- Support for this program was provided by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey... [mellow music] PSE&G, proud sponsors of "Pathway to Success"... JCP&L, and the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, working together to build a stronger community for all.

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[upbeat jazzy music] ♪ ♪ - Hello and welcome to "Pathway to Success."

Your host, John Harmon, Founder, President and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

My guest today is David Williams, who is the Director of Diversity & Inclusion for the United States Tennis Association, Eastern District.

So welcome today, my friend.

And I want to talk a little bit about your upbringing in East Orange, New Jersey.

And then we'll get into what you did prior to USTA.

- I appreciate you having me here today to talk a little bit about myself, my work, and the things that USTA Eastern is doing.

So I grew up in East Orange, New Jersey.

I grew up basically in a family full of educators.

So my mother has been a career educator.

She has two Masters degrees, one in Early Childhood Education, the other in Career Guidance Counseling.

My aunt, she was also a career educator in the East Orange school systems, and retired at Gordon Parks Academy after roughly 30 years.

My grandmother in the school, she went to private school actually in Florida.

So and then my father, he was-- he converted to Judaism.

So I remember him going to different churches, even in the north area, here, and preaching, preaching the gospel, preaching the Word.

So he was a lecturer and a teacher.

I was surrounded by people who had strong educational backgrounds and also strong careers.

- So where did you go to college and did you play sports competitively?

- So after high school, I basically went directly into professional career.

I started working at AT&T, straight out of high school.

And I was in the Customer Service Department.

That's where I started.

And I worked my way up.

After I worked my way up, I went back to school.

And I went to the University of Phoenix for online courses.

And I got my degree in Business Management.

I also went to George Washington University.

It's a program that they had come in AT&T where I can get a Masters in Project Management, a Masters certification, so I did that.

And I took advantage of other programs through the company.

I got my Business Marketing degree or a Business Marketing certification as well, from St. John's University.

So in that, and then studying process and process quality and process quality management and improvement and things like that.

So those kinds of programs helped me along in my career journey.

I was able to apply them directly to the jobs that I was in.

- And your wife, Michelle Gadsden-Williams, she's the new Chief of Diversity and Inclusion Officer of BlackRock, the world's largest asset management company.

You've got to be excited, not only about the things that your family, your mother, your aunt, your sister, your dad and others.

Again, let's talk a little bit about the Ceiling Breakers, the organization that you and your wife founded.

- Yeah, so we decided to off-ramp from our corporate roles and we became entrepreneurs.

And we started Ceiling Breakers together.

Ceiling Breakers is basically, yeah, it was a company that we designed to provide, you know, pathways and information, sage advice to upcoming professionals and professionals of color.

What we did was we really tapped out to the magnates of industry, right, so whether they were celebrities, top corporate professionals, you know, athletes, whomever, people who worked in politics.

We wanted to get them to provide information to us on how they made it to the top, how they became ceiling breakers.

And then we would record them, we would write stories about them, and then make that available to the general population.

We also incorporated our diversity and inclusion work into Ceiling Breakers too.

So we had contracts with financial services companies.

We would help them with their mentoringship programs, their mentorship programs, their sponsorships.

Maybe establishing business resource groups, help them come up with a diversity and inclusion strategy.

- The two of you worked in corporate America.

What was it like?

How did you arrive at that decision, "let's do our own thing"?

- Yeah, so that's a big decision, right?

Because you have a steady paycheck coming in, you know?

And here we are now having to, you know, go chase invoices.

We have to be responsible for our own health insurance and life insurance.

So it's a pretty major decision.

But on the plus side, you're now in charge of making your own decisions in terms of what work you go after and the kind of work you do, you know-- what you procure and how you succeed.

I mean, you're pretty much limitless in terms of how you can navigate and take your company forward.

And we then said, okay, well, maybe you know, we did it.

We put some people to work.

We produced a Broadway play, co-produced it.

And we got into the celebrity entertainment business to provide capital funding for their projects, to fund their projects to take them forward, so-- but you realize, you know, you have to sustain, you want to sustain the lifestyle that you had.

So we decided, okay, well, maybe we'll try the corporate thing again, but look for careers and roles that would make us happy.

- Share with us a little bit about Touchcast.

What was that all about?

- So I started Touchcast shortly after we got back from Basel, Switzerland.

That's another story I'll tell you.

