Hey everyone,
A few weeks ago, I was in a room at CAA's World Congress of Sports listening to Kara Swisher interview Clara Wu Tsai, co-owner of the Brooklyn Nets and owner of the New York Liberty.
Clara said something important: Everything starts with the players.
Simple. Obvious, even. And yet... how many organizations - in sports, in media, in business - actually lead that way?
How many build their systems, their deals, their infrastructure around the people who create the value in the first place?
Bottom line: Not enough.
A week later, I was at the Spring Sports & Media Huddle hosted by JohnWallStreet. Different room. Different conversation. Same undercurrent.
The organizations winning right now are the ones that have built cultures capable of responding IN the moment (in the pocket, so to speak). When what happens on the court - or in the market - demands something you didn't script.
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The Coach Who Kept Score on Himself
I came across a story about Mike Neighbors - a college basketball coach who kept a list of every mistake he made in his first year as a head coach.
418 mistakes. He boiled them down to 12. I’ll talk about 3 that I personally watched play out in rooms (and honestly, I’ve made myself):
He told people the truth before he earned their trust.
He got out of alignment between process and results - chasing goals while preaching systems.
And he exhausted his decision energy on things that didn't affect winning.
None of those are purely basketball mistakes - they apply to leadership.
Neighbors didn't make that list to wallow in it. He made it to build something. A few years later, he led Washington to the Final Four.
That list was the preparation. The honest, unglamorous, nobody's-watching work that earns you the right to perform and…to improvise…when it counts.
That's what I kept coming back to in both conference rooms. The organizations and leaders who show up in the unscripted moment aren't the ones who got lucky. They're the ones who did the work before the cameras were on.
What I Know From the Inside
I spent years building local sports strategy and sales at ABC stations and CBS Stations through one of the most turbulent periods in media history - regional sports networks collapsing, teams scrambling for distribution, fans losing access to their home teams entirely.
When the business model breaks underneath you - and in local sports media, it did, fast and without warning - the organizations that held on weren't just the most resourced ones. They were the ones with the clearest sense of who they served and the most prepared teams.
Preparation doesn't mean having all the answers. It means having the culture, the trust, and the clarity of purpose to act when certainty isn't an option (I wrote about that earlier here).
Clara Wu Tsai invested $75M in a practice facility for the Liberty. Real infrastructure. Real programming. That's not just belief in the product - that's preparation.
That's building the scaffolding so that when the moment arrives, your team is ready to stand in it.
The WNBA no longer needs to prove its value. What it needs now - and what every organization navigating disruption needs - are the systems, the investment, and the leadership to fully realize it.