Category: Mentorship Journal

Thursday is LAG Day on Zoom, and they say you should never skip LAG Day, though we have had to cancel due to scheduling conflicts some weeks, and starting next week, we will push the time back thirty minutes to allow for greater availability. As today’s discussion was important to the progress of the course, I jotted down some action items for everyone to take before the next meeting. I, for one, need to send the latest revisions of the brochure to Josh so that we can finalize it soon. Liston needs to have a conversation with someone we want as our spokesperson for the program and he wants to be able to provide that person with the brochure. We had a discussion based on an e-mail Dr. Tiell sent about creating an advisory council for the ICC that would assist in the promotion of Life After the Games. Her thought was that Josh and Liston should be part of that committee (B. Tiell, personal communication, Sept. 1, 2020).

Meanwhile, Josh is to work with our collaborator on the Sport & Special Event Security certification on a few matters. Finally, we should all provide Liston with talking points for his conversation with the potential spokesperson. My task was pretty simple, I just had to send Josh an e-mail with the revised brochure and did so shortly after the meeting. That plus a submitted summary of the meeting led Dr. Tiell to respond, “we are quick and efficient” (personal communication, Sept. 3, 2020). Perhaps I am a little too efficient.

I have compiled my commentary on Athlete365 and sent it on to the ICC partners for their use. I also received via e-mail some recommendations for our ICC website, which I cannot believe I forgot to mention when I initially did this but the website is live now at http://www.icctrainings.com, so please do me a favor, check it out, and let me know what you think. I think what happened was that I somehow managed to publish it amid the craziness that happened here in Cedar Rapids a few weeks ago with the derecho, but with that disaster at the forefront of my mind, I did not get around to announcing it. My deepest apologies to everyone for that oversight.

Obviously, it is not in finished form yet. You will see mention of initiatives like a Sport & Special Event Security certification that we are still trying to work out. There is a brief description of what that will entail on the home page. Hopefully, we will have even more for you about that later on. Another change involved moving the biographies for each ICC partner. Initially, they were on the home page but I have added a new page to host that information, some of which also needed to be changed. Beyond that, the site is in really good shape. Of course, icctrainings.com is also where you can learn more about Life After the Games itself! You can actually see a description of all nine units in the program. Keep checking back because we will add more to the website as time goes on.

Strange that we have made it to a new month. I guess time really flies in an election year with a pandemic, social unrest, and for my community, a derecho. Meanwhile, I am finishing up my assessment of the International Olympic Committee’s Athlete365 portal, which I can say after a thorough investigation into the content is not a carbon copy of Life After the Games. The Life After Sport and Preparing for Future Success courses I accessed are just brief components of the larger Athlete365 system. Again, I think of it as a sports version of LinkedIn Learning, though Athlete365 participants can gain access to that as well thanks to a partnership with Intel.

Allow me to share some of the curricula that can be found on Athlete365. There are a couple of courses about public relations, conditioning, coaching, organizing fundraising events, and a very prominent issue in the Olympics–cheating, specifically discouraging athletes from partaking in activities that compromise the fair play aspect of sports. The IOC also has a document similar to what we call the LAG Playbook, the interactive piece that students would fill out to learn more about themselves. Theirs is a life skills booklet, however, it lacks the interactivity of our document. Most importantly, Athlete365 is intended for athlete development in general rather than focusing on a specific subset of that development like the ICC is. The IOC even suggests that athletes reach out to a career counselor for further assistance, which is what we can offer them.

I am proud to say that I have been certified for a second time by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) through its Athlete365 portal for completing a course on Preparing for Future Success in addition to the one I already did on Life After Sport. Well, the certificates are officially in the name of William Stonecroft, the name of the character I created for my unpublished book. Will, an American soccer player, gets the credit but I did the work. That is how I look at it anyway. The two courses on Athlete365 are essentially the same in terms of presentation. The instructor offers a lecture on the subject, some key bullet points pop up on the screen, and at the end of each section is a brief quiz to see how much the student has paid attention to the material.

I, or Will I should say, passed both courses with flying colors and have the certificates to prove it. I can now use this experience to put together my overall observation of the IOC’s portal and send it on to the partners at the ICC to demonstrate we have done our homework on this. Knowing what else is out there and whether it competes with what you are trying to do is an essential role in business, and I am glad that got to be able to test the waters and even take on a bit of a different persona in doing so. I believe in trying to make my projects a little fun if you have not already noticed.

I started another class this past week, a Sports Management course about the human resources side, so I spent yesterday focusing on that and now I am back on this Saturday doing some more tweaking to the Life After the Games brochure plus reviewing the Athlete365 material promoted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). My first concern was whether I would even be able to access the course, considering I was never an Olympian. I thought that maybe they had some sort of procedure where you had to show proof that you have competed in the Games. As it turns out, no such procedure exists. I was able to create an account to log in. I took the course called Life After Sport incognito, meaning I used a fictitious name, one of a character from a manuscript I wrote a few years back but have not had published.

The site itself does not appear to be a centrally-coordinated effort like our program. I liken Athlete365 a lot to LinkedIn Learning, which has videos on a variety of subjects on professional development. Athlete365 has a presenter delivering high-level talking points about the subject at hand. The course on Life After Sport is definitely not as in-depth as what the ICC wants to offer. This is only one course out of many, but so far my hypothesis that our program is not like Athlete365 is correct. I will need to try another course of the IOC’s just to be sure, and I plan to do that tomorrow.

