Last month, the Pro Football Hall of Fame welcomed five new members. Among the class of 2026 is Drew Brees, the former Saints quarterback who led New Orleans to its first Super Bowl win. 

There are many parallels between being a successful quarterback and a successful Athletic Director. As Brees said: “I never saw the position [of quarterback] as one of pressure…but rather one of great responsibility… The quarterback is…the ultimate problem solver.” Most Athletic Directors know exactly what he means. The job demands unwavering optimism and constant, quick problem-solving. School life is dynamic. Coaching is dynamic. Put the two together, and you have a role that requires, in the words of Brees, “a steady hand.” Three moments from his speech in particular are worth sitting with. 

You Are an Ambassador 

“The greatest teams in the history of sports are the ones who accept the responsibility of being a true representation of their city/country/community.” 

When Drew Brees spoke about New Orleans, you could feel his pride. His tribute to the Big Easy ranged from crawfish étouffée to the city’s resilience after Hurricane Katrina. Brees used the moment to praise the city’s values, not his own achievements. But the impact ran both ways. A Louisiana Children’s Museum CEO put it well when she thanked him “for the role modeling that you have done for families all throughout our city, our region and our country.” 

An Athletic Director carries a similar responsibility in a school community. Athletics is one of a school’s most visible, public-facing programs. ADs interact regularly with students, parents, coaches, opposing schools, and members of the broader community. Every interaction, from how they welcome a visiting team to how they handle a difficult parent conversation, communicates something about the program’s culture and values. The strongest Athletic Directors recognize they are constantly telling the story of their school through the standards they set and the way their program conducts itself. 

So many Athletic Directors get consumed by the day-to-day that they neglect the role of representative. But if they don’t champion the program, coaches won’t want to coach there, athletes won’t want to play there, and the broader community won’t want to invest in athletics. It hardly matters if the monthly newsletter goes out on schedule if it is merely score reports. And if there genuinely aren’t enough hours in the day to be a representative on top of administrative tasks, that’s a sign the department needs more personnel, not that the AD should let this responsibility slide. 

The best thing Athletic Directors can do is solicit and reflect on athletes’ stories. You will observe lifelong friendships that began on the field. You will watch a shy freshman find their voice as a team captain, or a struggling student discover the one part of their day that still makes sense. 

Just as Drew Brees’s reflection on New Orleans brought him to tears, Athletic Directors can draw from this well of inspiration to motivate themselves and energize their community. Being an independent school AD is about being a representation of what the program, and the school, stands for. Hopefully the AD is just as excited to utter the school’s motto as Brees is to say “Who dat.” 

Excuses Won’t Get You Where You Want to Go 

“You reach a point in your career where you stop making excuses… it’s usually a moment or an event where you flip a switch or make a very conscious decision, and it becomes part of your being.” 

Brees offered that reflection right after telling a story about two Chargers coaches. “I was coming off a tough game, and as we watched the tape together, they asked me: ‘Hey, why didn’t you throw to this receiver? He’s wide open.’ My response was, ‘I couldn’t see him.’ The tape paused. They glared at me and said, ‘It’s your job to see.'” 

We recently surveyed over 50 Athletic Directors who reported working an average of 65 or more hours a week during competition season. It would be easy for an AD to explain away something that fell through the cracks. But successful ADs understand that excuses, however valid, don’t get you where you want to go. This doesn’t mean successful ADs are infallible. It means they take responsibility for mistakes and figure out how to keep them from happening again. 

This starts with separating your value from your work. It is easier to take responsibility for a mistake when you don’t experience it as an indictment on your character. Say a parent comes to you upset that last week’s newsletter failed to mention the soccer team’s regional championship. You might be tempted to point to your assistant AD, who proofread the newsletter and said nothing. Or you may be tempted to tell the parent they are overreacting. 

None of that moves the program forward. If you can see the mistake as a professional oversight rather than a personal failing, it becomes much easier to accept responsibility. That might mean apologizing to the parent and the team, then sending out a special addendum. Longer term, it might mean building a system that ensures accomplishments like this one never miss the next issue. 

As Brees put it, make this your moment to “flip a switch” and stop letting excuses keep you from becoming the AD you want to be. 

Sports are More than Sports 

“Youth sports and especially high school football should always be about character and leadership development, teamwork and positive affiliation. May we never forget that!” 

If you asked them directly, 99% of Athletic Directors would say interscholastic sports are about more than winning. But 99% don’t always act like it. In today’s hypercompetitive sports landscape, it’s hard to drown out the noise of club teams, college scholarships, and parental pressure long enough to remember the real purpose of youth athletics. 

That’s what makes Brees’s speech so striking. It comes from one of the greatest football players of all time, reflecting on a Hall of Fame career, and he spent almost no time talking about the personal satisfaction of victory. Instead, he talked about the people who got him there and the lessons he learned along the way. The greatest win of his career earned about as much airtime in his speech as the smell of crawfish étouffée. If that’s what stuck with him about a Superbowl MVP, it’s worth paying attention to. 

Brees’s plea is a good prompt to audit your own program. Do you have an athletic mission statement? A clear set of values you actively promote, not just ones written down somewhere? Do you know where you land when priorities collide, like participation versus winning, or talent versus seniority in playing time decisions? Just as many schools have a “portrait of a graduate,” an athletic program needs the same clarity. It should be unmistakable what the program stands for and how it makes decisions when those priorities conflict. 

Conclusion 

Hall of Fame speeches offer a unique kind of clarity. Athletes are often asked to speak at the height of their career or in the glow of a big win, and those moments are necessarily short-sighted. Success is still unfolding. There’s little distance from which to judge what actually mattered. A Hall of Fame speech is different. It’s retrospective by nature, delivered once a full career is in view, and it carries something of the same power as words from someone who knows they’re dying. People are drawn to these moments because we want to know what actually matters once the dust settles. 

For Drew Brees, it wasn’t the trophy. It was the people, the responsibility, and the chance to represent something bigger than himself. Athletic Directors carry that same chance every day. Represent your school as though the whole community is watching, because it is. Stop treating valid excuses as good enough, because your program deserves better. And build character on purpose, because sport alone won’t do it for you.