Competition, Challenge, Victory, and Resiliency: Educational Based Sports at Lovett

One of the most frequently named aspects of the whole child promise is the opportunity to learn and grow through educational baseboards. While certainly the emotional, spiritual, and intellectual development of our kids is front and center at Lovett, the physical is routinely cultivated through Lovett's PE and health curriculum, and of course, our competitive athletics programs too. Research and experience tell us that young people who learn the benefits of healthy life choices like exercise and nutrition, along with the lessons we inevitably learn through competition, victories, and even disappointment, lead to a healthier, more resilient, balanced whole person. This is Living Lovett. Stories from the Riverbank. I'm Jessica Sant, Chief Engagement Officer at the Lovett School. On today's episode, you'll meet Adam Nelson, Lovett's Athletic Director, a 1993 Lovett Alumnus, a college athlete, a professional athlete, and a gold medal Olympian. Adam's perspective on shaping Lovett's athletic program is a unique one, further informed by being a Lovett dad himself. Our guest is Adam Nelson, Lovett's Athletic Director. Thank you for having me. You have multiple identities as it relates to the Lovett community. You are, like I said, overseeing our athletics program, but you are also an alum, and you're also a parent. Talk to us about your journey to and through Lovett. I think we usually start these episodes just talking about who you are as a human being, but because you wear so many hats here at the school, I think it's worth our listeners hearing from you about what your experience was like as a student and how that led to you ultimately becoming a leader at Lovett today. Sure. It was a class of 93 at Lovett. And look back on those days really affectionately. They're like everybody, I think, with middle school and high school. I started in eighth grade here and then stayed through high school and graduated in 93. There's some great days and there's some bad days as well, and all of them stand out in your own mind and memories. But on balance, my memories of Lovett were really, really positive. The friendships that I've forced you through academics, art and athletics, which I was heavily involved and invested in all three while I was here, that really lasted a lifetime. And it's kind of how I got back here. When I graduated Lovett, I went to Dartmouth and played football and track there. And when I was at Lovett, I had also been heavily involved with the theater. Doing drama, actually, Jay Freer was my drama teacher. He was the program director. I did not know that fun. I mean, I should have assumed, but I didn't know. Yeah. I mean, if anybody was involved with drama for the last, you know, I'm in history, a memorable history anyway. Jay Freer had to have been involved. That's exactly how I meant that exactly how I said it. And he loves me. He was like, well, but yeah. So it was actually just a little story there. Like side note, when I went to Dartmouth, I actually looked at trying to major in theater or drama up there, but really couldn't do it because they required so much out of class time and in all my extracurricular time really was spent in either football or track or trying to do both at the same time. It just didn't work out, but it's always been a passion of mine. And so I share that to say like that to me is a lot of like the whole child promise had love it is that inspires you to go in different directions. I explore other opportunities like at the next phase of your life. Came kind of came through college, graduated college in 93 or 997, went back actually for one more season of eligibility and track and had the honor of doing fairly well in football and fairly well in track and the opportunity to continue track and field after college. And so I think it was actually in the winter of 98, I packed up my car and drove across country to California, the train at Stanford with a group of Olympic hopos over there and was really living the true Olympic struggle with Olympic journey, if you will. I literally had a my first house or room out there was closet under the stairs and a five bedroom apartment or five bedroom house and a men loop and I was living with 11 other Olympic hopos. But I always joke now because I was paying $200 a month literally for a closet underneath the stairs. And so I like to say like I was inspiration for JK Rowling's Harry Potter character. Well, you were you I've seen the picture of you at that time. You were a big dude. So you in that closet, that must have been pretty tight. I'm going to take some personal fence to that. I'm very good. Well, look, just because I'm an administrator here doesn't mean we can't have a sense of humor and fun. Absolutely. Thank you. I agree. That's the whole point of this is for people. You know, and so yeah, so it's funny. I went on this path out of high school and college where I really thought I was going to be a professional athlete and then ended up having the opportunity to live that life for four or 15 years after college, 12 years of it. I was doing full time as a as a professional shop putter and yes, you can be a professional shop putter and but it was it was a great opportunity for me to learn and explore other things. There's only so many hours during the day that you can actively train. And so I spent a lot of my my off time doing other things and ended up getting the NBA from University of Virginia, starting school of business and graduated there in 2008 while I was still training and it was it was awesome. Set up some post athletic career opportunities kind of bounced around through the sports space, did some strength conditioning work or running a multi purpose facility, worked my way back into the business side of sports management and ended up becoming a CFO COO for sports event company that was based out of Houston. And that's really kind of where my love it journey reconnected like my journey reconnected back to love it is I was going in different direction or starting to like the company that I joined out there was a wonderful company and incredible purpose and the purpose of always