit about just the Milwaukee sports fan and how important they are to the success of these events?

Oh, absolutely. Before I started working for Visit Milwaukee, I worked for the Milwaukee Bucks for almost two seasons. The Milwaukee fan is unbelievably dedicated to a point where they feel that they have ownership in the products and that they’re a part of the team. I mean, they have to question every decision being made, if it's not something that they would do and I love it because we're passionate! We are very passionate about our sports which makes for a great fan and a great fan base for all of our teams. Then also that makes us a great city to bring in new events. I think we're always open and excited to see something different because there's really a wide range of what sports are. We keep talking about hockey, we talk about basketball, we're talking about baseball, but, you can go down the spectrum of USA ultimate, which is frisbee, it's fencing, which we do really well at. Golf as well, we are a huge destination and that's really been our focus on the state level. A few members of our team here have been in the trenches for the last few years to make sure that we're making ourselves the number one golf destination. Thinking about the top-notch courses that we have, we're hosting the Ryder Cup at the end of this year, which very hopeful they'll be at full capacity! This is going to be on a worldwide stage to host something of this caliber. Even look at our Pettit national ice Center, which is right in our backyard, in 2018 we hosted the long track Olympic team trials, and most likely we'll be hosting for 2022 as well. There's something to be said, I mean that really pushes Milwaukee and puts us on the international map.

Let’s talk about your new role. Can you speak to why Visit Milwaukee created this sports focussed role, what you hope to accomplish and what your priorities are as the Director of Sports Milwaukee? 

This has been a passion project of mine for the last 10 years. There are numerous other cities that we compete against, that we work with, that all have a dedicated sportsperson, sports department, Sports Commission, or just some dedication to sports tourism. So I have been trying to push the needle and yes, it's crazy because you have such joy, you look going into 2020 it was like oh my gosh, this is actually happening. All right, we're gonna make this announcement. All right, we've got the Ryder Cup coming, we had the DNC, Milwaukee was a buzz! To be a part of that, and to see this come to fruition, I'm very grateful for our new leadership that has come on board and was able to look and realize what I have been trying to accomplish is feasible and to get their support 150%. So there it was in February, you get the announcement out, and then a few weeks later it's like "What's this thing that's happening over in Europe? No, we're good. Wait, oh, we're shutting down the office for two weeks? Okay, but we'll be back." We still had events that kept hanging on waiting, thinking it's going to change, it's going to change. So last year was just a huge transitional year for all of us and trying to do what we can to make tourism work amongst a pandemic. But again, given all of that it also gave us time to really look at how we want to approach Sports Milwaukee, and what we want it to be what is our vision. Now we're able to put that out there to the public and it coincides with the start of sporting events and we have really recognized that throughout the country, youth and amateur sporting events have really been the first to return. It's something we've talked about for the last year, as some events started last July, last June and now we're seeing it spread throughout. Of course, my key is to bring in economic impact. I want to see our hotels full, I want to see people working because of the business that we do and it is also my love for youth and amateur sport in terms of what it brings to kids. I think it is so important, it teaches teamwork, it teaches discipline, it teaches so many life skills that you will carry forward in life and it's so important to the mental and physical health of our youth. So I think of Sports Milwaukee as a marketing arm of Milwaukee, with a little bit of advocacy and I hope to keep building upon that and growing our team internally and really becoming a resource to everything sports.

And so much more…

Meet Dr. Barbara Meyer

Dr. Meyer is a professor and director of the Laboratory for Sports Psychology and Performance Excellence at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. On top of that, she is also a Sports Psychology Coach who works with professional and Olympic athletes on the mental side of their game. She has trained athletes at every Winter Olympics since 2002 and has worked with athletes across various sports, including freestyle skiing, speed skating, and hockey, among many others.

Are there ways you can monitor and evaluate someone’s mindset in school? 

If you were to enroll in one of my classes in particular at UWM I teach an undergrad Sport and Exercise psychology class. I've been teaching that class as long as I've been at UWM. The first day of class, I ask everybody to do a show of hands and I say, "Would you rather learn a lot in class and earn the grade of a B, or not learn very much, it's an easy class, you can memorize things and forget it tomorrow, but you earn the grade of an A, which would you rather have?" We can tell a lot about your motivation by how you answer that question and we can ask athletes the same thing. Would you rather let's say in an Olympic sport, finish fourth, but have a personal best, or would you because of whatever reason, not performed very well, but you end up first. Maybe everybody else fell down or nobody else had a good performance and so your bad performance was better than everybody else's bad performance. But those questions really get at some psychological characteristics that people have about their motivation and we can apply that to everything we do and we can learn a lot about people.

So I'm going to make an assumption. My assumption would be that most of your students, and for the most part, most of your athletes are going to sacrifice the learning and the personal bests in order to get the A and to get first. Would that be correct? 

Yes, or they're going to try to balance it out a little bit. Most think that they should say, learning, they think that they should say personal best. But most competitive performers aren't there to do their best. They are, but really they want to win, they want to end up on the podium. So really, what we have to often do is deconstruct it and build up enough trust and enough evidence to say yeah. But the best way to get on that podium, the best way to win is to take a step back, and focus on the process, and focus on getting better. If you can get better at something in your performance domain, whatever you do, if you can get a little bit better at something every day, you're increasing your chances of getting the desired outcome. Sometimes it might be getting a little bit better at your nutrition, sometimes it might be getting a little bit better at your recovery or your rest. But if you can focus on getting a little bit better at something every day, you maximize your chances of getting that desired outcome.

How do you help either your students or your athletes make that mindset change quickly? 

