It's How We Play the Game

by Ed Stack

  At first glance, and maybe in most cases, that makes sense. But here we were taking a baseball that we could get for a fraction of its retail cost and selling it to the foundation for exactly what it cost us. The foundation’s money went much further. It could buy more balls. Dick’s merely served as a conduit for the product. I remember saying to our general counsel, “So you’re telling me that we could go to Sports Authority, our competitor, and pay much more money for the same stuff, and we’d be fine donating it?”

  “That’s what you have to do,” he answered. “We can’t buy it from ourselves.”

  What we elected to do in that case was leave the foundation’s money untouched and just donate product straight from Dick’s.

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  Sports Matter required a more ambitious style of giving. In 2014, the foundation launched its own crowdfunding site to give away millions of dollars to the most at-risk youth sports programs we could find. The following year, we found a more sustainable means of helping public school sports programs in a remarkable crowdfunding organization called DonorsChoose.org. It was started by a high school social studies teacher in the Bronx, Charles Best, who found he was spending a lot of his own money on supplies that his students needed but couldn’t afford. It occurred to Best that people might be willing to help, if they knew exactly how their money was being spent. So in 2000, with the help of his students, he built a website that connected needy classrooms and would-be philanthropists.

  It’s beautifully simple. A teacher in need goes to the DonorsChoose.org website and lists a specific need for his or her class, including a line-item budget. People who want to give go to the site and find a need they’d like to help meet. They can donate as little as a dollar. When the budget for the need has been met, DonorsChoose.org buys the requested supplies and ships them directly to the teacher. And when those supplies are put to use, the donor gets a letter from the teacher (and students, in the case of bigger donations) and a report on exactly how the money helped.

  At first, the program served only those in the New York metropolitan area. But in June 2003, Oprah Winfrey shone a spotlight on DonorsChoose.org, sparking $250,000 in almost overnight donations and so much sustained traffic that, by 2007, the program was available to every public school teacher in the United States.

  It didn’t take a lot of smarts to see that partnering with DonorsChoose.org would get our money to where it was needed most, because the people closest to the needs would be making the requests. We set up our partnership so that we’d match donations to any sports-related request—a project would need to achieve only half its crowdsourced funding before we’d step in with the other half.

  Between 2015 and 2018, the partnership pumped more than $10.5 million into needy programs across the country, directly helping more than 650,000 students. On Giving Tuesday in late November 2018, we committed another $5 million to the effort, to be parceled out over three years. We’ll keep doing it for years to come.

  Apart from our partnership with DonorsChoose.org, our foundation created an in-house community grant program aimed at helping high-poverty schools, leagues, and sports programs. We put up a million dollars in cash for a wide range of uses, from buying equipment to field repairs to subsidizing player participation fees.

  In 2016 alone, Dick’s and the foundation together gave more than $30 million to teams, leagues, community groups, and schools to buy gear. Our customers pitched in, too. In every store, at every register, during every transaction at certain times of the year, they could choose to make a donation to the Sports Matter program. During the 2018 holidays, we also held in-store events starring pro athletes and benefiting more than three hundred underserved kids. Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes II, Eagles linebacker Nigel Bradham, and Phoenix Suns star Devin Booker were among the pros who took kids shopping at Dick’s, giving them a once-in-a-lifetime experience along with the gift of sports.

  * * *

  Sports Matter occupied a lot of our attention. We made it central to our Web presence and to signage around the registers in our stores. But the most successful and surprising of our strategies might have been the stories about real athletes that we put before the public in the form of movies. If you’d told me a few years ago that Dick’s or its foundation would be in the movie business, I’d have called you crazy, but in truth, it just makes sense as part of who we are. When we say that sports change people’s lives for the better, it isn’t pro athletes we’re talking about. It’s amateurs, often kids struggling against all sorts of odds to play, let alone play well. Amateur sports abound with great, dramatic, true stories, and we realized that by telling them well, we could push the message that sports matter far more effectively than if we bought a dozen Super Bowl commercials. We could show that they matter, rather than just insist that they do. We could invite people into the lives of student athletes and, by sharing their pain, uncertainty, commitment, victories, and defeats, as well as the challenges they face off the field, bring home the message that sports are essential to building a vital society and not mere luxuries when it comes to public funding.

  We had no idea how to do this, so we got help. Tribeca Digital Studios, based in New York, pairs with companies or brands to produce content-driven documentaries, legitimate nonfiction film narratives that help their clients make a point. Some are ninety seconds long. Some are full-length movies.

  We teamed with TDS to find and film stories that made our point. The first was a series of short documentaries that followed high school football players preparing for their upcoming season at a weeklong sleepaway summer training camp. The first Hell Week doc took a week of shooting, and we realized, in the process of putting it together, that we liked stories that took a while to tell.

