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I still remember the moment I realized I was completely unprepared to be a manager.
It was my second week leading a product team at a mid-stage tech startup. A designer on my team had just pushed back—hard—on a direction I’d proposed in standup. The old competitive athlete in me felt the sting of being challenged in front of peers. My immediate instinct was to defend my position, establish authority, and move forward. I almost did.
But something stopped me. A memory of my college lacrosse coach pulling me aside after I’d snapped at a freshman during practice, telling me that competitiveness without coachability was just ego with a jersey.
That moment crystallized something I’d been sensing for years: my decade as a competitive athlete had prepared me for certain aspects of leadership in high-pressure environments far better than any MBA case study could. But it had also nearly sabotaged me in ways I didn’t expect. The skills that made me successful as a player—raw competitiveness, individual accountability, winning-at-all-costs mentality—required complete recalibration when I moved into leadership.
This is what I wish someone had told me clearly: sports teaches you about leadership, but not always in the ways you think. And the gap between what it teaches and what you actually need to lead is where most athlete-turned-leaders stumble.
The Coachability Paradox: Why Your Best Players Make the Worst Managers (At First)
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: elite athletes are often poor at receiving feedback without ego.
We’re trained to trust our instincts. We’ve received corrective feedback under pressure—mid-game, mid-tournament—and learned to integrate it instantly. Our coaches yelled adjustments and we executed them. This created a pattern: feedback = information to be acted upon immediately, with minimal emotional residue.
The problem is that this pattern doesn’t translate to organizational leadership. When you’re a manager and someone challenges your decision, it’s not a coach calling a timeout. It’s a peer or direct report offering a perspective that your ego immediately categorizes as either “right” or “wrong,” “aligned” or “insubordinate.”
I learned this the hard way, and here’s what shifted my approach:
Coachability isn’t about accepting feedback. It’s about being genuinely curious about the gap between what you think is true and what someone else sees.
When that designer pushed back on my direction, what she was actually doing was offering information I didn’t have. She’d been thinking about user testing results I hadn’t reviewed. She’d been sketching solutions at 11 PM that I hadn’t considered. My job wasn’t to defend or correct—it was to understand why someone I’d hired to be smart about design thought this way.
The shift sounds simple, but it required unlearning something deep: I had to stop treating disagreement as a competitive moment to be won, and start treating it as a data point to be understood.
This is where I differ from a lot of athlete-leaders I’ve met. Many of them stay stuck in the “I made the team, so I’m right about teams” phase. But the best ones—the ones actually moving into executive roles—develop what I call coachability practice. It’s a discipline.
Here’s what it looks like in practice:
- The pause. When someone disagrees with you, you literally pause before responding. Not for effect. For clarity. You ask yourself: “What do they know that I might not?” This sounds basic, but it’s the opposite of how athletes are trained.
- The clarifying question. Instead of defending your position, ask the person to walk you through their thinking. “Help me understand why you see it differently” isn’t weakness. It’s intelligence gathering.
- The explicit acknowledgment. If someone changes your mind, or even partially shifts your view, say it directly. “That’s a perspective I hadn’t fully considered. Let’s explore that.” This does two things: it shows your team that feedback works, and it models the coachability you want from them.
I started doing this about six months into my first PM leadership role, and the shift in team dynamics was immediate. Suddenly, people spoke up more in meetings. They weren’t strategizing about how to present ideas to avoid my defensiveness—they were just thinking out loud.
The irony? This actually makes you more competitive as a leader. You’re not slower because you’re considering other perspectives. You’re faster because you’re making decisions with better information.
Pressure: The Thing Sports Taught Me That Actually Translates
Here’s what college sports genuinely prepared me for: performing under pressure when the stakes are clear and the timeline is compressed.
I’m not going to oversell this. Leading a product team shipping a major feature before a quarterly deadline feels similar to playing a tournament game with playoff implications. There’s a defined end state. There are real consequences. You have to execute when it matters, with imperfect information, and you can’t afford to completely fall apart.
My background in lacrosse gave me specific tools for this:
- Compartmentalization. You can’t worry about the playoff game while you’re playing the regular season. You can’t worry about Q4 revenue goals while executing Q2 features. This seems obvious, but most people don’t actually do it. I learned to do it under genuine pressure, which is different from knowing it intellectually.