Yeah, and let me before I answer that, let me also go back and say that once you can make that connection, that I am getting smarter, I am improving, I am getting better at something. If you can realize that and really come to appreciate that, when the time comes if you don't get your desired outcome, at least you don't have any regrets. At least hopefully, on the morning of that loss is we can move on faster because you know you did everything you can and on that particular day, that wasn't good enough. So in addition to helping you maximize your chances of getting that desired outcome, knowing that you've done the work, you have no regrets helps you to manage it when you haven't achieved that. Now, to your question, how do we fast forward people's ability to get that. So oftentimes athletes that I've worked with for a really long time will come and stay at our house here in Milwaukee and on a couple of occasions, my husband has had to come to our backyard and ask us, an athlete and I who are having a session on the patio to quiet down because we're using our outdoor voices, and our neighbors can hear us. One of the athletes I'm thinking about, in particular, we were talking about outcome versus process, we were talking about the best way to get you to win is to back up and focus on the controllables and focus on the process. So how do you do that? You ask people to experiment in low-stakes ways. So for you as a student, I'm not going to ask you to do that as a student, because you might not trust me and the stakes are too high. But I'm going to ask you to do that in a different area of your life. So that's going to be some of your at-home exercises, or some of your homework is to practice that process-oriented approach or practice those controllables in a different area of your life. You will if you do that consistently, and you debrief honestly with me, you will make progress at that. Eventually, your curiosity will probably be piqued and you're like, "Hmm, I wonder what happens if I do this in school or I try this and another higher stakes?" So we build up trust and rapport in our relationship. I might have you watch a documentary, maybe you're a big Formula One fan so I have watched a documentary on Formula One, which is about process orientation and controlling the controllables. Or I might have you watch some YouTube videos or what have you, to give you some additional evidence that maybe this is worth trying. Then over time, you will start to understand it, you will start to believe it and hopefully, in no time, you're like, "Duh, I can't imagine I was ever anything else."

How does ego play a role in our inability to want to advance that process?

So most of the time when someone emails me or calls me to do performance-based work, it's not usually because everything is going great. So there's a little bit of desperation and usually, they have done everything else, they have a technical coach, they have a physical preparation coach, they have a nutritionist, they have a financial planner, so they have all of the other boxes ticked. They want it to be often everything else but a head problem. So I always say, when people call me I usually know something's going wrong with them. Like I'm stepping on the Titanic, instead of The Love Boat. I'd say, 30% of the time, someone reaches out and says, "I think everything's good, but I just want to make sure," The other times, the wheels are falling off and this is a desperate cry for help. So in some ways, I've got their attention because I know they've tried everything else and it hasn't worked to the extent they want it to work. So I've got a little bit more of a captive audience now and they're willing to put themselves out there, they're willing to be uncomfortable, because your brain muscle, and I always refer to it as a muscle and neuroscience teaches us now that there's neural plasticity. So with training, we can change the way our brain functions. But I often say that they're desperate. Just like if I asked you to change the way you throw darts, right? And I'm like, "You know what Will? I really think you can get 5% extra if you just change the grip on the dart." You'd probably respond by saying you have been throwing it this way for 25 years and it's going to be uncomfortable. You're probably going to get a little bit worse before that new grip on the Dart becomes your habit. The same thing goes with the brain muscle. We're changing the way your brain thinks and it's gonna be uncomfortable because you have your habits. Your habit is to think about winning, your habit is to think about what people are going to say about you in the media, or what somebody's going to tweet about you so we have to get you past that. It's going to be uncomfortable before it becomes more comfortable. You could get a little bit worse at this before you start to see consistent progress forward. Usually, they're desperate by the time they get to the mental side of it, and they're a little bit more willing to take a risk.

So you said in one of your recent interviews back in 2018 that sports psychology is one of the last areas of expertise or disciplines that has gained wide acceptance. So we are three years removed from that, have you seen that shift begin to change anymore? Also as it does shift, do you think that number of 30% that are coming in just to make sure everything is good will increase?

That's the hope. In some of the sports organizations that I've worked at over the years have been on the forefront like 10-15 years ago, where along with a nutritionist and the physical preparation coach and the athletic trainer, the physical therapist, the physio, whoever, they've had a mental performance coach on staff. So just as you would, let's say, in an elite sports draft where you go to the combine, and we see how much you can squat and everything, you go talk to someone who tries to do a little bit of an assessment of where you are mentally. So some organizations have already put that in place to try to normalize and just make it that this is one of the other things that we take care of in this organization.

What have you seen in this capacity and how would you describe the current landscape on how we can advance these conversations? 

So, one of the things that they do, or they have done in the past, I don't know if they're still doing this, but Canada was at the forefront of a lot of this. They did mental skills training as part of the elementary school curriculum. So in addition to all of your academic subjects, they wove into the curriculum, stress reduction. So some breathing, they did things with regard to self-talk and confidence, communication and teamwork. I have colleagues in other disciplines whose partners are school teachers, elementary school teachers here in the US, and they try to do things like practicing mindfulness and working on communication skills, and those sorts of things within their classes, not as part of a formalized curriculum. But those are certainly things that we can do. We can do that with our nieces and nephews. Again, you're playing board games as a family, these are lessons that you can learn and just nuggets you can drop throughout for anybody. So weaving that into just how we are as human beings, I remember years ago, and this colleague is no longer at UWM. But I had a professor colleague at UWM and I happen to be at his house for a barbecue and one of his children had come home from the elementary school track meet. The first question he asked his daughter was, Did you win?" Okay, so I like to win, right? I like to win more than anybody else, probably, but that's not the question you want to ask that child. It should be, "How did you do? Tell me what you remember about your track meet. Did you have fun?" So you want to ask those sorts of things to try to reinforce that process, that improvement, that getting better. Because again, we're coming back to the fact that the more you get better, the more you focus on the process and the controllables, the greater your chance of getting the outcome that you want is.

So you work with the Australian Winter Olympic team, how the heck did that happen?