And I became the Vice President of Programming.

Now, Touchcast was attractive to me because it was a technical startup.

And they were getting into this field of diversity and inclusion.

It was a project that was very close to the owner.

You know, he was-- he felt discrimination, being Jewish, and he wanted to do something about it.

He started this company and he wanted to provide this training, diversity and inclusion training.

And he wanted to do it in a way that it was called-- we like to call it a persistent intervention.

And that meant that you can constantly, if you were a company and you took on this training, we were constantly providing you content and information.

The video in and of itself, was extremely dynamic.

It was unparalleled because it looked like a movie.

But then along with it came a lot of analytical reports.

So if a company was able to get the service or use the service, it was on a subscription based, what they would do is then we could see where the employees were most interested in the content.

And if they, you know, they were really interested in African American-type information or information that was pertinent to that segment of the population, to that demographic, or maybe other abled people, then we can make sure that we provided more content around those specific subjects.

So it was really unique and innovative in the way that we went about doing it.

And that's what attracted me to the role.

I learned a lot about people's experiences because we interviewed quite a few people.

And they talked about what unconscious bias looked like, what microaggressions looked like in their workspace.

And this was a way for us to do something about it.

- So, a guy growing up in East Orange, New Jersey.

Switzerland, the Alps-- did you ski?

Tell us a little bit about that experience.

- So, that journey over to Switzerland.

So Michelle gets the offer of a lifetime to go to Switzerland.

She gets to get to the top job if we make the move.

At this time, we're living in Somerset, New Jersey.

I'm, you know, duly employed with AT&T.

Love my role.

Love my job.

And she says, "We have to move overseas for me."

I said, "As long as it's for the top job, I will retire.

I'll take early retirement and I'll move over there with you."

So we packed up.

We took our little dog, Miles, our Yorkshire Terrier, and we moved overseas.

And we lived in Basel, Switzerland.

What started as a three-year assignment turned out to be close to ten years.

And I really enjoyed it there.

I felt this sense of grounding.

It allowed me to decompress from AT&T.

I didn't realize that I needed that after working there for 20 years and doing the work that I had done.

I needed to kind of like, just kind of find myself, and I was able to do that.

I wrote a book called "I Want to Play Golf."

It's for children.

And you know, I found myself just really enriching myself in the culture, in the lifestyle and everything that Basel had to offer.

- Well, that's a fascinating story.

So--but now, you know, as Director of Diversity & Inclusion for United States Tennis Association, how did you land that job?

- So now, at this point in my career, we've come back and we've done Ceiling Breakers and we sold Ceiling Breakers.

A friend of mine, actually, who I used to play tennis with, I used to volunteer.

I started on a voluntary basis working with his tennis programs as a coach.

And he said, you know, there's this role open in USTA Eastern.

It fits in line with your experiences.

He said, you know, let's, you know, maybe you want to reach out and try to see if you can land the role.

And I said, okay, why not?

So I applied for it.

And I got a call back shortly after.

And you know, I was really, really excited about that because now I'm like, wow, I'm in tennis.

I'm back in sports.

I grew up playing tennis.

You know, that was really one of the first sports I started to excel at.

Number one with my mother playing and taking lessons, so I had that representation there.

So I had someone like me and my family gravitating to it.

So I naturally started to gravitate to it.

But then now I have this role where I'm, you know, around tennis all the time.

And I'm also combining the skill and you know, exercising this muscle of my diversity knowledge in with the same place.

So that's why I'm excited about this role and the work that I'm doing.

- So we're going to take our first break here.

We'll be back in a minute.

- The African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey is your pathway to success.

We encourage you to visit our website at www.aaccnj.com or call us at 609-571-1620.

We are your strategic partners for success.

- Welcome back to "Pathway to Success."

I'm your host, John Harmon, Founder, President and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

I'm really enjoying my conversation today with David Williams, who is the Director of Diversity & Inclusion for the United States Tennis Association, Eastern District.

So David, tell us a little bit about, you know, your day-to-day activities, any initiatives and programs as it relates, not only to diversity inclusion, but programming for youth here in New Jersey and in the region.

- Yeah, so this is really what wakes me up in the morning.

USTA Eastern is one of 17 sections of the United States Tennis Association, which is the governing body of tennis.

And, you know, I focus on a few pillars, strategic pillars.

One is around the image and branding of USTA Eastern.

