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(upbeat music) - Welcome to Business Forward.

I'm your host, Matt George.

Joining me tonight, Chris Reynolds, Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics at Bradley University.

Welcome Chris.

- Thank you for having me.

- Well, I appreciate you coming on.

We've got a lot to talk about.

Let's let's start with you.

You were born and raised here.

Is that accurate?

- Absolutely, yes.

- Yeah, you've been here a long time.

Kinda took a break, went did some other things.

We'll get to that in a second, but you've been at Bradley for the past six years.

It doesn't seem like it's been that long, but as I was doing the research, seeing a lot of success in a short period of time for Bradley University.

- It's been a blessing, it's been terrific and it's been fun.

And my philosophy on life is, if it's not fun, it's not worth doing.

And we worked with tremendous people, terrific folks who wanna see Bradley move forward And what's been really neat about it Matt is the community has been so great just in terms of supporting us.

And I've always been one to believe and I said this, when I first arrived at Bradley, is that I certainly can't do this by myself and it's gonna take everybody lifting and everybody has.

- Well, you've always been a team player anyway.

So you're one that doesn't take credit for anything.

You spread the love so to speak to your team and you're right.

People forget to have fun sometimes.

And you're in a business where even though it's tough, it is fun.

- Absolutely.

- That's right.

So any particular initiatives or happenings that stick out in your mind in these past six years that you've just said, yes.

That is something that we worked hard on and we came out on top because of whatever it is.

- Yeah, it's pretty simple for me and our team at Bradley athletics.

We see all the time that it's our business to develop the leaders of tomorrow.

And so we have over 200 student athletes, they do terrific things in the community.

Prior to COVID, our student athletes average over 3000 of community service.

And so these are things that people don't know about, they don't read about, but it's why I do what I do to see them develop and grow into mature young adults and have an opportunity to be very successful in life.

And for me, education is priceless, and so the opportunity to receive a quality education at a place like Bradley and then what they can learn through sport.

And so I believe that sport is a great instrument that can be used to teach so many things that help young people as they move forward in life.

They learn hard work, they learn discipline, they learn time management, they learn how to fail and get back up.

And so all those lessons are gonna help them to be successful as they move from the hilltop into what I call the real world.

- Teamwork, leadership, those things are, you're right.

I mean, there's something to be proud of.

A lot of student athletes and not just at Bradley, but in general, they don't get a lot of credit for the stories that actually should be talked about.

These kids have a lot of stresses on them.

There's the stress of their home environment, there's the stress of school and grades, there's the stress of winning and losing.

You talked about failure, but it's a toll to lose and then bounce back that next day.

- It is and it's one thing that I keep in mind with regards to my own personal life and I apply it also to our student athletes life.

Regardless of what happens to me and I've been very fortunate and I'm grateful for all the wonderful things that have happened in my life.

But I tell our staff all the time that yesterday ended last night.

And so it's over and then we gotta move on.

Good or bad, we gotta flip the page and we gotta keep grinding and moving forward and we teach our student athletes that too.

You miss a shot, you strike out, you've missed that putt.

You feel bad about it for a moment, but it's onto the next hole if it's golf, if it's tennis, it's onto the next set.

In life, when things don't go well, it's onto the next moment and you gotta just keep moving forward.

- Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned other sports and basketball because a lot of times a university like Bradley, they'll think Bradley basketball comes first in their mind, but you have a lot of very good athletes in all men and women's sports.

It's an impressive group of kids.

- And it's really important for me Matt.

I'm glad you brought that up and I wasn't intentionally just referencing those sports, but I'm the athletic director for all 15 sport programs.

And the thing about young people, they know if they're being slighted if they're asked to take a back seat through our actions as adults.

And so it's important for me that all of our student athletes get my attention and my time.

And I'm very intentional with all of them.

- Yeah, and you look at the success of some of the programs like women's basketball as an example.

You talk good leadership not just from you and your team, but the coaching staff.

Getting the right people in there.