At the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, I was accredited with several countries' teams and literally would do sort of like the Superwoman change in the phone booth from one team gear to the other team gear. My husband made a joke and said that I should have Velcro letters and that way I could turn the AUS for Australia into the USA when I went from skiing to hockey and I was like, "h, wow, I knew I had you around for a reason, that's a great idea." So I was working with freestyle skiing in the US and I was working with a development athlete at the USA development ski team member. In the work that I do, I try to work with the coaches and everybody else on the team. That particular coach and I were working closely with the US athlete, and then that coach got hired away by an athlete in Australia. Australia has done some really great work in talent, transfer, and talent identification. So if you've ever heard of the book, The Sports Gene, by David Epstein, he goes into some of the stories about how the Australians because they're not a winter sport country, and they don't have very many people, have to find different ways to develop talent. So one of the things that they've done in a couple of their premier sports is they worked on transferring talent from gymnastics, diving, acrobatics into winter sport. So they took her primarily gymnast taught them how to ski and developed a dynasty in freestyle aerial skiing, similarly in mogul skiing, and more recently in snowboard. So they have a lot of really good results in World Cups, World Championships, and Olympics over the past couple of decades, particularly in those sports due to talent transfer. So this coach was hired away by one of the Australian freestyle skiers named Alisa Camplin, who felt that she wasn't getting the attention she deserved from her national institute because one of her teammates was a reigning world champion and she was kind of an up and comer. She sort of did this little bit of a split from the Australian team so that she could get attention going into the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake. So I got a call from this coach that I knew and he said, "Look, I'm not with the USA anymore. In fact, I've been hired by this one athlete in Australia. I'm going to be working on the technical side of her performance and I think she would benefit from some mental training. We can't pay you. I know you really like winter sport, you're interested in this, would you be willing to work with us?" I said, "Yeah, of course," and met her for the first time, like three or four months later, where she was training in Canada. Then in February of 2002, she won a gold medal. So from there, I've stayed affiliated with the Australians and now serve as their lead sports psychologist, providing oversight to the other staff in that area. So I have an administrative role in addition to working with various athletes and teams on the winter side there. 

So what would you say are aerial skiers' biggest roadblocks with regards to fear?

Many of them have come from acrobatic sports so they've got some strategies to deal with that. Occasionally, the weather conditions are windy. Just like in golf, where unless it's lightning, you keep golfing in inclement weather. In these sports, unless the visibility is so bad, you just keep going. So it could be foggy, it can be snowing, the wind can be coming sideways and so there are weather conditions that make things interesting. Fear is a part of it, but they want to get it like they want to have consistent performance. I think that's one of the biggest things is developing consistency and what they do, again, whether it's golf or baseball, whatever, you just want to be consistent.

So why do you think athletes can get it right sometimes, and still mess up other times? 

The inputs into your system aren't consistent. Physically, mentally, tactically, technically.

So I want to talk about a moment that we had discussed before the recording started. I believe it was back in 2018. Again, you've been working with these athletes for a long period of time, and they have a really tough Olympics. One thing that you talked about was the toll that took on you, and how you needed to focus on your own mental capacity before because you're going through it, your athletes are going through it, you're the coaches are going through it, the association is going through it. It's like, "I can't even get to my athletes," because it affected your own mental capacity so much.

Yeah. That's something that I never learned in graduate school. There's a lot of things I never learned in graduate school and I try to impart that knowledge to my students. Yeah, the Australian aerial ski team has this history and they've been dominant in the world for decades. At the PyeongChang Winter Olympics in 2018, they had four or five legit medal chances in aerial skiing and came away with no medals. Got a top-five and top five is amazing, especially from a southern hemisphere country and all of these sorts of things, but that's not their expectation. Their key performance indicator was one if not more metals in the aerial ski. So that was the first time I'd ever been to a Winter Olympics and they hadn't won a medal. So that was new territory for me, and so needing to take care of them if you will, and work with the athletes and try to debrief that and make that okay for them, the close staff of that program, and then the whole staff of the organization. So there were several layers of the onion that professionally needed my attention before I could try to understand what that meant for me. So I had to really just push that aside. I have a really good support system where people are like, "How are you doing, are you okay?" Because my support system knows that this has been a really successful program and on paper, the program didn't meet the goals that they had set out for this Olympics. So that was a new and interesting experience.

And so much more...

You can learn more about Dr. Meyer's great work at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee here: https://sites.uwm.edu/lab-sppe/

Meet Aaron 

Aaron is in his 15th season with the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers and he currently serves as the Vice President, Assistant General Manager of those Wisconsin Timber Rattlers. Aaron himself has actually been with the organization for 15 years starting in 2006 as the seasonal box office employee, which now he currently oversees the team stadium operations and special events. 

Where did the name “Timber Rattlers” come from?

It was from a name the team contest back in 1994. The first year we were called the Timber Rattlers was 1995. So they did a name the team contest and that won apparently. They did it with some elementary schools I believe in the area. So Timber Rattlers aren't native to this area, but apparently Western Wisconsin area there actually are some in the state but not locally, thankfully.

What is happening currently in the Minor League Baseball world?