Making sure that everyone who wants to learn and understand about the organization can see, you know, this is who we are and this is how we're represented.

So making sure that our assets are well-represented in the public spaces.

I also make sure that we have strong strategic partnerships and community engagement.

So that for me means reaching out to different communities to make sure that anyone who wants to play, okay, and promote the game, has an opportunity to do so.

So a lot of times, we offer low-cost adult lessons at community and parks.

We started to do that in New Jersey.

It's just a pilot but it's really starting to catch on.

We have players who've really picked up a racquet for the very first time.

And now they're enjoying it so much that they want to, you know, continue through lessons and possibly join some of our leagues.

So we see that strategic partnerships with for example, hospitals, Mount Sinai, and other organizations that, you know, align with the sports and active lifestyle, which is very important.

I make sure that from a procurement standpoint, our suppliers are diverse.

I also make sure that our staff and our Board is trained on diversity and inclusion and what that means and what it means to be an ally.

I also work with what we call our NJTLs, our National Junior Tennis and Learning organizations.

Now this was started by Arthur Ashe back in 1968.

And his thing was, you know, the African American community or people of color really can start to excel in sports, but in order for them to actually move up in the world, to move their social status up, they have to have an educational component to come with it.

So they started the NJTLs back then in New York Tennis and Learning, to make sure that the children who were taking place in-- taking part of these programs were educated, well-educated, and then also had tennis kind of as the overlay, so that they could do both.

So I make sure that our NJTLs, the providers that we have today--one in particular, I'm just going to mention.

She's in Rochester, New York.

The name of her organization is Conkey Cruisers.

She provided a tennis event for almost 20 schools in the Rochester area.

She also offered a rap contest.

So the children would then rap about Arthur Ashe.

It paid homage to Arthur Ashe.

The winners of that rap contest actually had a chance to go to the New York Open.

I like to work with these organizations to help promote their programs.

I make sure there's grant money available for them.

And if they have great projects like this one, I'll be able to fund them.

And again, this is just all about expanding our reach in the community.

- How has the pandemic, this COVID-19 environment, affected the programming and some of the initiatives of the USTA?

- With the pandemic, we're seeing some explosive growth right now.

So tennis is really one of the best social distancing sports.

We have a 22% increase in tennis participation.

We have a 44% increase of new players picking up a racquet, which is nearly 3 million players.

And now that equates to about 4 million more people playing tennis in 2020 than in 2019.

There are 18 million tennis players in the US.

Approximately 1.8 million are in the USTA Eastern section.

And approximately 10% are African American players.

And what we're noticing is there's a huge interest.

African Americans are actually over-indexing and an interest to play tennis.

So that to me says that, you know, if there's an interest, let's make sure there are opportunities to get them a racquet in their hands and that they're on a court somewhere.

- Now what's the best course of action for a young person that may be a part of some of your community leagues and then wants to matriculate into college and hopefully have the skills to one day be the next Venus or Serena Williams?

- Absolutely.

So there are different pathways for juniors all the way up through college.

And that's what we're looking for.

We want those who, you know, those students, kind of like I was, right, to play recreationally, to then fall in love with the game and say, you know, I want to compete.

Yeah, so providing those pathways, we make sure that we're, even now, throughout the pandemic, working with those students.

So we have a lot of webinars and online training.

There's quite a bit of engagement from professional players in certain types of programs at the national level, where professional players will give the kids encouragement and motivational talks and advice and guidance and things like that.

You know, we work with different providers across the section so that they have a place to play and to practice.

So it's very important that, you know, we look out for our students and those children coming up because that is the future of our game.

- What does that feel like, as the Director of Diversity & Inclusion, to see black and brown kids getting into this sport and competing?

- It's exactly what we're looking for, you know?

Tennis is going to be a sport for life.

So just a couple of more statistics that I can share real briefly.

It adds nine years to your life, right?

So that's one thing that many people don't know, but by playing tennis three hours a week, it can reduce your risk of heart disease by 56%.

There are 82.1 million people who are inactive in the United States.

Four in ten are obese.

So when you think about our communities and hypertension, diabetes, heart-related issues, tennis is the ideal sport to get people out and moving.

And you don't have to think about it in terms of when you watch the U.S. Open and you see Venus, Serena, they're constantly running around like that.

We can start you slowly, right?

