Jim Tressel Story:

Jim Tressel is the recently retired president of Youngstown State University, and former head football coach at The Ohio State University. His tenure as head coach came to a sudden end in 2011 after National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) violations by players. After this unexpected development, Tressel was forced to reexamine the remainder of his career.

His entire professional life had been guided by hard work and helping others, and as he moved forward, Tressel remained committed to his core values. “I always wanted to have that opportunity to think what was next, now it ushered in a little bit more quickly,” said Tressel. He lost his coaching position over Memorial Day and within a week, “I kept getting all of these calls asking me to come do this or that with other people and I said, ‘You know what, I’m not doing anything until I read 100 books.’ I started that, and I got up to about 30 books and I didn’t want any of them to be about sports.”

Some companies respected his plan and suggested some reading about their own industry. “I had gotten calls from Chesapeake Energy. They had wanted me to come on because they were going to start getting this plan in Ohio. They thought I might be a natural with them to develop it. So, they gave me three books. All of a sudden, I got into energy. I got to about 32 books and I was feeling good about what I was learning.”

But a few months, he got a call from Jim Caldwell, coach of the Indianapolis Colts. “He called me and said, ‘Hey you know, we’re not going to have Peyton Manning, we’re going to be terrible. Could you come and help me a little bit? I’d like to win a couple games.’ What’s funny is that Jim is a voracious reader. Riding on the bus to a game, he’d be reading a book. I asked him how he became such a reader and he said that his parents demanded such good grades, and he went to the University of Iowa and played football.” Tressel explained. “There was no question he was going to have good grades, but he wanted to go out with the fellas at night. He came up with a way to get all of his homework done whether he was riding the bus on the way to class,” said Tressel.

Tressel hadn’t reached his 100-book goal yet, so he had some reservations. “Jim said, ‘You can work from home and just come three days a week.’ Columbus and Indianapolis aren’t far. I asked him to let me think about it, then I asked my wife because I had made this commitment. She said, ‘Do it. I’m tired of you being around here seven days a week. Get out of here. If you ask me one more time, ‘What are you doing today?’ For our sake, it was time. So, I did it.”

His decision became pivotal. “It made it clear to me that one, I didn’t want to do this,” Tressel said. “It really affirmed that it was time to take on something new and grow. But I had no idea what that was going to be. As the season was going on, I was pretty clear at the end of the season that after I had this experience it was time to move on.”

Tressel had a lot of opportunities to consider. “In December I was getting calls from head hunters about small college presidencies.” Tressel had attended a small Ohio School, Baldwin-Wallace College, where his father was the football coach. “I was a small college guy, in fact. I had a guy from Connecticut stop at my house in Columbus and he was the President of Trustees at Wittenberg University. I had never thought of that, but I knew I wanted to be in education. He told me he wanted me to interview with their committee in Columbus and they would be downtown in a hotel with 22 people.” He interviewed for the job and said, “When I got home, my buddies from Baldwin-Wallace called me and said that they heard I interviewed with Wittenberg, who was their rival. They said, ‘Our presidency is open, you better come interview for ours.’”

So Tressel interviewed at Baldwin-Wallace. “I went back to Columbus and got a call from the president of the University of Akron, where I had got my Master’s. He called and asked me to come and meet with him and that I ought to work with them.” I said, “That’s funny that you mention that because I just interviewed for these two. I don’t even know if I’m going to make it to the next step.” I agreed to visit with him. Northeast Ohio was home, and Akron was the one that gave me my first chance and there was some sentiment there. I went and met with him and he asked me to come on as a vice president. I went home and that night, the two schools called back and said that I was in the final three and I have an on-campus interview. Now, I’m scared because I didn’t know if I could do this.” However, he chose to take it. “None of it was orchestrated,” he said. “It was all studying what is next.”

From here, even though he was learning what the university needed, he didn’t feel like he was under what he calls duress. “What I think we need in life is for the game to slow down and not feel the duress so that we can do what we have to do and stay focused. Execute what we have to and not allow the duress to affect our performance. I remember William White who played at Ohio State, telling me when he was with the Atlanta Falcons. He talked about the key to being successful is to just slow the game down. Slow it down and understand what’s going on. He said that the same thing is true in life. Slow the game of life down so that you can make good decisions and execute.”

Tressel learned and improved in this new venture. After two years at the University of Akron, Tressel became the President of Youngstown State University. One of his biggest frustrations from coaching, the NCAA scandal, followed him to higher education, too. “People would talk about my players that did this or that. So often, not publicly, I would be like, ‘If you would have grown up where he did and had the same role-modeling, or lack thereof, you would have gotten to the point where he is now.’ I said to my department chairs, ‘Guys, the only thing I’d like you to be willing to do is make sure you and your faculty treat every kid exactly the way you would treat your own children with those expectations because I know all of your kids are brilliant.”