So the landscape has changed a lot in the last year. Basically, the agreement between major league baseball and minor league baseball was coming to an end, which had been a 10-year agreement and been in place for a long time. We just kind of rolled over the last time. In the past, minor league baseball was its own separate organization, and they've been in a partnership with Major League Baseball since the late 1800s, early 1900s. Minor league baseball was basically the farm system for Major League Baseball. There was this long partnership between the two, Minor League Baseball was its own organization and then the partnership with Major League Baseball. So basically when you're an affiliate of an MLB team, like we are with the Brewers and have been, since 2009. But with that affiliation that you have, basically, the minor league team provides the team a place to play, bus to travel, jerseys, that sort of thing. Then the major league team provides the team, players, coaches. The equipment is kind of split between the two. But we were a separate entity with minor league baseball and our own Appleton Baseball Club is what we have been known, which just changed recently. So here, we're affiliated with the Brewers, and people assume we're owned by the Brewers. A gentleman came up one time as like, "I was just chatting with your owner the other day," and actually, we didn't have an owner until recently, we were community-owned, just like the Green Bay Packers where there wasn't one owner, there were shareholders. But basically, if we made any money or lost any money, it just stayed within the organization so that we made money that we could do a little bit more to the stadium and do some things on that. So I corrected him and said, "Well, Mark Attanasio actually isn't our owner," and he said "No, no, no, Yeah, he's your owner," and I'm just like, okay no sense in arguing that. That's really the basic agreement. So if the Brewers send us a team that's terrible we can tell them that these guys aren't very good. But it doesn't matter, they don't have to change anything. Then they can't tell us that our stadium is terrible, or we charge too much for tickets or we run terrible promotions. They can't do anything about that because we operate separately, but we're partnered together. So thankfully, we don't have a terrible stadium and we run good promotions and keep tickets at a good price. So it's been a good partnership there. Basically, this partnership between major league baseball and minor league baseball, where they partner together and work together came to an end, and now Minor League Baseball is kind of finished and Major League Baseball is just going to take over and run Minor League Baseball. There are going to be some changes, some of which we are kind of getting into and knowing about and some are probably going to be a bit of a surprise of how certain things change. We know the basic layout of everything. But we're going through a pretty big adjustment and change as far as how things are going to operate and who's calling the shots and those types of things. Minor League Baseball had a president and currently, we do as we work through some of the transition, but that'll probably change and Minor League Baseball and organizations probably going to pretty much phase out with Major League Baseball taking it over. They're hiring some of the people from Minor League Baseball to smooth that transition from the whole Minor League Offices down in Florida, but really MLB determined everything and they cut out some teams. So we used to have 160 Minor League teams brought minor league baseball, they cut it down to 120. Each MLB team has four affiliates at Low-A, High-A, Double-A, and Triple-A. They do have some complex teams at their spring training sites where they'll have some additional players but they're limited now with the number of teams they can have. They're limited with the number of players they can have where it really wasn't a level playing field in the past. So the New York Yankees go out and sign 30 guys from the Dominican Republic for as much as they want. They didn't fall under some of the salary cap stuff that’s implemented with the draft or penalties or things like that. 

Are there benefits of the MLB essentially taking ownership now of the Minor League system?

From the level the playing field perspective, that means something at the Major League level, not so much to us necessarily at the Minor League level. But with Major League Baseball taking over they should be able to streamline some things. So we had a number of people in the Minor League offices that, you know, we paid dues, and things like that, to cover salaries and different things with that, and the physical office as well down there. There were expenses with that and some of that should go away. With sponsorship sales, things like that, where Major League Baseball is going to probably sell naming rights to Minor League Baseball, probably. So we might end up with a jersey patch or something like that, kind of like the G League. The NBA had the D league developmental league back in the day, it changed to the G league sponsored by Gatorade, so they had G on their jerseys. So there are some things there from that standpoint that could help us in terms of more revenue coming in, some expenses cut, a couple of different things with that. We're still kind of early in the phase of all of it and it's almost going to take a year before we realize, okay, we've gone through a season, hopefully, and kind of see how it all shakes out. 

What was this last "season that wasn't" like for you guys internally as an organization? What did you do during that time? 

Well, the agreement was up after the 2020 season. So that was just kind of a timing thing in the way that it happened, but rumors had already come out. There were rumors in maybe September of 2019 that Major League Baseball was looking to cut teams. It kind of came back to the fact that Minor League Baseball players are not paid all that well. So there's been more and more spotlights shown on that. There's been some lawsuits and different things where former Minor League players have sued Major League Baseball, trying to get better pay, better working conditions, different things like that. So Major League Baseball has been under the gun for a while to increase salaries. So really, when they looked at it having a bunch of minor league teams, how many players do you need within your system to fill out a major league roster? So at the end of the day, they looked at it and some of these guys are just filler to fill up teams, but chances of them making the Major Leagues aren't very good. When we look at it from any given year, a roster of 25 on our roster, but we have 35-40 guys come through our team every year. Maybe 10% of our team eventually makes the major leagues and that's only three steps away. The odds aren't in favor of a player making the Major League so the MLB looked at it and said do we need all these teams? Do we need all these players? Probably not, we can cut back on some of that, though, by cutting back on the number of teams and players, if we keep that expense for player salary the same, we can pay fewer players more. So it all kind of shook out that way as well. That was already kind of in the works at the end of 2019 and rumored going into 2020. Then  2020 happened, which obviously didn't help any of baseball. So ultimately it was Major League Baseball's call to cancel the Minor League season because they supply the players. If we don't have players, there's really not a whole lot we can do. Some Minor League teams did start up their own league even. A team in Lansing in our league created two teams just out of local college players, some from further away, and played the Lemonade League. 

How does that directly relate to your position with the Timber Rattlers and what does that just do for the health of your organization?

Yeah, it's huge. So as I mentioned earlier, we were affiliated with the Mariners before we were with the Brewers. So we had Alex Rodriguez come through Appleton the last year of the old stadium, the old team, The Appleton Foxes in 1994. A-Rod played, I think, is most games for any Minor League team with the Foxes, like half a season. David Ortiz played here in 1996. So we had some big names, but when we became an affiliate of the Milwaukee Brewers after the 2008 season attendance went crazy. We went up 35%, maybe the next year from an attendance standpoint, which is huge. People love their brewers around here, people love their baseball, and when there was just that Brewer tie, it was great timing, because I think the Brewers made the playoffs in 2008 for the first time since 1982 when they made the World Series run. So it had been a while since there had been any success on the baseball field within this state. So to be able to continue that affiliation with the Brewers, for now, a 10 year deal with that whole Major League Baseball- Minor League Baseball agreement, really extending and now Major League Baseball, taking it all over. But now they want to do 10 years so it's not changing every two or four years, like it had been in the past Major League Baseball really wanted to lock in the affiliates for these major league teams, not as much jumping around and really just create a partnership. We've heard good stuff from the fans about continuing that relationship and being in the home state obviously helps a lot too. We used to be the Low-A affiliate, we're now the High-A affiliate so it's one level change. So we're one level, kind of closer to the Major Leagues for these players. So it'll be a little bit better skill level. A lot of guys don't make it past Low-A ball, so it's the next rung to the MLB. We're probably going to see a lot of the guys that we had the last time we played ball here in 2019 at least for the first year. So I don't see a huge change from that end of it. But really that affiliation is still the big thing and to be affiliated with the Brewers is huge.

