For Rebecca Feickert (MBA 2018), who grew up in the town of Goodrich, North Dakota, population 126, basketball was a stepping stone to success in the wider world. The skills she had honed playing against the boys in her hometown earned her a spot on the University of Kansas Jayhawks, and the lessons she learned on the basketball court—drive, endurance, teamwork—served her well in the business world, too.

But not all of her college teammates and other friends found the same success after sports. “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,” Feickert says. That revelation led her to cofound Trey Athletes, a social enterprise that creates cohorts of high-potential high school athletes and introduces them to former athletes whose career paths can be models of success.

The students enrolled in the inaugural cohort of Trey Athletes 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.” Too often, Feickert says, these high-performing students lack “the recipe”—the knowledge they need to navigate the opaque college-recruitment process and to transition their skills and identity from the sports environment to the work environment.

“We want to empower athletes everywhere to succeed as leaders,” Feickert says. “And those athletes will become role models for the next generation.”

(Published January 2020)

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