like missions. I've always been very mission driven and I know that's become kind of a buzz word, but you don't choose to be a shop putter to make a lot of money. You choose it because there's a certain appeal to it and you like the Olympic Olympic values. That was how I always saw it. And so I moved out to to my family out to Houston to help run this company that was raising money for pediatric cancer research and treatment through sports, which was like awesome from us. And we developed some technology and that ended up being a potentially more lucrative play over the long run. And it was just be evolved into a company that really I wasn't fit to push forward with and I wasn't really inspired to. And about that same time I got a call from someone from love it or who was familiar with the love it athletic director role. And he goes, he says, Hey, did the athletic director role and love it was open? I said, did you I hadn't even thought about it? Would you ever really consider it? I said, absolutely not. And he said, well, before you hang up, let's just have a conversation. And so we had a quick conversation then he kept calling me probably call me two or three more times. And that kind of as we talked about it, the whole concept of like sort of like mission driven life and sort of what are the real important values that you have and who those are and what those are and how they drive you forward. I love sports. I love athletics. I love the opportunity to help anybody learning grow through the experience that athletics competitive athletics can offer kids in the punchline was I entered the interview process and in about six months later, they hired me for the job and then COVID hit and I didn't have necessarily an athletic director job to come to so to speak, just joking. It was here, but we didn't know if we were going to have sports tomorrow. It was a weird way to start. No kidding. Yeah. So I mean, I think that brings up a really good point. You started in the midst of a global pandemic, a place that you already knew well, but certainly had changed since you had been a student here. You were introducing your girls to love it too at the same time. Obviously we're on the other side of things, we hope, but talk to me about that first year for you, even in the face of so much challenge, how did you reacquaint yourself with a place that you think you might have known, but like we said, has probably changed significantly in some ways. Yeah. What does that look like? You know, I guess in my mind, it sort of reminds me of the old song that I changed by staying the same. I kind of thought that love it had changed a whole lot and or hadn't changed as much as I thought it would have changed. Maybe there were some still some familiar faces and names around. I mean, Jay Frier, he's still here, which is awesome. There were a lot of familiar names and faces with the place, but at the end of the day, the whole world around love, I didn't love it as a result of it has changed. And I think what happened in the year that I stepped in here in 2020, I started in May of 2020 when literally the whole world was shut down was any resistance to change that people had had because of their normal sort of regular routines and activities, they got wiped away. And so now all of a sudden, I do think that this is like reflective of the world is like when when COVID eliminated everybody's normal routines, and as we know, most people like really define themselves by their daily routines. And when those were removed, it really was really fascinating to be a part of love. It really did change a whole lot. I think in almost a nanosecond, it felt like in hindsight, but but it was also reflective of the change that was going on. Yeah, I think you're right. In some ways, it was a gift because it was a clean slate and gave every community love it or not an opportunity to really examine what mattered most to the place and hold firm to like you talked about mission and values in a way that we might have not been forced to do had we not otherwise experienced that moment in history. Yeah. I think something that you've now you've shared and certainly I thought about as I was preparing questions for you is just the immense amount of discipline that you had to exhibit as a college athlete, as a professional athlete, as an Olympian. And I wonder how that translates to you as a professional. Hmm. I mean, there are I think one thing that you realize is that as you get older is that if you can figure out how to be successful in one space and you have an open mind about it, you can figure out how to be successful in other spaces as well, unless there's clearly an intelligence, a technical gap that you just can't close. And on balance, I don't feel like that's the biggest, the biggest issue for most people, particularly if they're not been some sort of engineering or whatever space. I think the big thing that coming in 2020, the first thing I had to figure out was how to build a schedule for myself that would help me and then hopefully help this department and the school be successful in accomplishing their own goals. That was really challenging because like while we have a mission and some core values, the that there's not a clear objective all the time. And I don't mean that like in the terms and business terms, you can have a monetary objective. You can have in sports terms, I can have a win loss objective or a specific performance objective. The areas in education are gray. The wins are gray and they're really how you define them and how you paint them and celebrate them. And so it's a little harder. It was a little more obscure to figure out what success met here. And until we really started doing a lot of like deep work on what our purpose is as a department, you'll hear me say this to my coaches, you'll hear me say this to everybody we talked to is like our wins and losses don't define success for us as education based sports program like club sports, which are all over the place. If you're on a club team and you're buying into that club team and you're not winning, you're going to leave. It's just reality. The purpose of being there is to accumulate wins and hopefully gain