Do you see attendance spike more from wins, or is it more in relation to the entertainment factor? 

Yeah, the joke throughout Minor League Baseball is nobody cares about the game or the team. It's all about family entertainment. We're not competing with the Brewers to draw fans, we're competing with your movie theater down the street or anywhere that families go. We figure probably 90% of the people who come through our gates have no idea about any players on the team, have absolutely no clue what our record is. Really the only people who know are the full-season ticket holders basically who are out here every night and you know kind of live and die with whether you win or lose. But probably at least 50% of the people who come to a game a certain night have no idea if we won or lost that game. They’re coming for dollar beer, they're coming for their company outing, their picnic that their employer is putting on for them and they say "Hey, yeah, I'll have a beer and a hot dog on my place of work if they're gonna pay for it and some baseball." We do different bobblehead giveaways and things like that, people come out to get some of those things. So the baseball is kind of secondary. So yeah, Back to what you mentioned, it's really the Brewers' success that helps create baseball fans in the state and get people hungry for baseball and excited for baseball. If we're playing really well, again, there's probably going to be 10% of the people who even know that we're doing well, and might care but for the most part, they're not. So success at the Major League level is probably more important than us even doing well.

What does selling tickets post-pandemic mean to you guys and what have you guys done internally to prepare for this?

So prior to the pandemic we were selling 40 to 45% of our tickets through groups. So that's these company outings or family outings, anything like that. A group of 20 or more that's coming to the ballpark was 40 to 45% of our attendance. So we did really well with companies in our area, outside of our area. 10 to 15% of season tickets, and then a lot of individual tickets, and that's based on weather, that's based on the promotion that we have, whether it's a giveaway, whether it's that dollar beer, dollar hot dog, former Brewer appearance, whatever it might be. So you have your different groups of people and why they come out. So post-pandemic, we're going to see what that looks like. We figure some companies are going to be a little bit more hesitant to come back and do an employee outing or do a customer appreciation outing or something like that. But a lot of people are chomping at the bit to come out. So a lot of season ticket holders we're seeing re-upping their tickets. Individual tickets we're going to put on sale probably in March. We just got our schedule last week, actually, so we're throwing all our promotions in and it's carrying pretty much all our promotions over from last year. So we had 11 bobblehead giveaways planned for last year so we have them in.

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Meet Arron

Aaron serves as the Director of Analytics for the NBA's Minnesota Timberwolves, and he has done so since September of 2020. Before joining the Timberwolves, Aaron broke into the NBA as the Analytic Systems Coordinator of the Detroit Pistons, ultimately being promoted to the Director of Research and Analytics of the Pistons. Aaron has previously held positions as an Actuary Consultant for Milliman and Optim Insights and he resides in Minneapolis with his wife and his two-year-old son. 

What is it like for you to be working for a Basketball Association in the state of hockey?

This is a weird season because there are no fans at the games, but it seems like people are really into the team here. I see timberwolves gear around town when going out shopping and stuff. So it doesn't feel like they're second fiddle to the wild, it feels like you know, people are pretty into all the teams here.

Can you talk a little bit about the journey that ultimately landed you with the Detroit Pistons back in 2016 and how that has made you who and where you are today?

My first 15 years of professional work as an actuary, of course, where I worked for a health insurance company and a couple of consulting companies. For people who don't know, actuaries are sort of the math and statistics people that that work for insurance companies or hospitals or auto insurance companies, life insurance companies and usually are applying math and statistics to the quantification of risk. I specialized in the health insurance industry, but also throughout my time working as an actuary, I tended towards the more technical side of things like doing a lot of programming work, you know, being sort of the tech support guy amongst, the teams of actuaries I worked with. That was really what I enjoyed doing was more of the technical side of things. I built up a pretty solid skill set of programming skills, database skills and I was always really interested in sports analytics. It started out with baseball, you know, the Moneyball revolution that kind of took off in the early 2000s. Even before the movie, in the early day back in the old message boards, back in the day where people are discussing this stuff it was just really intriguing to me. I actually had a boss at my first job, who was pretty into it, as well and he kind of got me, you know, digging deeper into those rabbit holes of what some of the really cool work was being done in the industry. So I mostly applied it to trying to prove that the Cubs were the best team and the Cubs had the best players and winning my fantasy baseball leagues. There was a lot of really great public work going on in baseball at the time so it was nice, you didn't have to do a lot of your own work. It was really when the other sports started to take off when a lot of the opportunity popped up when, when basketball and football started to realize like, "Hey, we should be using data to make better-informed decisions as well."

How did the Detroit Pistons ultimately come into the picture?

