A working proposal, open at every turn
Before I hand you a proposal, I want you to see the road that led to it. Not because the destination is fixed, but because if the road sparks a different route for you, we can branch off at any point on it. Read this as one person's line of reasoning, offered so you can pull it apart.
An engagement that grows students on the inside and the outside at once.
We share an outcome: aware and wise business leaders, formed as lifelong learners of themselves, through their own experiences.
That is the whole of it. Not a program a student finishes, but a capacity a student keeps. When we talked, the alignment on the destination was real, and it is the thing I keep coming back to.
Two kinds of growth sit inside that outcome, and they are inseparable. The internal: awareness of emotion, thought, and sensation; a sense of purpose; the steadiness to sit with hard things. The external: leadership, performing under pressure, and finding a way through a dynamic and uncertain environment.
At a Jesuit school this is not a bolt-on. It is formation, cura personalis, care for the whole person. The work of learning yourself is the point, and it does not end at graduation.
Business is a performance environment. That is exactly why this belongs here.
Business is performance-based, much like sport, and it carries a real emphasis on wellbeing. That combination makes it unusually good ground for this work.
And the ground is already prepared. GSCG is built on this foundation. I am a faculty member with a lot of freedom to try things. I care about this work, and so do you. The pieces are rarely all in the same place at the same time. Right now they are.
The challenge is one of scope. I want us to build something we can actually run soon, something concrete and real this coming year. And I want us to reach for something grand enough to leave a lasting mark. Holding both at once, the near and the ambitious, is the balancing act of the whole effort.
Sports identity is not one thing. It runs a spectrum, and all of it is here.
From the elite competitor to the person who simply loves watching the game, every version of a sports identity shows up in the business school, and well beyond it.
In the growth-through-sport work I have spent real time mapping these. They are not equal in intensity, and they do not need to be. Each one is a legitimate doorway into the same conversation about performance, effort, and who you are becoming.
The competitor
Currently plays at a high level. The identity is active, central, and shaping daily life right now.
The former athlete
Years of it are built into them, and they are working out who they are as that chapter recedes.
The lifelong participant
Never elite, but sport has always been part of the routine and part of the self.
The student of the game
The analyst, the strategist, the one drawn to how performance actually works.
The admirer
Loves and follows sport performance without playing, and is still shaped by what it models.
A program that only speaks to elite athletes misses most of the room. Designing for the whole spectrum is what makes this both honest and scalable, and it means a sports identity is far more common among our students than a headcount of varsity athletes would ever suggest.
It also reframes the raw material we are underusing. It is not a niche detail about a few students. For this audience, it is the most authentic shared starting point we have, and it is sitting idle at the door of the business school.
Their sports identity is a bridge we underuse. It is also the hardest part to get right.
Sport is a language these students already speak, which makes it a natural bridge to both the internal and the external growth we are after. The difficulty is knowing how much to lean on it.
I want to name the challenge plainly, because I think it is the same challenge in three places, and none of us fully solves it:
For you
You lead from rich sports experience, but your value is as behavioral and business consultants, not as athletes retelling stories. Your experience is true and substantial. I do not want to reduce you to the sports part of it, or turn that into a show. That would waste the thing that makes you worth working with.
For students
They cannot stay only athletes or fans wandering into business. They have to build new identities grounded in Jesuit values and real business capability, using their sports identity as material, not as a costume they never take off.
For the initiative
So the question underneath everything is simply: how much sport is the right amount?
Here is the reframe I keep landing on: the right balance is not a fixed point we will find and hold. The search for it is where the growth lives.
My instinct right now is to leverage sport heavily. You may read it differently, and that difference is useful, not a problem. Finding the right balance for this specific audience, across the whole spectrum of sports identities, is the shared work. I would rather do that work with you than hand you my answer to it.
Something concrete and low-risk, starting soon.
In the near term, a small set of sessions this fall that raise awareness, deliver real value, and let us learn from our students before we build anything larger.
Three open sessions
A short series, open across the business school, to introduce the idea and start the conversation broadly. Bite-sized and participatory rather than a single talking head, so the room is doing the work, not just watching it.