visibility for your child to secure a scholarship at the next level. That's a broad stroke against clubs, but that's pretty much what their focus is. Program based sports is different. And it's really about creating those moments where kids can experience life through either physical education or healthy competitive sports that allows them to have that incredible growth moment and build those skills for long term success. You can talk about it's more of an intrinsic thing. It's not an external measurement. Trying to get clear about that took some time to figure out for me what that meant. And I know that love it does a wonderful job of saying and putting the student first, that really sort of being student centric as much as possible, but in a world or an aspect of a world that really judges everything by external forces or external results. Or soundbites. Or soundbites? Yeah, it was really challenging. So I think to go back to answer your question, the first thing that I really looked at was what's the structure that I need personally to have success in this position? And then how do I use one of our terms in internal, like distribute or cascade that outward and empower my team to help us accomplish those goals? And then really to try to clarify or clean up some of the gray around the objectives that we have. And knowing that it's also going to be really nuanced in every individual's own pursuit. And that is a really hard balance because sometimes it also means telling kids, like, look, I know you want to play this sport, but you're just not good enough to do it. That doesn't mean you can't be a part of a team. There are other teams and other opportunities for you. And whether they're in athletics or some other aspect of the school where your value, like what you can bring to the table adds value to what the specific purpose of this particular team is. And that's sometimes hard. That's really hard. Yeah. That's really hard. Especially when schools are places where kids are meant to learn, not just through successes, but also challenges and failures. And I think often, certainly as a college counselor, one of the most typical essays that we see from kids is around lessons learned through sports and often failures learned in sports competition. And while the benefit of time allows for kids to see what they've learned as a positive, certainly in that moment when a kid is being told for the first time, possibly, you're not good enough for this. Man, that's hard. That's really hard. Yeah. And I mean, people don't like to hear that. Who likes to hear that? Well, nobody does, right? But that's the secret to long-term success is that people receive that kind of feedback. And either accept it and listen to it and adhere to it or change your process. And I think that's the big thing there. Or change your definition of what success means in that space. Like, I say this and I look, I know people say, well, we'll look at my resume and my pedigree and say, well, how could you possibly understand? You played college and college. You did two college sports, went on and won national championships in Olympic medals and stuff like that. You've never experienced a downside of sports. That's absolutely wrong. I actually had my opportunities because I got cut from sports. I share this story. One of the greatest things that happened to me at Love It was my eighth grade year, which was incredibly challenging socially for me too. I'm not too delving to that. But coming in as a new kid and then coming in as an athlete, it just was really challenging. Middle school is just like that at some level. But one of the greatest things that happened to me that year was I got cut from basketball and I got cut from baseball. And I went home and I remember with basketball, it was a winter sport and I'd already decided I wanted to wrestle so it wasn't a big deal. But with baseball, I went home and I said, I remember having this conversation with my dad and I said, Dad, I got cut from baseball today. And the coach back then was a great guy. He was a teacher and coach. He talked to me. He was physics if I'm not mistaken. Coach Shafer. He just kind of said, Adam, you're just not good enough. And not only that, you're never going to be good enough. You may have to. I mean, it was really brutally honored. And I was a little bit shocked. I didn't, I remember going home and telling my dad and saying, but it's okay, dad. I've got a plan. I was my number one sport. And so I'm going to focus on that. And my dad basically said to me and no uncertain terms, he said, you're a 13 year old boy. You can either go get a job or you can go out for another after school activity. Because idle minds, idle hands with boys at that age is just not a good thing. And so I thought I pulled one over on them by going out for track and field, which I was like, oh, the football coach is the track coach. And so I'm basically going to be doing my training for football. And it ended up being a decision that sort of changed the trajectory of my life for the next 20 years. I'm kidding. Yeah. And we've talked about this on other episodes. Again, I think when any of us look back on the moments that were the most impactful, oftentimes they are in moments of discomfort or failure. I think I've said this now multiple times and you just gave another example of it. And as parents, it's certainly, I can see this just with my two year old, you want to clear out the path. You want to make it easier. And kids, you don't want to watch them struggle. It's painful to watch. But you also know. You also know that it's what shapes us the most. And if we rob our kids of those experience, then we're robbing them of the opportunity to really learn and grow and evolve and become this independent, self-motivated adults that we hope they will be one day and know they can be one day. Yeah. Part of being successful as an athlete is your ability to constantly reset yourself with the same expectation for tomorrow or better than what it was for today. Knowing that any event, whether it was a win or loss or could be marked as a winner loss was a learning and growth opportunity. And not something that's going to define you more than just that moment