  Philadelphia gave us an opportunity to go even deeper. In 2012, the city’s school district grappled with a shortfall of more than $300 million by instituting its infamous “doomsday budget,” shuttering twenty-four schools, laying off thousands of teachers, and canceling many extracurricular programs, including athletics. Among the schools shut down was Germantown High School, violence plagued and for generations the bitter rival of similarly troubled Martin Luther King High. The stage was set for a great drama. First, the district decreed that Germantown’s students would be attending MLK. That was bound to be stormy. Second, MLK planned to field a football team combining players from both schools, despite (a) the long history of enmity between the two, (b) having no money for the program and no paid coaches on staff, and (c) MLK’s abysmal gridiron record—the school had won just one game in two years.

  It was risky. To begin with, we didn’t know how the experiment would turn out—this wasn’t a story we could script ahead of time. The school’s attempt to unite the two teams into one might fall apart for any number of reasons. The environment was gritty, the players unpredictable. “I educate the kids no one else wants,” as MLK’s principal put it. Half or more of the school’s students failed to graduate. Odds were, it would fall apart.

  But the MLK story epitomized the crises going on all across the country. We decided we’d take it on, and however it came out, it came out. This was real life in an American inner city. Tribeca’s group was equally excited to tell this story. They introduced us to a wonderful filmmaker named Judd Ehrlich. Once he came aboard, our main job was to stay out of Judd’s way, as he and his crew practically moved in with members of the team and its volunteer coach, a laid-off Germantown math teacher named Ed Dunn.

  The result was We Could Be King, a feature-length documentary about the MLK football team’s 2014 season. If you haven’t seen it, you should—I won’t spoil it by telling you how it turns out, except to say that it’s an amazing story, inspirational beyond our hopes, and a great testament to the redemptive power of sports. It’s got a lot of heroes, but none as impressive as Coach Dunn. This guy was so good to these kids, so supportive, and so important to them. As you watch the film, one truth comes to the fore: without football, a lot of these kids a
ren’t going to school. There’s a scene at a school board meeting where a former student says as much, and for me it’s the most profound statement in the movie. Football is the best thing these kids have, their slim tether to self-respect and a future. If they’re not practicing, working hard, what are they doing? It’s tough to get to a good place with the answer. And if you broaden their situation to include kids at the hundreds or thousands of American schools like Martin Luther King High, the importance of sports—and the key role they play in the country’s health five, ten, fifteen years down the road—really hits you.

  We Could Be King premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Four hundred people were in the theater, including the MLK football team, their parents, the principal, Coach Dunn. None of them had seen it. Everyone was blown away. The event’s emcee was Mike Golic, the host of ESPN’s Mike in the Morning and a former Notre Dame and Philadelphia Eagles standout, and when the closing credits finished rolling, he stood up. “You know, I had a pretty good football career,” he said. “But I had one more thing that I wish I could have done in my career. I wish I could have played for you, Coach Dunn.” The place went nuts.

  After that, the movie was shown on ESPN. The New York Times decided it had “a memorable season’s worth of moving stories to tell on and off the field, as rich as any in Friday Night Lights.” That article, and a rush of other press, established a linkage between the movie’s message and Dick’s. “Forget sports equipment and sneakers,” the New York Post wrote. “Dick’s Sporting Goods is focusing on the human drama of athletic competition through movies these days. Via its foundation, which focuses on youth sports, the retailer is generating a lot of buzz.”

  We Could Be King won the 2015 Emmy for Outstanding Sports Documentary, which generated still more media attention, cementing our connection to the film. The overall Sports Matter program also won a Grand Clio—the Oscars of the advertising world—for integrated marketing. Which brings up an interesting question: does this kind of purpose-driven investment in storytelling really work? In terms of making the case that sports matter, there’s no doubt about it. We Could Be King argued the point in ways we, at Dick’s and our foundation, couldn’t. But here’s a benefit that might not be so obvious—being associated with a story that people can get behind, their good feelings about the story rub off on us. We did well by doing good.

  There’s a lesson in that for American business.

  Lauren Hobart, who did a lot to deserve the Emmy statuette she received, got to know the coach and many of his players over the course of filming. She came to really like one kid, a gifted cornerback who, halfway through the season, missed several games because he was jailed in a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. “You know what?” she told him. “You get out of high school and you go to college, and then come see me, and I’ll give you a job.” We’ll have to see what happens, but it could be that the movie will bring us further benefits.

  * * *

  Our experience with We Could Be King made us eager to try another story. Again with Judd Ehrlich at the helm, we focused on a group of Native American girls at upstate New York’s Salmon River High School who were trying to organize an interscholastic lacrosse team, despite fierce resistance from their Mohawk elders, who felt the game was a sacred gift to men, and men alone.

  As producers, our foundation team recognized that women’s lacrosse wouldn’t gain the immediate traction with audiences that football enjoys. But we felt it important to make the point that the transcendent value of sports isn’t restricted to the big four games. You don’t need to pack a stadium to enjoy the benefits of sports.