GSCG-specific sessions
Smaller and more structured, with the consulting team, where we can go deeper and hold more of the experience. This is where the reflective work has the most room to land.
Every one of these sessions is doing three jobs at once:
- Raise awareness of the idea and build appetite for it.
- Provide real value to the students who show up, on their own terms.
- Gather information about what they are actually wrestling with.
I do not want to design the larger thing in a vacuum and then go looking for students to fit it. The fall is how we find out what is really there. One idea for content: work with the campus video team to capture short interviews with our own athletes talking through these concepts, reusable and sustainable, so we are not dependent on a single live speaker every time.
And then, the grand version of it.
So how do we actually reach the larger goal: aware and wise business leaders of the future, formed through internal growth, with sport as the conduit?
Here is my answer, offered as a starting point rather than a conclusion. I hold it loosely, and I would rather show you the raw version and have you push on it than hand you something polished and closed.
This is early. It needs building, and it needs your thinking. I am putting it in front of you precisely so you can knock it down, reshape it, or replace it. If your idea is better, or a different vehicle entirely serves the same goal, that is the outcome I am hoping for.
We have a place to go when we want to train the body. Where do we go to train the mind?
Right now the honest answers are ad hoc or clinical: a video online, or therapy. And therapy is closer to physical therapy. It is valuable, but it is usually there to address something specific. What is missing on a campus is the everyday equivalent of a fitness center, but for the interior life. A proactive place to get stronger, not only a place to repair.
What it is
The Internal Lab. A resource, likely virtual at its core so it can scale, where a student goes to work on their mentality: to grow more aware of emotions, thoughts, and sensations, and to build tools for whatever they are facing.
Why it should exist
Because we ask students to perform, to lead, and to navigate uncertainty, and then give them nowhere to train the inner capacities that make any of that possible. Sport is the bridge in, because it is the performance world they already trust.
The outcome we are after
Students who can notice what is happening inside them, who carry their own practice of internal growth into their careers, and who lead better because they actually know themselves. Wise, not just skilled.
How settled it is
Barely. The name, the shape, the delivery, all of it is open. I expect the fall to teach us so much that the whole thing shifts, and I want to leave real room for that, and for your version of it.
Working names on the table: Internal Lab, Performance Well-being Lab, Internal Fitness Center. None of them fixed.
I want you to see the path, not just the endpoint.
This did not start as a two-part plan. It got there, and I think the way it got there matters.
After our meeting, I first drafted a single-page version of this and then held it back. It stated too strong an opinion without enough reasoning behind it, and it left too little room for you to shape the thing. That did not sit right.
On more reflection, the wiser move became clear: try a couple of concrete things this fall, gather real evidence about our students, and let the grand vision prove itself rather than announce itself. That is how I arrived at a near-term step and a longer-term idea, held separately and held loosely. The progression is the point, because if it generates a better route for you, I would rather we take that one.
Every point above is a fork.
If the thinking here sparks a different direction, we can branch at any of these. None of them is closed.
How central sport should be
My lean is heavy. Your read may be lighter, or differently shaped. This is the one I most want your view on.
What we listen for in the fall
What we pay attention to, and how we capture it, so anything we build next rests on something real.
How you want to engage
With GSCG and with the school. Framework design, facilitation, delivery, or a role I have not thought of.
The container
A class, a dedicated cohort built for this, or the existing GSCG cohort as the home.
Whether the Internal Lab is even the right vehicle
Its name, its shape, or something else entirely that reaches the same goal. I am genuinely open here.
Mostly, I want to know what this stirs up in you.
I tried to make this concrete enough to react to. None of it is set. Think of it as a way to put my thinking in front of you, not a plan to approve.
So my real question is an open one: does any of this spark thoughts or ideas for you? Where does it land, and where does it not? If it points you toward a different direction than the one I have drawn, that is a good result, maybe the best one.
We are going to learn a lot this fall, and I fully expect to be changed by it. I would rather start a conversation here than close one. Wherever your thinking goes when you read this, that is what I want to hear.
Faculty, Management Information Systems
Director, Gonzaga Sport Consulting Group