Stories
Stories
A Shot at Success
Photos by Karen Campbell
Rebecca Feickert (MBA 2018) grew up in Goodrich, North Dakota, population 126. Her high school had 15 students; her graduating class, just two. So when teenaged Feickert, a gifted basketball player who was six feet two by the age of 13, wanted to get the attention of Division I college coaches, she had to get inventive.
“I made a homemade highlight tape,” Feickert recalls. She sent the video, set to cheesy pump-up music, to the nation’s top basketball programs. Soon, the coaches she dreamed of playing for were traveling to central North Dakota to check out the star shooter. Her skills—and her resourcefulness—earned Feickert more than 40 offers. She attended the University of Kansas, where she spent three years as a Jayhawk and graduated with a degree in accounting, becoming a first-generation college graduate.
Sports had been the essential stepping stone, Feickert says. And the things she learned on the basketball court—drive, endurance, teamwork—served her well in the business world, too. The pressure of tax season at Ernst & Young in New York, where she moved after graduation, was nothing compared to standing at the free-throw line at the Allen Fieldhouse with thousands of people waiting for you to fail. So when she returned to the University of Kansas for a reunion in 2014, Feickert expected to hear similar stories of success from her teammates and other friends who had been college athletes. Instead, she discovered that many of them were struggling in their careers, working minimum-wage jobs, or unemployed. “It was shocking,” she recalls. “These were the most disciplined, coachable, resilient people I knew, but they had not gotten the education and support they needed to use sports as a lever to change their lives.”
That was the seed that would become Trey Athletes, a leadership-development program for high-potential high school athletes that Feickert founded with Brian Reynolds, a college classmate who had seen similar outcomes among his high school basketball teammates in Topeka, Kansas.
But before Feickert could address problems like the ones her former teammates had experienced, she needed to understand the problems. In 2016, she quit her accounting job and moved to Bolivia to work as a teacher for A Ganar, a youth-workforce-development program that uses soccer and other team sports to teach job skills, and then she enrolled in Harvard Business School. “I knew I needed more education to even figure out what the solution should be,” she says.
Rebecca Feickert (MBA 2018) with Trey Athletes cofounder Brian Reynolds
It was a conversation with Reynolds in 2018 that crystalized the vision for Trey Athletes, which creates cohorts of student-athletes and introduces them to former athletes whose career paths can be models of success. Reynolds was building a new retail startup; Feickert was about to start her second year at HBS. “We were ready to do something about this problem and utilize sports for societal change,” says Reynolds. The pair ran a pilot program for five of the nation’s top high school football players on Chicago’s South Side during Feickert’s second year. In the fall of 2018, just a few months after Feickert graduated, Trey Athletes launched in Dallas, serving 40 basketball stars from 31 high schools across 29 zip codes in the region.
Incoming sophomores and juniors are nominated for the program by teachers or administrators. These students have what Feickert calls “the ingredients”—the athletic potential to play in college, a good presence in the locker room, and the ability to compete in the classroom. But too often, Feickert says, these high-potential students lack “the recipe”—the knowledge they need to navigate the opaque college-recruitment process and transition their skills and identity from the sports environment to the work environment.
Trey introduces these athletes to others in similar situations through Trey Academy, an interactive curriculum that focuses on the particular challenges that high school and college stars face, from public speaking and social-media curation to time management and mental health. Trey Mentors—former college and professional athletes—join Trey Academy regularly to serve as knowledgeable advisors for the students as well as their parents. Among those who have provided advice for the program are Russell Wilson and his brother, Harrison Wilson. “Everyone knows Russell,” says Feickert of the Seattle Seahawks quarterback. “But most people don’t know his older brother, Harrison, was also a standout Division I football player who has had a very successful career as an entrepreneur and in the pharmaceutical and medical-device industries. Students need to see that type of role model.”
Trey Athletes was recently accepted into the United Way Social Innovation Accelerator, which, along with philanthropic investment and corporate partnerships, will help the fledgling social enterprise expand its Trey Academy to other US cities and to grow its web-based resources. “We want to empower athletes everywhere to succeed as leaders,” Feickert says. “And those athletes will become role models for the next generation.”
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