I spend much of my professional life in front of a screen, working at the intersection of digital platforms, artificial intelligence, content, live experiences, and the complicated institutional systems that shape participatory, college, and youth sports. Much of that work involves helping organizations raise capital, clarify strategy, develop partnerships, and grow. It also means identifying opportunities that are not always obvious: where technology can improve access and decision-making, where media can build deeper connection, where sports properties can create more sustainable commercial models, and where partners can align around shared objectives to create meaningful value.
I genuinely enjoy the work. I like the pressure of a complex problem, the process of finding a path through competing interests, and the moment when a conversation becomes a practical idea a team can actually execute. I enjoy the energy of meetings in New York City, the intensity of negotiations, the pace of building relationships, and the ambition that comes from being surrounded by people who are trying to make something happen.
At the same time, I have learned that the work remains meaningful only when another internal drive is fueled by something more elemental.
For me, that place is outside.
I Do Not Seek Balance
I do not think of the outdoors as a counterweight to work, and I do not seek “balance” in the conventional sense. Too often, balance suggests compromise between two competing forces: give a little here, take a little there, and settle somewhere in the middle to avoid falling. Balance is a form of settling for mediocrity.
That has never been especially compelling to me.
I do not want a life engineered to avoid failure, discomfort, or intensity. I do not believe that the goal is to reduce the peaks and valleys until everything becomes manageable. The summit is not reached through moderation alone. It requires commitment, preparation, discomfort, persistence, and, at times, an acceptance that the conditions will be difficult.
The outdoors does not diminish my professional ambition. It strengthens it. It gives it perspective, discipline, and energy. It reminds me that effort is not something to be avoided; when directed toward something meaningful, it is often the point.
Sport Before the Industry
Before sport became an industry of rights packages, recruiting systems, NIL strategies, audience analytics, creator platforms, and content calendars, it was fundamentally about movement. It was about using your body, testing yourself against distance or terrain, learning what you could handle, and sharing the experience with others who had chosen to do the same.
That is still what draws me to outdoor sport. Running, cycling, skiing, hiking, and open-water swimming have each given me something different over the years. Together, they have brought comfort, challenge, success, pain, loss, perspective, and community.
A long run can make a difficult business problem seem less fixed than it did an hour earlier. A ride can create enough space for an idea to develop without forcing it. Skiing can restore the simple pleasure of being fully engaged in the present, where the terrain and conditions demand your attention. Hiking slows the world down, while open-water swimming offers a more immediate lesson in focus, composure, and respect for the surrounding environment.
Those experiences do not remove the pressure of work. They put it into perspective and fuel the internal drive that makes sustained work possible.
A Colorado Sense of Place
I was born and raised in Colorado, and I still feel a powerful gravitational pull toward its outdoor lifestyle and culture whenever I return. The landscape has a way of making the world feel both larger and clearer: mountains that reset your sense of scale, weather that reminds you that you are not in control, and long stretches of trail or road that reward patience more than speed.
Colorado remains magical to me not simply because it is where I grew up, but because it shaped some of my earliest understanding of what sport could be. The outdoors was never merely a setting for activity. It was part of the experience itself, a place that demanded preparation, instilled humility, and made achievement feel earned.
The mountains taught me that progress often happens gradually. You reach a summit, complete a long ride, or navigate a difficult run not through a single burst of effort, but by continuing to move forward when the work becomes uncomfortable. They also taught me that the best experiences are often shared: meeting someone at a trailhead before sunrise, riding alongside a friend through changing weather, or recounting a difficult day over food afterward.
Those lessons have stayed with me, even as my professional life has moved into very different environments.
A Change of Scenery
Since relocating from New York to northwest Connecticut, I have found another version of that connection. It is different from Colorado, but it has become equally meaningful in its own way.
The wooded trails, quiet roads, lakes, and changing seasons create an outdoor life that feels close and accessible rather than distant or dramatic. A run can begin directly from home. A bike ride can become an extended stretch of solitude and thinking. A hike can transform an ordinary afternoon. A skin up a nearby ski hill offers a quick reset, while an open-water swim can make the rest of the day feel more grounded.
What I appreciate most is that the outdoor world here has become woven into daily life. It is not something reserved for a major trip, a special occasion, or a carefully planned weekend. It is part of the rhythm of where we live. That accessibility has created a genuine sense of peace and happiness while connecting us with people who understand the value of being active outdoors.
There is a particular kind of community that grows around outdoor sport. It is less concerned with status and more grounded in shared effort. People show up for the same early rides, choose the same difficult routes, wave or exchange a friendly word when passing, wait out the same weather, and learn to appreciate the small rituals that make a life outdoors sustainable over time.
What the Work Can Learn
The relationship between my professional world and my outdoor life is not a contradiction. In many ways, it is the point.
I believe deeply in the potential of technology, AI, data, media, and new business models to improve sports. Those tools can help people navigate complex systems, increase access to useful information, reduce administrative friction, tell more meaningful stories, and make participation easier for athletes, families, coaches, schools, and communities.
But technology should strengthen the human experience of sport rather than replace it.
Sports organizations often speak about engagement, retention, belonging, wellness, participation, and community. Outdoor sport offers a powerful reminder that those ideas cannot be reduced to a metric, a marketing campaign, or an optimized funnel. People remain connected to sport because it gives them a reason to move, an opportunity to challenge themselves, a group to belong to, and memories that are difficult to replicate elsewhere.
The strongest sports organizations of the future will understand that their responsibility goes beyond attracting attention. Their real work is to create the conditions for people to participate, progress, connect, and develop a lasting relationship with a sport and the communities around it.
That is true whether the organization is a youth program, a college athletic department, an endurance event, a ski destination, a swim club, a professional league, or a media platform.
The event matters. The platform matters. The business model matters. But what matters most is the life people can build and the connections they can form around those experiences.
Returning to Center
I do not want less ambition in my work. I want ambition that remains connected to something real.
I enjoy the city, the meetings, the work of building, the negotiations, and the challenge of helping ideas become durable businesses or institutions. I want to continue working where sports, technology, media, and culture intersect, particularly when there is an opportunity to build systems that are more useful and more humane than those that came before.
At the same time, I sometimes dream about returning to my days as a ski bum or ski and snowboard instructor. I think about what it would mean to work in a role that helped more people get outside and discover that rare, magical moment of weightlessness—when worry, deadlines, rings, beeps, and the constant hum of a connected world fall away.
I also know that I think best when I remain connected to the world beyond the screen.
Running reminds me that progress is built through consistency. Cycling creates distance from the immediate pressure of a problem and often makes the answer easier to see. Skiing demands presence because hesitation and distraction rarely serve you well. Hiking teaches patience and attentiveness. Open-water swimming reminds me that uncertainty can be uncomfortable without being dangerous, and that composure is often the difference between panic and possibility.
The outdoors does not pull me away from the work. It gives the work its proper context.
It reminds me that sport is not only an industry to modernize, a property to monetize, or a system to restructure. At its best, sport is a vehicle for confidence, connection, health, courage, friendship, and a fuller life.
That is why, before my day begins in earnest and after the meetings, deadlines, travel, calls, and work of trying to build what comes next, my return to center is outside.