As more teams started to hire people, I started to realize that this is something I could actually do for a job, I started exploring what I have to do to do that. How many teams are hiring, what are they looking for, and what employees? At the time I actually was living in Colorado, I met someone who worked for the Colorado Rockies. He agreed to have a beer one night, and you know, I just picked his brain about it. It was a bit of a discouraging conversation at the time, because he said, "Your best bet is to have a friend or family member who owns a team or already works for a team," and that’s not really anything I can control. But I still kept exploring, and I was still focused mostly on baseball at the time, but starting to get really interested in the basketball side of things as that was really starting to take off. So then in 2013, when I was starting on the process of leaving Optim Insight, I said, "Hey, if I'm going to look for something new, why not try this sports thing?" So that summer I started searching online and looking for any team that was hiring and just applying for everything. Anything that was posted, I would just apply for it just to see what would happen. Sometimes I heard nothing, sometimes I got an immediate canned rejection letter that was clearly just generated by a computer. But a couple of the teams wrote back and they would write some follow-up questions. Some of them have some technical tests, they would have you do some pretty basic stuff. Ultimately, It didn't work out, but I did gain a little bit of insight at least into what they might be looking for. I also realized that I wasn't quite prepared and I didn't have any of the requirements so I had no shot. 

What were some of those requirements?

At the time, a lot of people were listing that they wanted an advanced degree. They wanted a lot of experience doing this actual work. It's one of those situations where you have to have the experience before you get the job. I also realized that despite having some decent technical skills, I wasn't quite on the level of what they were looking for. Seeing even some of the public work that was going on out there I thought that's really good stuff that I'm not quite capable of doing yet so I need to get to that level if a team is actually going to give me a shot. So then that was 2013 and ended up getting a job at Milliman then later in 2014, that fall, I got a phone call one day from Gabe Farkas with the San Antonio Spurs. He mentioned that "Hey, you'd applied for this job with us last year. It wasn't the right fit for the role we had, but we have this new and we're hiring for and I remember your resume, I think you might be an okay fit for it." I ended up doing a phone interview, a technical screen where they sent me some work to do and I had to send back, going out for an on-site interview. I ended up not getting that job, but it made me think that this could happen if I keep pushing for it. I was totally thrilled, like by the fact that he even remembered me from a year before and reached out to me unsolicited. 

So you were realizing that you were getting closer. What did you do to ultimately bring yourself over that mountain top?

I just kept working on my technical skills on the side, building up a pretty good database of basketball data at home that I could work with so I could do some projects to be able to show people some work that I'd done. I just kept trying. Typically teams would hire in the offseason so jobs would get posted in the July-August timeframe. So that following summer in 2015 I just applied for everything. Again, I got some rejection letters, got some technical screens, didn't get hired again that year, but just kept plugging away, kept plugging away. I started to do more networking as well, just connecting with other people that were doing public work. A lot of the guys at the time were writing for Nylon Calculus, and have since gone on to work for teams, just connecting with those guys online as much as I could. I didn't go to any of the industry conferences. They're expensive and once you're with a team and they're paying for it it's worth it, but it's hard to justify, you know, a $600 ticket when it's out of pocket. Then next summer 2016, the Pistons posted a job. This is what I got really excited about because, for the first time, it was a job that seemed right in my wheelhouse, as far as the specific things they were looking for. So I was in the process of planning a wedding as well and I applied for the job on a Sunday evening and got a call on Tuesday. They gave me an assignment on Wednesday, and I had to turn in by Friday. The following week I got the second round and another technical screen with another two-day turnaround. So I went through those couple of rounds and just kept progressing and they called me for an in-person interview. I got married on Saturday, then I flew out on Tuesday for my in-person interview to Detroit, got a call on Friday that I had the job offer, accepted right then and there, and two weeks later had packed up all my stuff into my car was driving across the country.

What were you doing for the Pistons and what was their need that you filled?

I was the Analytic Systems Coordinator so essentially there was a new data vendor they were going to be using and they were going to have this massive influx of new data, and they needed someone to come in and set up some back end infrastructure for that, and then start to make sense of the data so they could use it in the analysis they were doing. That just fits really well with some of the experiences I had in healthcare. I'm just setting up easy-to-use, efficient back-end systems, and then building out our whole reporting infrastructure from there. Having done all this basketball work on the side like setting up my own database at home for personal use, and, building some of my own tools and reporting infrastructure, all fit perfectly with what they were looking to do. I was fortunate in that a lot of the jobs that teams are hiring for more heavy on the statistics side, like the predictive modeling which are the guys with PhDs and stats. While I've done a lot of statistical modeling as an actuary, that wasn't my biggest strength. My forte was more like infrastructure and programming so for them to be looking for that more than the modeling side was really fortunate for me.

What is the future of analytics in the NBA from your perspective?

The future is happening right now with player tracking data, and all the additional insights we've gained from that. It's been in the league less than 10 years now and we've learned a lot from it, but it's still a largely untapped resource and I think there's still a lot to be learned from there. Getting that type of player tracking data for leagues other than the NBA because right now, it's mostly just an NBA product and we've got players are coming out of college player, and we're coming from overseas. So just learning how to best make use of that player tracking data is a big part of it. As we talked about before, the sports science side is going to be a big part of it. You're trying to better quantify and predict injury risk and fatigue and how that impacts performance. 

Are you guys doing any analytics around fans in the stands and homecourt advantage against away and how that's changed during the current world that we live in?

I've seen some stuff being done publicly with that. When they did the bubble last year, it was interesting because it was a natural experiment to see how much does travel matter and how much does actual home court matter. It's weird though because it was such a unique situation that it wasn't going to be necessarily replicable to a normal season and there weren't that many games to truly learn, like, the variance from game to game for just the bubble sample might be higher than the actual effect of those things. I think everyone is predicting the edge of homecourt advantage, and predicting how much travel matters. Like we're on the second game with back to back and the other team has been off for three days, how will that affect our team. I think every team is doing, you know, the basic stuff there. Obviously, teams are pretty close to the vest with what they're doing there, but it's definitely something that has to be considered just even to evaluate how good all the teams are. Because us in Minnesota, being in the Western Conference, despite being in Minnesota, we have one of the worst travel schedules in the league. I think Portland is actually the worse as far as the number of miles traveled, but for teams like Detroit, and Cleveland, their schedules aren't so bad. They have a lot of short flights, and they have a decent cluster of cities, all in the same geographic region. So yeah, there definitely is a disparate impact across the league and it's important to quantify that.