  So, knowing that the whole film could implode, Judd again glued himself to the students, their parents, their coaches. Some of these kids faced life-and-death challenges off the field. Partway through the season, one girl tried to commit suicide by drinking chlorine bleach. Over time, her lacrosse teammates brought her back to life. The team’s unity of purpose, its camaraderie, restored her. Other kids struggling with self-esteem issues, parenting troubles, and academic woes blossomed over the course of the season. Again, I won’t say too much about what actually happens in the film, but I was amazed at how intimate it was. You can’t help thinking, as you watch it, How on earth did they do this? Judd’s cameras witnessed really private moments that are startling in places and rich throughout. The result, Keepers of the Game, is a terrific movie.

  Our foundation premiered it at Tribeca in 2016. Lauren came up with the idea of assembling a panel to talk about the importance of sports right after the screening. We thought we’d invite 250 people to dinner, to hear this panel of athletes and others involved in sports, and to be honest we worried a little, as we sent out the invitations, about whether we’d get enough panelists. You know what? We got so many positive responses that we put together two panels. John Skipper, the president of ESPN, appeared, and Kevin Plank, founder of Under Armour, and Mark King, president of Adidas North America. Tim Finchem, commissioner of the PGA Tour. Rob Manfred, commissioner of Major League Baseball. Tom Brady, Serena Williams, Missy Franklin, and Jessica Mendoza.

  Hannah Storm, the ESPN anchor, moderated the discussion, and the stories these athletes told about how important sports had been to them, and how vital they were in general, were just fantastic. Serena Williams was a wonderful spokesperson for the cause. Brady was great. “This is so important,” Tim Finchem said. “Why are we not talking about this in the presidential debates?” The event, like the film, attracted another round of wonderful media attention and hammered home the message that sports really do matter in our kids’ lives.

  I’m tremendously proud of Keepers of the Game. I’m so pleased that we were able to tell this story. I hope a lot of people see it. I defy anyone who does to be unmoved and to not understand the stakes involved.

  I’ve always felt, as I suspect my father did, that our country’s most precious natural resource is our children. They’re our future, and right now we’re not investing enough time or money in them. We don’t prioritize their educational, emotional, and social development.

  That’s especially evident at under-budgeted schools serving underserved populations. I believe income inequality is one of the metastasizing cancers in our society, and that its root cause is educational inequality. We need to come together as a nation and make a real priority of providing a quality education for every one of our children, no matter their means. With its wealth and know-how, America should have the best primary education system on the planet. We fall far short of that.

  To nurture, protect, develop, encourage, and empower our most precious natural resource, we must educate our children. Our health as a country and the place we occupy in the world is dependent on it.

  CHAPTER 19 “READ ME THE NASTY ONES”

  In February 2018, when I caught the first word of another mass shooting, this one at a school one county away from our Florida house, I was heartsick. Five years had passed since Newtown, and similar shootings had happened with growing regularity since. Yet as a society, we were no closer to solving the issue of gun violence in America. In fact, we were probably further from meaningful dialogue than we’d ever been.

  The response to these terrible events had become numbingly predictable. In Washington, both political parties went right to their respective playbooks, and the media did the same. Networks and newspapers would crank out stories that bolstered whichever side they’d hitched their wagons to. And so there was never any serious effort to sit down and discuss the problem, let alone seek a solution. Everyone would talk past each other until another controversy came along, after which the matter would be dropped. John Boehner had been right.

  Now, inevitably, it had happened again. I turned on the TV in my office and watched the coverage from Parkland, Florida. Saw aerial footage of kids filing out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, escorted by police. Listened as reporters repeated a few scant details of what had happened inside the building. Felt my heart sink as
it became clear that many students, and perhaps a few teachers, were dead. Waited, along with many at Dick’s, for a mention of the shooter’s name.

  It was Valentine’s Day.

  As that afternoon unfolded, more details of the tragedy emerged. Seventeen students and teachers were dead. An equal number had been wounded. It appeared the shooter was a former student at the school, who was arrested as he walked home through a nearby neighborhood. I don’t recall whether we had the gunman’s name by the time Donna and I took off for Florida, but we were both preoccupied on the flight; our conversation centered on the day’s news. I remember feeling deeply saddened and thinking that something had to be done to stop the madness. Something had to be done.

  And a thought came to me that wasn’t entirely welcome. Maybe we were part of the problem. Maybe the fact that we did everything by the book didn’t matter. Maybe that was merely an excuse, a justification. We went through corporate torture every time one of these incidents happened, worried sick that we’d sold the means to cause harm. Why keep doing this?

  We hadn’t been long on the ground when I sent an email to Lauren Hobart, who by now was our president, and Lee Belitsky, our CFO. “Lauren/Lee,” it read, “I would like us to develop a plan to exit the gun business.”