Another Thursday, another Zoom meeting, and this is one that I created so we have a consistent location each week and each of the partners receives a reminder on their calendar to attend. That makes me the de facto host of the meeting, which means I make sure the virtual room gets “opened” and I let the participants in. We had a productive meeting about the brochure, which I sent to Josh. There are still a few more edits to make there. Something that came up during the meeting was the potential of our program competing with one by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) called Athlete365. As the name suggests, it is also a resource for Olympic athletes. I was asked to take a look at the offerings of Athlete365 to see whether they indeed do come into conflict with the IOC.

I started that process this evening. Based on what I have seen so far, my feeling is that Athlete365 does not bear any similarity to Life After the Games, but for the sake of performing due diligence, I will dig a little bit deeper in the coming days. The concern is legitimate and I do not want to find out later that the two programs are alike. Also, I am quite interested to see what Athlete365 does provide for Olympians the world over. Post-athletic transition is only going to grow as a topic, so the ICC has a big opportunity to lead the way with that. This is an exciting project all around.

Last week, I sent over the latest copy of the brochure and suggested edits were made then I sent it back. This evening, Josh emailed me with a few more instructions: one was to cut the rounded corners in the ribbon portion of the medal and adding a different connector. Luckily, I can be pretty resourceful, so I cropped the ribbon into a rectangular shape and then added triangles to make the corners pointed. Now it looks a little more like what Josh had in mind for the brochure. Another issue that I am not entirely sure how this happened or how to fix it is the formatting of the three panels to each page. “The centering is off,” Josh indicated in the Word document he sent me.

It is a headscratcher because I initially used a template designed by Canva. Even when the colors switched from yellow/black to red/white, it kept the same structure. Perhaps the margins got moved when I went to edit something in the brochure. I really could not say for positive. What I do know is that I will need to look at it and see how to remedy the situation so that the columns are aligned. I must admit that I like the direction that we are going with the brochure. It already looks good but with all these touchups we are making, and at this point, I feel comfortable with calling them touchups, it is going to be even better. We are that much closer to a final product.

I am happy to be up and running again after the storm knocked out our power for several days. Not everyone has their electricity back, so you can still hear generators running throughout the city. Hopefully, it will not be too much longer for them. In the meantime, I am trying to get back in the swing of things, starting with our weekly conference call. Oddly enough, Dr. Tiell had canceled last Thursday’s meeting about three hours before the storm came through. The reason was so Liston could focus on campaigning (B. Tiell, personal communication, August 10, 2020). With the situation as it has been here, however, it was a good thing we did not meet. I am definitely raring to go on Life After the Games now after essentially a ten-day layoff.

At the request of Dr. Tiell, I sent over the most recently completed Life After the Games brochure before the meeting, where we went over it as a group. I have been told that it continues to look better, it just still needs a few tweaks before it is ready for consumption. One thing that was pointed out, in particular, was that the medal had too much of a military look to it. Additionally, the edges of the ribbon from the pre-produced image I found off Canva were rounded and Josh felt it needs to be more square. He also requested that the connector between the medal and ribbon be separated which cannot be accomplished in its pre-produced state. I explained this to him in a later e-mail. I am anticipating that more modifications will need to be made.

To use a sports analogy, I am essentially on the inactive list. At around 12:30 p.m. this past Monday, a nasty storm blew through my hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with gusts of over 100 miles per hour. Brief and without much warning, this derecho as they call it has wreaked havoc on the entire metropolitan area. Entire trees block city streets or have fallen onto homes, power lines have been downed, and there are massive lines at service stations in the surrounding area for gasoline. I have never seen anything like this before, it is reminiscent of a scene in a dystopian film. Cellular service is spotty at best and the Internet is non-existent which means that for all intents and purposes, I am cut off from the rest of the world (obviously, due to the near-total shutdown of communications in the city, I am having to post this later).

My e-mail worked just enough to inform everyone at the ICC and send over some items I had been doing prior to the storm coming through. That includes changes to the Life After the Games brochure and a condensed script for the video promo. All things considered, I am just fine. However, while I wait for restored power and Internet, my priority must turn to helping others here get through an event that is so catastrophic, it will take weeks or even months to recover from. What has already been a difficult year for so many has become even harder, but I have faith that we will come out of this stronger than ever.

I have an extended family function coming up on Zoom later this evening. Whether in person or virtually, our gatherings tend to be quite conversational. In preparation for that, I spent some time going through the ICC website so it is close to ready for publication as can possibly be. There are a few sections that we will have to fill in at another time. Right now, it is in pretty good shape though. In fact, given my limited knowledge on starting a website from scratch, I would have to say I am quite pleased with how it looks. Putting together a basic website and blog is a nice skill to have. Whether or not Web design is your thing, chances are you will be involved in maintaining or posting content to a site at some point in your lives.

I also sent over more changes to the brochure. Dr. Tiell had some more changes early yesterday. One thing I got busted on was incorrect spelling on the word “periodically”. Now I am a pretty good speller, it is just sometimes my fingers think faster on the keyboard than my brain, and it does annoy me when I subconsciously make that error. However, it is nothing that could not easily be fixed and I have fixed it. Everything else was pretty minor, too. It did not take all that long to make any of the corrections. I am efficient if nothing else. Just have to learn to take it slow sometimes, especially when it comes to typing and proofreading words.