is one of the hardest things to learn and appreciate. And it's something that when Olympic sports, I think it's a really interesting metaphor or pathway for life, if you will. So short term, short term discomfort for long term gains for sure. And you are an example of that, your eighth grade, baseball story, reference J for a couple of times. But now today as colleagues, you two, I think, work pretty closely in thinking about how you might sort of unify the philosophy around co-curricular extracurricular experiences that love it. And I wonder if you can share just some of the work that you and Jay have done in smoothing out that experience for our kids. You know, I think the first thing is we both have to set aside egos when it comes to the conversations and what we think is best or what perspective we're looking at it from. And we really try to center everything on the kid first. I think we all want success, but not at the cost of everything else, especially at this age. And so I think Jay and I typically come into our conversations like that. You know, the biggest issues that we usually have are competition, if you will, for time after school, the extracurricular time as programs evolve and grow and our arts programs have, I think, so a lot of incredible opportunities for kids to perform and showcase their talents. And our athletic programs need to grow in size and number. The hardest thing to do is how do we keep the kids out of this and not make it personal or hard for them when they're trying to figure out where to spend their time. And it's not always easy. We have something that we have when I first got here was called the conflict calendar. And Jay and I have adopted a different term, the cooperation calendar. And I don't like that. And it still can't quite live down that the legacy conflict calendar. I think that's the big thing is like there's never going to be a perfect win for everybody. And so there's got to be a give and take on some of the especially when we want our kids to try to experience and grow out of as many opportunities as possible. And I think for both of us at some level, there's times when we both see it as like, well, I won't speak for Jay, I'll think for myself, but we're all look at it and be like, this is a huge deal and I don't understand why you're not getting it. And he'll look at me and be like, I think he's saying the same thing to me. That's where we have to just kind of avoid those gridlock situations and understand that, hey, we're all on the same on the same team trying to help these kids have these incredible experiences. And what can we do and where are the opportunities that we really need to say? No, this one really needs to take precedent here. We've got a bit of a precedence there now with our cooperation calendar. And then we always try to keep the door, keep everything open so that we can have those conversations and not make it a competition for our kids in their time. It's more about how can we better live out our mission, our whole child mission here. I love it. We talk so much about whole child. And certainly I think whole child extends beyond athletics, fine arts and academics. I think there's a spiritual component, there's a wellness component. But often the initial aspects of those conversations tend to circle around your department and J's more often than not. And many families choose this place for that reason. And so thinking about how to allow kids to explore when we already know there's a finite amount of time in a day. Those are worthy conversations to continue to explore. And certainly nothing is perfect, but finding ways to find middle ground compromise, I think is really, really important. We've talked about your identity as an alum. We've talked about your identity as our athletic director. What about as a parent? How does that inform how you show up every day? Oh, man, that's a loaded question. I think that's the one that I have the hardest time separating out from the other two. Yep. Really the other one. I mean, my alum status is, I mean, that's because of something I did 30 years ago or finished 30 years ago. So, but the parent and the administrator role, those go hand in hand and they are on the present and they do compete with each other all the time. I mean, the life of an athletic director in the school, I mean, we have close to 600 events a year and every single one of those families wants to see just me, but this office there and supporting their kids. And that means something. How do you do that? That's probably the biggest challenge that I have as a parent is finding that right balance between the work and the family life. There are other things that pop up when you work in a school and your kids go to school at the same place, but those are a little bit easier to sort of delegate out. It's like if there's ever an issue with the school or with a class or a teacher or something, my wife will take care of it. From my standpoint, in terms of who I am as a parent, I hope I'm pretty much the same person I am as an administrator. I feel like I have a great relationship with my kids and I have really honest conversations with them about everything. And that's super important. If I don't have those opportunities, that's when you see me. And sometimes at the end of the day, this business is very cyclical, literally seasonal. And as those seasons start to collide and overlap and the time gets pulled and my time gets pulled really thin, it gets my kids that have to have the understanding that like, hey, I have to be at work for the next six weeks because it's just the overlap between the winter and spring season. By the way, it doesn't mean I don't love you. It just means that I'm there until the last day, until the last event ends. And that's just about the commitment that you make to the program. It's not because other people can't be there. It's because of what it means to everybody else. And there's a huge part that you have to recognize that. And I think they know that in my personality, that's who I am, I don't know how to not be committed 100%. And when I stop feeling like I'm committed 100%, it's really time for me to move on. I wish I could say I could separate