We can start with decompressed balls, a red ball, orange ball, those that don't bounce as high.

We can start you at the service line, which are those lines closest to the net.

And just starting to work on your dexterity, you know?

Just trying to build that coordination, hitting the ball back and forth.

It builds sportsmanship.

It builds character.

These are the things that we like to see the kids go through.

And then they'll keep it for a lifetime until adults.

That's how I started.

My mother was playing.

So I started playing shortly after that.

And like I said, you'll have those life-- those health benefits for a lifetime.

And that's what we want to see.

We want to not only attract and engage, but we want to retain, make sure we retain our tennis players all across the country.

- And you know, that's an interesting stat, you know?

We do a lot of conversation with health insurance companies here in New Jersey 'cause they're members of the Chamber.

I'm just curious if, as a-- if I listed on my application that I play tennis, I might get a discount.

- Absolutely.

- So I need to take a look at that.

Can you talk a little bit about your relationship with the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey and why that's important as it relates to our respective missions?

- I believe the foundation within the African American Chamber of Commerce, working with different businesses and corporations, will allow us actually to partner with you and to learn a little bit about how to manage a business.

So for many of our community tennis associations, that might be brand new.

They're basically running a business of their own.

So how can we support them?

How can we provide the guidance and the support necessary for them be successful?

For them to grow the game, so to speak?

For them to expand their membership?

For them to be successful in procuring the facilities to actually be able to get people on the court, where they can then bill them and then get the revenues from them?

How can they also fundraise and get sponsorships for their programming?

I think that that would be-- those are areas that would definitely support USTA Eastern in our partnership.

- Well, let's just talk about, you know, tennis, its evolution here in 2021.

- It used to be what they call, I think, the gentleman's sport, where you didn't see a lot of us in the game a long time ago.

And, you know, now we are trying to attract a whole new generation of players.

And it's very important that we continue to do that.

We remember seeing, you know, the Arthur Ashes and Althea Gibsons.

I actually had a chance to play with Althea Gibson when I was in East Orange.

They renamed Soverel Park, where I started playing tennis, after her.

And this was what I called my homecoming of sorts.

Because these were the courts that I grew up on, I learned on.

There was a 40 Love Club there that I used to play with.

And, you know, we played in that park.

And now they're renaming it.

And now I get to speak on behalf of USTA Eastern in her honor.

It was--it was-- it did something for me.

It made me feel like wow, the game has come a long way.

And now I get to kind of move that legacy on to other players, so the children there.

East Orange has tennis programs and there are after school programs and things like that.

So it was nice to see some of those children come out wearing the USTA Eastern shirts and just kind of participating in that event.

Because who knows?

The next generation-- any one of those kids could be in my spot, you know, 20 years from now.

And that's how we're going to keep the game growing.

That's how we're going to make sure that tennis is-- has a lively future.

- Well, David, I've really enjoyed our chat today.

And to our viewers, Mr. David Williams.

And I'm John Harmon, Founder, President and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

Until the next time, on your "Pathway to Success," thank you for tuning in.

[upbeat jazzy music] ♪ ♪ Today in my conversation with David Williams, we talked about the evolution of tennis and the diversity of tennis.

You know, at one time, you didn't see many Blacks play tennis, many Blacks play golf, but what has shown to America and to the world with the inclusion of Blacks and leveraging diversity in sports, in tennis and in golf, Blacks have not only competed, but they have excelled and been very victorious.

So the word today is encouragement.

We've got to stay focused.

Got to persevere, notwithstanding the many obstacles that come your way.

Blacks are still struggling to coexist in a meaningful, equitable way in the economy of our state.

We have been working very closely with the Murphy administration, advocating for policies and engagement that will really and truly impact a host of systemic challenges that have plagued the Black community in New Jersey.

We see a number of corporations responding to the call with some very encouraging opportunities for Blacks to serve on boards, commitments to increase contracting and employment.

And lastly, to put resources in underperforming communities.

You know, when this is all said and done, in a very cooperative manner, we will have a better state for us all to live, work, and co-exist in a more competitive environment.

I'm encouraged by what I'm hearing but I will not relent on our level of advocacy.

Thank you so much for tuning in today on your pathway to success.

♪ ♪ - Support for this program was provided by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, PSE&G, JCP&L, Investors Bank, Berkeley College, NJM Insurance Group, Vandiver.

♪ ♪