- Routine under chaos. Every athlete has pre-game routines. I have a pre-launch routine now. Same coffee, same review process, same stakeholder alignment meeting. The ritual creates calm in the system, which makes it easier to think clearly when things inevitably go wrong.
- The ability to stay outcome-focused while adapting the approach. We’d go into games with a game plan, but if it wasn’t working by the second quarter, we’d adjust. Same thing in product. You don’t panic and abandon the ship. You stay focused on the outcome (ship the feature, maintain quality, keep the team functional) but you’re flexible about how you get there.
But here’s where the metaphor breaks down, and this is crucial:
Game pressure and deadline pressure feel similar, but they’re fundamentally different in ways that trip up a lot of athlete-leaders.
In sports, pressure is often zero-sum. You win or you lose. The other team either scores or they don’t. The game ends, you know the result, and you move on. The pressure is intense but it’s finite. It has clear boundaries.
In tech leadership, pressure is continuous and ambiguous. A deadline passes, and suddenly you’re navigating whether the feature actually solved the customer problem. You’re managing the emotional fallout from a rushed launch. You’re deciding whether to do a post-mortem or move straight to the next thing. You’re dealing with your CEO asking why the engagement numbers aren’t what they were supposed to be.
The pressure doesn’t end. It transforms.
For me, this meant I had to actively resist the athlete’s instinct to “get the win and celebrate.” Instead, I had to learn to hold complexity: we shipped the feature on time, which is good. But here’s where it’s unstable, here’s what we’ll do differently next time, here’s how we support the team who moved fast and needs to recalibrate.
The athletes who struggle most in leadership are the ones who keep trying to “win” the deadline and then wonder why their team is burned out or why the culture feels unsustainable. They’re optimizing for the wrong pressure metric.
What I’ve learned to do instead: use the deadline pressure as a forcing function for clarity, not as justification for cutting corners that create compounding problems. That’s a shift that doesn’t come naturally from sports. It comes from being willing to outgrow what sports taught you.
Building Team Chemistry When There’s No Locker Room
One of the most disorienting parts of transitioning from college sports to tech was realizing that the thing I thought sports had taught me most about—team building—didn’t actually transfer to a remote-hybrid work environment.
My college team had chemistry forged through:
- Traveling together on buses
- Living in close quarters
- Shared physical hardship (morning workouts, conditioning, travel fatigue)
- Post-game rituals and celebrations
- The pure repetition of being in the same space, every single day
None of those things exist when your team is split between three time zones and three people work from home on Tuesdays.
I spent my first six months as a PM trying to recreate “team chemistry” through things that made no sense in our context. I organized team outings. I tried to get everyone in the office on Wednesdays. I suggested early morning workout groups. It all felt forced because it was—I was trying to import a model that depended on physical proximity into an environment where that wasn’t the baseline.
What actually works is different. It’s what I now call intentional vulnerability at scale.
In sports, chemistry happens because you’re literally exposed to each other. You see teammates at their worst—tired, frustrated, recovering from injuries, dealing with personal stuff. You build trust through that exposure. There’s a shorthand that develops.
In a distributed environment, that exposure has to be deliberate. It can’t be accidental.
Here’s what I’ve implemented that actually moves the needle:
- Regular one-on-ones where we talk about things besides work for the first five minutes. This sounds small, but it’s the closest analog to locker room conversations. You’re making space for someone to be a full person, not a set of job functions.
- A “personal context” document that each team member updates quarterly. Where are you in life right now? What’s energizing you? What’s draining you? What do you need from your team? It’s vulnerability on a written track, which removes some of the performance anxiety, and it creates a record that prevents people from feeling forgotten.
- Celebrating wins together, specifically. Not just “we shipped the thing.” The wins that matter to individuals. Someone fixed a gnarly bug. Someone pushed through a really hard conversation with another department. Someone leveled up a skill. I call these out explicitly in our weekly sync, and I ask the team to do the same for each other.
- Creating consequences for showing up and consequences for not. This is pure sports mentality. If you miss standup without context, I notice and I mention it (kindly). If you’re consistently present and engaged, I notice that too. People feel the difference between teams where showing up matters and teams where it’s optional. The latter have no chemistry, remote or not.
