My Story

In 2017, the career I built in college athletics ended.

Not slowly. Not on my terms. It ended because of choices I made: who I let into my circle, and how much access I gave them. I had no boundaries. I own that.

I had spent twenty years building something. A career in athletics. Leadership positions I had worked toward for a long time. A professional identity I wore like a second skin.

And then it was gone.

I am not going to walk you through the details.

What I will tell you is what the details do not capture.

They do not capture what it feels like to lose your title and realize you do not know who you are without it.

They do not capture the embarrassment. The silence from people you thought were permanent.

They do not capture what it means to be a father during the hardest years of your life, with a one-year-old son who has no idea what is happening and needs you anyway.

My son saved my life. I do not mean that as a phrase. I mean that on the days when I could not find a reason to rebuild, he was the reason.

Faith held the rest. And cooking, strangely. I studied it, and the kitchen was the one place where I could produce something and know it was fully mine. No institution. No politics. No optics. Just the work.

Here is what I learned, and what I am still learning:

I was excellent at leading others. I had built systems for accountability, standards, performance. I held people around me to a high bar.

I had never built the same system for myself.

I had tunnel vision. I was chasing a career goal I believed I was entitled to, and I stopped paying attention to who was around me and why. I had no boundaries.

That is not an excuse for what happened. It is the honest explanation for how I got there. I was governing everyone around me and exempting myself from the same standard. That gap was the real failure. Everything else followed from it.

I am telling you this here, on my own site, because I believe in standing inside your own story. Not managing it. Not running from it. Standing in it.

2017 is one of the most significant periods of my life, for a number of reasons. It is also the reason I am the best version of myself today: as a father, as a man, and in the work I do now. None of it would have been possible had I not gone through 2017. While this may be an uncomfortable sentence to write, it is very true.

I’ve learned to be present on the path I am on rather than question why I am on it.

This is not a comeback story. I am not interested in that frame.

This is a discipline story. And it is still being written.