This spring I'm releasing bonus episodes of The Take Home. No new lectures on leadership, instead I'm sharing the amazing podcasts created by the students in my Leadership for Sport Professionals class.

In this bonus episode of Season 5, I'm sharing "Beyond the Arc" which was created and produced by Jacob Harvey and Halle Hamilton. Here are their liner notes:

In season 2, episode 1, Jacob and I explore Northouse’s ethical leadership style as detailed in chapter 15 of the 9th edition of Peter G. Northouse's "Leadership: Theory and Practice." During this segment, we highlight the importance of mentoring through observation, speak about humility's role in a collaborative and flexible coaching style and why people should always come first, discuss connections to Trinity, and end with a few valuable bits of wisdom to carry into the future. We also touch on the leadership challenge and the five components of leadership that we discuss in class, competence, benevolence, reliability, trust, and honesty, and how Jay naturally utilizes these practices as a leader in the Sports Industry.

For this episode, we are joined by Jay Demings, the 3x3 national teams director of basketball for Team USA. Before arriving in Colorado Springs, Jay coached AAU basketball teams and fostered many youth basketball events. Jay earned his undergraduate degree in Business Administration from UMass Amherst and later pursued graduate studies in Sport Leadership at Northeastern University in Boston. Jay Demings joined USA Basketball as the Youth & Sport Development Director at the end of 2013. After expanding the division to include youth and coach development initiatives, 3x3, and E-Sports, Demings officially transitioned his full-time focus to 3x3 men’s and women’s national teams.

Jacob first met Jay when he toured the USA Basketball headquarters in Colorado Springs during his freshman basketball season. From there, he got to know him by being a practice player at training camps for 3x3 world cups and competing in 3x3 events.

Jay speaks very passionately about having a collaborative style when coaching. He believes that most of his early success as a coach came from his ability to admit when something went wrong and having the humility to tweak it with the help of his player's input. He drives home that, as leaders, it is extremely important to show people that you care about them more than the results and how far that truly goes. When we spoke about leadership philosophy, Jay stated his was: “Stay as flexible as you possibly can while maintaining your values, standards, and ethics.” He highlights the importance of implementing standards in place of rules and that these standards should be agreed upon collaboratively. When we dove into specific values of leadership, Jay believed trustworthiness was above all else. We loved how he consistently emphasized the importance of prioritizing people, particularly athletes, over the game itself.

Jay wraps this conversation up by encouraging listeners to look for roles that allow them to expand their skills and emphasizes the importance of doing a multitude of skills, even the unfavorable ones, to the best of your ability.

This is an excellent conversation to introduce season 2, and we thoroughly hope you take this conversation beyond the arc!

Music by: Beat Mekanik