The biggest shift I made was accepting that remote team chemistry is not a pale imitation of in-person chemistry—it’s a different thing that requires different infrastructure. Once I stopped trying to recreate the locker room and started building the actual structures that distributed teams need, things got better.
That said, in-person time still matters. But it matters differently. When my team is together in person for a week, we’re not trying to build chemistry—we’re trying to have the conversations that are harder over Slack. We’re trying to align on ambiguous stuff. We’re trying to repair relationships that have gotten strained. It’s much more intentional and much less about “let’s hang out and bond.”
The Athlete’s Approach to Skill Development: What Transfers, What Doesn’t
One of the genuine gifts that sports gave me is a very specific model for skill development: deliberate practice.
By my senior year of college, I was pretty good at lacrosse. Not because I had the most raw talent on the team. Because I’d developed a system for identifying specific skill gaps and targeting them systematically. I’d watch film of myself and other players. I’d notice that my off-hand accuracy was weaker than my dominant side. I’d spend 30 minutes after practice shooting left-handed. Rinse, repeat, improve.
This model works almost exactly the same way in product leadership. I’ve applied it to:
- Presentation skills. I identified that I was rambling in stakeholder meetings. I started recording myself. I watched the recordings (painful). I noticed I was filling silence with words instead of pausing. I built in pauses deliberately until they became natural.
- Written communication. I realized that my email writing was unclear because I was trying to show all my thinking. I read some emails from executives who were crystal clear, I analyzed what they were doing differently, and I started applying that. It took about three months of deliberate drafting before it felt natural.
- One-on-one conversations. I wasn’t asking good follow-up questions. I’d recorded a few one-on-ones (with permission), listened back, and noticed I was usually waiting to talk instead of listening. So I set a personal rule: I ask two questions before I give any advice. Just a forcing function. After months of this, deeper conversations became my default.
The athlete’s advantage here is real: I already know that skill development requires repetition and feedback and time. I’m not expecting to wake up one day “good at” stakeholder management. I’m doing the equivalent of shooting 100 left-handed shots after practice.
Where this breaks down is when people assume that the athlete’s work ethic translates to speed of improvement. It doesn’t. I spent three months improving my presentation skills. That’s not fast. It’s the normal pace of human skill development, and a lot of athletes struggle with that because we’re used to measuring improvement in games played or competitions won.
I’ve also noticed that the athletes who succeed most at executive skill development are the ones who have coaches. They’re not trying to see themselves clearly—they’re getting feedback from someone they trust. I hired an executive coach to work on my strategic thinking. That person is to my career what my college coaches were to my athletic development: someone who can see things I can’t see about myself and push me to improve.
The Competitive Instinct: Where It Destroys Leadership
I’m going to be very direct here because this is where I see athlete-leaders do the most damage.
Competitive instinct is great for individual achievement. It’s terrible for team leadership if you don’t actively manage it.
Here’s what I mean: competitive instinct creates a drive to win, which creates a drive to be right, which creates a drive to make sure everyone knows you’re right, which creates a team culture where people stop offering dissenting views because they know it ends with you being right.
I’ve been that leader. Not for a long time, but long enough to see the damage.
My first major project as a PM, I approached like a game I needed to win. I had a vision for how the product should work. When people disagreed, I saw it as them not understanding my vision clearly enough, so I’d explain more forcefully. When data came back that partially contradicted my assumptions, I focused on the data points that supported my direction and glossed over the rest. When the feature launched and underperformed, I blamed execution rather than strategy.
The team could feel it. There was this underlying sense that winning (proving me right) mattered more than learning (figuring out what was actually true). People became cautious. They’d raise concerns in one-on-ones but not in group settings. They’d execute what I wanted instead of what they thought was best.
The project failed, and the failure was more damaging because it was covered in this layer of “I was right, but execution was wrong.”
What shifted for me was recognizing that competitive instinct is energy. It’s not inherently bad. But in leadership, it needs to be redirected.
Instead of channeling competition into “I need to win this argument,” I started channeling it into “I need to build the best possible product.” Those sound similar, but they’re different at every decision point.
When you’re competing to build the best product, you actually want to hear from people who disagree with you. You want data that challenges your assumptions. You want to know where the execution fell short because that’s information about where to improve. You’re competing against the problem
