Two LEAD Summits, One Wild Year and Goal Setting

This past weekend we wrapped LEAD Houston, and I'm still riding the high a few days later — which, if you know me, is unusual. Normally after three and a half straight days of confidence seminars, teenage girls, their parents, their coaches, and roughly a thousand small logistical fires that only I am apparently licensed to put out, I am a human puddle for a week. This time? I feel like I could run a fifth summit tomorrow. (I will not be doing that. Kristen would quit.)

Here's why this one hit different: Houston marked the first time in LEAD's history that we ran two summits in one calendar year — Minneapolis in August, then Houston in September, each one three and a half days of swim clinics, sport psychology, and confidence work. Between the two, we had 100 girls come through the program. It's been years since we hit that number, and next year LEAD officially turns 10 — we lost a year to the pandemic along the way, so it feels good to finally make up the gap.

For anyone newer to the newsletter, a little of LEAD's origin story: the idea came from our founder, Kara Lynn Joyce, who'd come across an Ernst & Young study that found 95% of women in executive and C-suite roles had played sports growing up, many of them through college. The question that came out of that: what if we took everything an athlete gets once she makes a national or Olympic team — sports psychologists, confidence training, nutritionists, real professional support — and gave it to girls at 13 to 18, years before any of them are anywhere near that level? Pair that with mentors like Lilly King, Phoebe Bacon, and Anna Peplowski, and you get something that genuinely doesn't exist anywhere else in youth sports. We came up with the idea in late 2016, launched the first summit in Austin in 2017, and ten years later I'm apparently telling the story in a company newsletter instead of just cornering people with it at parties (I still also do that).

Doing two summits in one year was a big swing, and it was hard — but hard, worthwhile things tend to show you what you're capable of. It showed our team at CG Sports, and the team at LEAD Sports Co, what we can actually pull off, and it's got all of us thinking bigger for 2027 and 2028 — I'd already had a first call with a potential 2027 partner before I'd fully unpacked from Houston.

It's also got me thinking about goal-setting in general. One thing I've noticed at this company: when we set a goal, we usually hit it. Where I think we can actually get better isn't the goal itself — it's the timeline. More often than not, I think we give ourselves more time than we really need to get there. I don't think the fix is "think bigger" — I think it's "give yourself less time," which is a much less inspiring poster but probably the more honest one. I'll be spending the rest of September chewing on that, and not just for LEAD — for our clients, for the business, and for a few things of my own.

Ten years ago, I didn't think LEAD would grow into what it's become. We've now given over 1,000 girls a genuinely one-of-a-kind experience — I'd put it up against any camp in any youth or Olympic sport, not just swimming. And it's not only the girls who leave different: the Olympians and national teamers who come coach at LEAD almost always go on to have one of their best seasons afterward. Turns out pouring into the next generation is good for everybody's stroke count.