them really well. And I wish I could say I had this perfect work-life balance, but I don't because I can't extrapolate the two from each other. They are who I am. Right. Right. I mean, right. When you become a parent, it's front and center in your brain every day. Okay. So you referenced families and the value of you and your office being present. Talk to me about what you think a strong family school partnership looks like as it relates to athletics. I mean, I think it's all built on trust and communication. If we are communicating clearly and effectively upfront about what the experience is going to look like, it eliminates a lot of the hard conversations or changes a lot of the hard conversations because then it's not about a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the facts. If you don't do that well and consistently, then seemingly small issues become really, really big issues very quickly. I think if I were to like offer advice to anybody, don't send that email, like just call and say, Hey, can I come in and have a conversation with you? We're here to listen, it doesn't mean we can always take action. And I think those are the times when we see the best, the best relationships, the best conversations I think I've had with families is when they've extended that trust and we've seen and heard from each other. And some of them, there are some real movable, there's some real action items that can come out of that. But if we think about this as like, Hey, look, we really aren't a partnership here and this is what we're trying to do. What we're trying to do in the athletic department is create these incredible transformative experiences through healthy competition and physical education. The perspective families are listening to this conversation too. And I just wonder if you can just give them a quick sound bite of what they could expect out of their students participation in Levitt's athletic program. I think the first thing to do is really describe what education based sports really is because sometimes it gets lumped in with some of the other experiences that you may have outside of outside of here. Education based sports is yes, we want to be competitive, but we're not going to be competitive at the cost of everything else. We want our kids to come in and have this opportunity to learn and grow from parts of teams. Part of that is actually having teams that they don't make, but they have an opportunity to always participate in something else. One of the great things that we have at Levitt is we always have a sport that is has no roster limitations on it. So to speak, those could be great, great opportunities for your kids. If you position them as that, they are not second best. Let me put it that way. They are great, great opportunity. Second, we want to see your kid develop physically, emotionally, psychologically, and ultimately athletically and everything we do at every level. I hope is in line with that. We have opportunities for kids to compete from seventh grade all the way through their senior year. We do a really good job of it. I'm not going to lie. We have some incredible coaches. We've got some incredible programs. We've got some incredible resources top to bottom. But what I think is the most important thing that sports will give your child is if they didn't have a voice, they'll have one because they'll be part of a team. They will have that opportunity to learn and grow through the social interactions that are part of being a part of team sports or individual sports that work as teams. Figure out how to communicate better, more effectively with their peers, how to have conversations with people in the positions of authority and really how to have those hard conversations referenced earlier about the importance of failure. Well, one of the most important gifts that you get from team sports and education based sport is that opportunity to receive direct feedback. When you're successful or when you're falling short of what the coaches think you're capable of. And that opportunity is incredible. We don't guarantee playing time. That's earned, especially as you move up the levels. And I think that's hardly here. But the world is not a fair place in that sense. Every opportunity you have in life has got to be earned. And there are very few structures in life that allow you to test that and really try to learn and grow through that process than the structure of competitive sports. There's a season where we're going to basically go three months. There's going to be a clear purpose, a start, a finish. There are groups of people that you have to find a way to work with and hopefully get from point A to point B. And there may be three stops in between them. But that's what sports do. And that's what we try to do here. If we do it really, really well, gosh, man, like the opportunities that your kids have, that we're talking about for the rest of their lives. Okay. Last question. What does living love it mean to you, Adam Nelson? I mean, I think I'll start where I finish where I started, which is really focusing on like a mission driven life. I think one of the most important things that we talk about and really strive for is focus on our core values, focus on what our mission means and how that's going to appear in all of our interactions. And if we do that, we do that well. We're going to be better humans as a result of it. I think that's where I'll finish. But Adam, thank you so much for sharing some time with us today on Living Love It. I'm really excited that our families get to hear from you directly and get to know you a little bit better. Thank you for all you do on behalf of this place. The late nights, the early mornings, all of it, we are grateful. Thanks for being here today. Thank you. Y'all have a great day. Thanks to Adam Nelson for being on Living Love It today. You can find Living Love It on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Connect the Love It tool on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. All things Love It school may be found on our school website, loveit.org. I'm Jessica Sant and until next time, I hope you've enjoyed this story from the Riverbank. Thank you. Bye. ♪♪♪