He urged the faculty to be more hands-on. “Make sure they are managing their class schedule while involved with internships and extra-curricula’s. Don’t wait three weeks to find out if they went to class. If they are five minutes late to the first class, you’ll nip that right there because that is not what is expected or what it’s going to take to be successful. If you just do that with all of your students, you’ll be fine.’ There are some faculty that do just that. But there are some faculty that think, ‘Hey, they’re big boys, they’re adults.’ There are some students that think they’re adults and don’t want to be told what to do. It’s not easy for us. There are some, at our college, that feel as if those habits should have been developed by now and that’s not our job. Our job is to take them to the elite intellectual level. If they don’t want to do it then, that’s their problem.”

During a guest lecture on the economics of sports, a student asked Tressel, “‘What’s different about what you did all those years in coaching and what you’re doing now?’ I said, ‘There are so many things that are similar, but one observational difference I have is as a coach, if we succeeded it was because we had a really good performance by our players. If we didn’t succeed, it was the coaching. That was just our mentality. What I’ve learned in higher ed is that if the students didn’t succeed, they weren’t prepared, and it was their problem. If they did succeed, it was the brilliance of the faculty member. So, it’s just the opposite mindset.’”

Growing up, Tressel said, “There was nothing more important in my life than education and college education.” He said he was heavily influenced by his grandfather. “I watched my grandfather, who was a farmer, herd dairy cattle, and there was no such thing as a day off. We were up at 5 o’clock to milk cows and then we were up again in the early evening and worked in between, and that was seven days a week. My father went on and became a teacher and coach. My grandfather never had a chance to watch him coach. My dad left the farm environment, but he wanted to make sure we understood the farm environment. So, our vacation when we were little kids, every summer, we got sent to the farm individually and we worked for a week to understand. They assumed it would be a great experience. So, just to watch the work ethic that it takes. My father wasn’t a farmer, but he had those exact same qualities in his work. My mom, who was not a professional, spent every day of her life serving somebody, whether it was us, the PTA, or the community. Every single day, she was working extremely hard to make it a better place.”

From his upbringing and his professional experience, he has distilled his learning into five guiding principles. “There are five non-negotiables and I always give them to them in descending order. The fifth important one is work ethic. I’ve never seen anyone great that didn’t work extremely hard. I’ve never seen a great team that didn’t work extremely hard.

“Number four in my list is talent,” continued Tressel. “You’ve got to become competent in what you do. You’ve got to have some talent. I could practice basketball all day long and I’m not playing for the Cavs,” he went on. “My number three is curiosity. I’ve seen people work hard, develop their competencies, have capable talent, but they’ve lost the curiosity to get better and someone ended up beating them. Curiosity is a non-negotiable and it’s even more important than work ethic and talent.

“My number two is grit. I’ve seen teams who worked hard, who were talented, who were curious, constantly studying the films and trying to find ways to get better, but they got hit in the mouth and they couldn’t handle it. They didn’t have that ability to deal with adversity. They hadn’t thought about it in advance. The one thing we talked a lot about to our teams was that I say, ‘I’m old enough now that I can predict the future and I guarantee you, here is your future. It’s going to be combination of things you hoped for, trained for, and wished for, going exactly the way you thought it would and some things that you can’t believe the way that they happened. It’s going to be a combination of the two and it is the ones that you didn’t plan for that twill determine how close to reaching your potential you can get.’’

Tressel’s number one non-negotiable is, “You have to be selfless. That’s hard as humans. We’re all selfish by nature, but you have to work together as a team. You have to work hard at trying to be selfless and that is difficult. It’s not just something you say, ‘Well, I hope to be selfless.’ You’ve got to think about ways to be selfless. You’ve got to have constant dialogue and recognize selfless activity.

“Those are kind of my five non-negotiables,” Tressel concluded. “In education, sometimes I’m afraid that we spend so much time trying to give temporary knowledge. They don’t need us for knowledge, they need us for ‘What’s it going to take to make it in this tough life?’ It’s difficult for us, as educators, because chances are that most of us had no problem in school, most of us had a pretty good life with not a lot of duress. Yet, we’re being assigned to help someone along, but we’ve never been in their moccasins,” Being selfless is a start, he said, because it generates empathy and the compassion necessary to understand others who come from different circumstances. “To feel it,” he said. “To recognize their opinion and where they’re coming from.