What's one of your favorite data points or pieces of analytics that you like to collect and gather and review?

On the data, I have to be a little more coy, but I will just say I am a person who finds efficiency, very important. I can't get into specific stats or anything like that, but along a very similar line, one of the most enjoyable parts of the role for me and it's something that's related to what we do, though not directly all the time is the draft workout process. The league has pretty strict rules about how it's set up, you have six guys max, they can't play against professional players, and there's a time limit to what you can have them do. But seeing these kids come into what is almost like a tryout for an NBA team is very cool. Some of these guys are guys who are projected to be picked in the top five, some of them are projected to be undrafted and have to go overseas, but like seeing these guys chase their dream, it's a really cool experience.

So risk is always a part of this, tell me about your relationship with risk.

I forget the actual slogan of the professional actuarial society because I've been out of the game for a little while. But I think risk is opportunity is the site of actuaries slogan. Everything that we learn about being an actuary is about managing risk and quantifying risk. So I think you would find that most actuaries temperamentally tend to be more on the risk-averse side because it's what they do for a living and so much of their job is about, you know, not having a company go out of business, because of the decision, they may say that they're a little conservative on those types of things.

Have you ever looked at your analytics before a game, and said to yourself after reviewing that we're gonna have a good game tonight, or I really think we're gonna win tonight's game based on what I'm seeing?

There definitely have been some instances like that. It's generally just driven off of either a specific matchup or a trend that you see in the way a certain team is playing and you think the coaching staff has come up with a fantastic strategy for attacking that.

Meet Christian

From Wall Street Trader to Performance Executive Coach, for the last 10 years, Christian has been helping individuals and organizations raise their game by improving their mindset. He's been doing this through his consulting practice, Christian Buck Consulting. Christian has worked with professional athletes, student-athletes, and executives on a one-on-one basis challenging their thinking on the field, in the classroom, or in the boardroom. He has published two books, The Sport of School: Help your Student-Athlete Win in the Classroom, and Thinking Inside the Crease: The Mental Secrets to Becoming a Dominant Lacrosse Goalie. Christian is also a contributing author to the Forbes Coaching Council.

This idea of taking your skills, your experiences, everything that you've been through from the playing field to the boardroom, what does that idea mean to you in the work that you've done?

What I found is whether we're on the field, or in the classroom, we're always performing. The best players, the best executives, the best students aren't focused on the performance, they're focused on either winning the game doing well at their job. They don't see it as a performance, they're focused on what they're doing and getting the job done. Actually, my company used to be called Get it Done, which again, goes back to the focus of the task at hand, and not performing. So the key for all of this is the mindset that you have, whether it's on the field, in the classroom, or in the boardroom is that we're not necessarily performing for others, but we're performing to finish or complete a task by using that athletic mindset that we're usually pretty good at. Athletes understand the mindset of hard work and work ethic of being aggressive or focusing on winning, but we don't do it when we get to our first job or if we own a business, we're worried about getting a promotion or being liked. So it's helping people get back to that athletic mindset of focusing on winning, and not losing.

What happened in your journey where you started recognizing that there's this need for athletes in particular or former athletes who are now in the business world who are missing this component, this transition from one to the other? 

It happened over a long evolution. When I was in college I was a goalie and trying to get the starting spot back as a sophomore and I realized that I was just trying to impress the coaches so that I could start. I wasn't trying to win, I wasn't trying to stop the ball, I wasn't trying to be the best I could be, I was just trying to prove something, which is a problem. Then when I went into the Wall Street realm, and I was trading in the pits on the American Stock Exchange, what you're trying to do is make money day to make sure you're doing your job to the bosses. It's very quantifiable and you're focused on the outcome, the result, and the judgment of that result. So post 911 I stopped trading and went into brokerage and now you got guys yelling at you trying to deal with that and performing for them. I realized it's just anxiety-ridden and I was also just taking, I wasn't giving. Buy low, sell high for people that competitive and are really good traders, that's great. I mean, that's what makes them good, they would get in at five in the morning, and when earnings would come around they would stay late and go over all the analytics. I'd get there at 9:15 and then leave before 3 because I just didn't find interest in it and not that there's anything wrong with it, I just didn't find interest in it. So I started to focus on some things I took about a year to figure out, Okay, what do I like? Not what can I do, what do I like. That was a big period in my life that I work with executives now on is, what are things that you like? I call it the billion-dollar lottery, if you want a billion dollars, what would you do? There's probably some sort of two-week hangover and you're buying your parents a house and you're going on a trip, but after that period, you wake up and do what? So start figuring out what that is, and then build a job around it. Because most people think about the end result rather than who am I, what do I like, and what do I want to build out of that. So I figured out a bunch of things that, I was a goalie, I was a drummer, I'm a background guy, I do not want to be the lead singer. I like being social, I want to interact with people, I would hate going to a cubicle every day. I had every golf psychology book in the market and so I started to take all these things and put it together and say, "Oh, sports psychology!" I get to be a background guy, I get to be social, I get to work wherever the athletes are playing, fixing small problems. So that all led me to sports psychology and then when I was working with athletes and teams, I recognized that all the same stuff is true. Whether I was training, whether I was on a college lacrosse team, whatever it was, I was always trying to perform. This is the first time where I was just trying to help people just because I wanted to be of service, I wanted to help them, and if I got paid great! I got to work with the fourth in the world in long drive competitions, I would have paid him to work with him! He's hitting the ball 410 yards, it's just amazing! Then I realized that this is going to be a great ride, because I just love it every day, and I still do.

How do you begin that conversation with the athlete who is a senior and won't make it to the professional leagues where they have been so focused for four years on being an athlete? Yes, they're in school, and I'm sure a lot of them are getting good grades, and they have an idea of what they want to do, but how do you begin to kind of peel back that onion on it being time to begin the transition process and begin to understand what life has in store for you?

