Jade McCarthy: A Leader In Sports
By WILLIAM INOUE, KEVIN THANT, and ARJUN VELAN
There was an air of excitement hovering in Love Gym as everyone anxiously waited for the arrival of Jade McCarthy. Everyone there wanted to see what it took and what it looked like for someone to become a famous world-class athlete. Last Tuesday, we were blessed with the opportunity to meet someone just like that.
McCarthy, a twenty-year journalist veteran, and Emmy Award winner for her series GameChangers. Her journey with journalism began back in college, where she took a journalism class and interned for journalism. Since then McCarthy has interviewed people from Billie Jean King to Michael Phelps, along with covering many different winning sports teams.
McCarthy centered her speech around leadership through the phrase she built: “Let’s just go succeed because the clock’s ticking. I think you got to love, you got to have joy, you got to grind, you got to serve, you got to believe, and you have to remember it’s contagious and that time keeps moving forward.”
This phrase is how she views leadership and the values that are significant to it. She furthers the importance of leadership by adding, “Leadership can bring a group or person upward, and it can have the exact opposite effect if it’s poor or ineffective leadership.”
She adds to the importance of the 3 Cs in leadership, a clear vision, communication, and consistency. “The vision, it has to be really simple. You have to communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate until you think you’ve over-communicated it. And you have to do it consistently from top to bottom. Everybody has to know exactly what it’s and what you’re after, that’s important.” Hearing this from head coaches and executives, all attesting to how important the 3 Cs are to great leadership.
As a sports reporter, McCarthy has reported on some of the most inspirational people on the planet. “It’s the high school coach who was battling cancer and wasn’t gonna quit on his team.He was still out there coaching. Or it was this dad who had a severely, disabled son and he would take him out for runs in the jogging stroller — he realized that that was bringing joy to his son, so they wound up competing in triathlons together,” she highlighted.
But for McCarthy, it wasn’t enough to tell these stories to the rest of the world. As a motivational speaker, she now shares her stories with people just like the students of Exeter. “For me, I was like, ‘What’s next?’ I want to figure out what else I can do and how else I can continue to learn to serve. Then, I want to figure out how I can share some of those lessons that I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of.
“It was inspiring hearing somebody that has seen leadership on the highest levels of athletics talk about it,” said senior Jaylen Bennett.
“I’ve been blessed to be able to have conversations with all these people who have done [leadership] at such high levels in the professional sports world,” McCarthy shared.
“She told stories about all these players I used to watch on TV in her talk and it was moving,” highlighted prep Luke Sanders.
For McCarthy, however, her journey toward journalism has not always been straightforward. From wanting to host a morning show to getting on SportsCenter to now being a motivational speaker, nothing was linear for Jade McCarthy. “I guess I would say hold your expectations loosely, because if you put too much weight on what you expect something is going to be, then sometimes you don’t realize what’s staring you in the face. And that’s a pretty darn good thing a lot of times as long as you’re putting the work in, grinding for it, and love it,” she shared.
In a closing statement, McCarthy said, “You have to live forwardly. You have to focus forward. You can’t get complacent in victory and you can’t dwell and defeat doubt. You have to keep moving, right? You have to say, ‘Okay, I’m gonna improve upon the wins and I’m gonna learn from the losses and I’m gonna take all those things.’” As McCarthy has restated time and time again, leadership is not only reliant on how you lead through wins but also through adversity and presenting your best self to your team.
“And I’m going to recognize that how I live every day and how I lead is contagious to the people around me. And we only have this certain window of time and it keeps moving forward. So you got to make the most of it. You have to do it all the time. So let’s just go succeed because the clock’s ticking. Love, joy, rhyme, serve, believe it’s contagious and it’s time. Time’s yours.”