What a lot of athletes are dealing with is an identity shift. You have always been the athlete, you've always been the stud and you've always been known as that person and now it's removed. What do you do? Well, what I talk to them about is you're still in that mindset. Whatever made you great, whatever makes you an athlete is going to make you a good executive, it's just who you are! So in the sport of school, I talk about what's called the workhorse. The workhorse is the one that gets there early, stays late, grinds all day. That's in you, it's already who you are, so let's just apply it to school. Then when you get that first job, be the first one in, and the last one to leave. It's what you do anyway, it's not like we have to make up some new person, it's taking that athletic mindset and just grinding! It's not changing their identity anymore, it allows them to keep their identity. 

You've identified five categories of athletes/executives,  the workhorse, the intellectual, the rookie, the natural talent, and the spectator. How did you develop these five types and where would you say most athletes fall into? 

It came from about five or six years of working with student-athletes and recognizing that there were just common traits that I saw with each individual. Those characteristics started to create what I call the buckets. So the workhorse, for example, what I found was the athlete who is the grinder who gets there early stays late. I can use that and I can see it, I know what they do, it's very visual with the workforce. What we do is we can just take that and apply it to something else. The Spectator is the total opposite. The Spectator is on the sidelines of their life, they're just sort of watching it go by and I say there are two different types of people: there are motorboats and corks. Motorboats, create the waves, and corks just float around them and that's what the spectator does. They're just going through the motions, they're at practice, they're in school, but they're not excelling, and they don't really care to excel. With them, it's creating a personal vision, they have no vision. They think why bother doing these things, running sprints, getting the weight room? They see it as a chore versus the workhorse who knows the bigger and faster they are, the better they're going to be. So the workforce is driven towards something the spectator is just sort of there. The rookie wants to do well and they could be a workhorse, they just don't know the rules. They just don't know what they need to do or how good they need to be. A perfect example is I just heard from someone the other day that described a high school player that wanted to go pro in basketball. It's like, okay, I love the dream, and I'm not going to knock it but that is a very difficult thing to do. 3% of high school football players playing college and 1.6% of college players play in the pros. People do it don't get me wrong, but it's knowing that I want to get there, but am I willing to do what it takes? You've got your natural talent and your intellectual, the natural talent plays all the time, so they need to learn to work and the intellectual is the perfectionist, they want to do well, but they get anxious along the way.

In my experience, I would believe that there are more athletes who are at the professional ranks, who have more of the workhorse mentality, and work harder to develop their natural talents and make it to the next level, as opposed to those who have the natural talent and try to become a workhorse, because that's the component they need to get to the next level. Is that what you have seen in your experience?

It's a great question. I never thought about it before because with professionals there are so many components. If you're talking about pros, you look at Michael Jordan, right? He must have been a natural talent, but he's also a workhorse and he's also very tall. So you have these aspects like if you want to be an offensive lineman, you've got to be 300 pounds, it's just the way it is. So there are components on the professional level that you just have to have. Now I think of it, it's more about the mindset. So the natural talent, look at Allen Iverson. Allen Iverson was a guy that didn't need to practice, he didn't understand why he had to do it, or why it needed to be intentional or focused. Now, Kobe Bryant was the total opposite of that, but Allen Iverson was an insane natural talent. He was just good enough to pull it off. I think if you're talking about how you get into that 1.6% of athletes that go pro, it's going to be through a workhorse mindset. Natural talents only going to take you so far, unless you're just worldly gifted. We could count probably the number of people who are on that level. Like LeBron James is naturally gifted, but he's a worker because his mindset is a worker.

This whole mindset applies to life after sports as well right?

Exactly and so I'm taking the person and applying it to the performance. So it could be in the classroom, it could be on the field, and it could be in business, the person is the consistent one, the constant. All we're doing is applying it to different areas. That's where I think a lot of people can find a lot of confidence and be like, "You know what, when I get to my job, I am going to kick butt because that's what I do, I've been doing this my whole life, this is gonna be easy for me!" One of my guys who's now an analyst on Wall Street, I talked to him recently for the book too and he said he still thinks about this stuff. He said, "You said to me once that there's someone out there working harder than you and that never stopped so I get in early, and I stay late and I just outwork everybody."

In your relationship with sports psychology have you recognized in your time in this industry that athletes have become more welcoming to the idea of the assistance with the mindset? 

There are a couple of things, one, that golf psychology is about golf, it's not about the people. It's just part of the game and it's about picking targets and being able to hit short putts and all that kind of stuff. Even Tiger Woods stayed in college to learn how to win. He did have a mental coach, but it's not well known and he doesn't talk about it. So what has happened through that I believe, is one, the sport of golf has just accepted it. Whether or not that was a catalyst, I don't know, but what has happened since the last 10 years is an evolution to the lack of the stigma. I have expertise in sports psychology and I think that the lack of the stigma or the reduction of it is a huge benefit. Now, you look at all the top athletes in the world, and if you're gonna line up 10 guys in the 100-meter spring for the Olympics, it's going to be who's the best prepared at that point. Usain Bolt is a little bit more of natural talent because of his physical stature. However, Michael Johnson, who broke the world record was just more prepared than his competitors. So it's become more welcomed and people are wrapping their arms around it now, for the first time. I would say that's probably been within the last four years or so. The average athlete doesn't know because they aren't exposed to it compared to an Olympic athlete. They just for the most part don't know what it means and haven't fully grasped it. I think there's still a lack of knowledge of what it is, but once I start working with people they get it. I'll tell you so many of the young athletes that I work with major in psychology because they get it, and they like it, and they appreciate it. I don't know if they're going to go on and do it, but they're no longer blank on what sport psychology means.  They really have an idea of what it means so I think that's where we're at right now.

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