But you also have to make sure that they abide by the standards of Bradley University or whatever university you're part of, but for Bradley, there's the expectation of grades.

- Absolutely.

- There's the expectation of being good stewards in the community.

- Yes for sure.

What most people won't know again, but something I'm really proud of, three of the last six years, our athletics department has won the all academic award for the highest GPA in the conference.

I'm more proud of that than anything because they're students and they're athletes, but they're students first.

And we do have a high bar for them in the classroom and we should.

- And very few people are gonna be like Marcellus Sommerville where he can play 12 years overseas or whatever it may be.

I mean, these kids go from student athletes to productive tax paying citizens pretty quickly.

- Absolutely, the NCAA, they have a quote that I love to recite.

They say that 99% of our student athletes are gonna go pro in something other than sport.

- Oh, I love that.

- And it's true.

Most of these folks when they graduate from Bradley, they're gonna have to go and get a job.

And not that playing a sport is not a job because it is a job, but most student athletes are gonna go on to do something that is not sport related.

And so that transition is not an easy one.

Because think about it Matt, for all of your life from the time you were five or six years old, you went to practice, you played a sport and then it's going to come a day when there's no more sport other than the rec league or something like that.

But it's just different.

There's no practice to go to, there's no coach.

And so now you're going to a job.

- There's no dreaming about it anymore.

Once you're done, you don't just sit there.

I told you, I'm 51 years old.

I used to play tennis in college.

I don't sit there and think about tennis.

I haven't in 30 years.

You know what I mean?

And so I know exactly what you're saying.

I'm going to get back to Bradley in a second, but you were a pretty good basketball player yourself.

So, I asked Shaun Livingston this and David Booth the same question, but in your opinion, how have there been so many great basketball players from our area, from middle Illinois?

It's unbelievable when you go down the list.

- It is incredible.

I really can't put my finger on it, but I do know that growing up, whether it was Proctor Center, Carver Venter, I would see the same guys.

And it was interesting, even when I went on to play college basketball, I would come home during the summers and try to get on the court and it was hard.

It was so competitive.

- And here you're coming from IU, right?

- Absolutely, but there were so many guys that didn't even go on to play college basketball but they were terrific high school basketball players, they stayed in the area and we had some battles on the playground.

And so I would attribute it to just playing outside and we played from sunup to sundown growing up and what you don't see anymore Matt, you don't see kids outside playing.

- It's crazy, I held off for years of letting my son get a video game.

And I said, "You're not playing video games."

And I finally got him one and he only plays baseball.

That's the game that he plays on it, but I don't let him play any other games, but he can't play until he's so tired from being outside because it's so important to get that energy out.

It's so important for that competitive eye, hand coordination all of that, but you're right.

It's a different era when it comes to kids right now.

- It's very different and as parents, we have to understand that that times are different and as young people evolve and have evolved, we have to evolve as well.

And it's really important that we adapt and we give young people what they need in 2021.

- But it's hard too.

It's hard when an 11 year old says, "I need a cell phone dad."

- It's very difficult.

They don't come with a manual.

- And it goes back to when I was in college in Illinois.

We didn't have cell phones back then and here you got kids who are 10, 11, 12 everybody's got a cell phone now.

- I know.

- I wanna talk just briefly about IU because when you played in Indiana, you played for Bobby Knight.

Do you ever just think back and kind of dream or reminisce and go, "Man, what a time I was at Indiana University playing basketball premier team in the country."

- I'll give you my candid answer.

I don't think about it much, I don't.

- Okay, well, that's fair.

- And it's really candid because I'm just so busy now.

But there are moments where somebody will remind me and we talk about it, but I'm just so locked into now.

And it's not my TV answer, it's just a real answer.

I'm just so focused in the moment and I just believe you have to keep moving forward.

You have to keep looking forward because candidly in my role, I'm serving 18 to 22 year olds and that age range never changes.

It always stays 18 to 22 years old.

And those young people, they don't really care to that played basketball at the end.

They really don't.

- Some of them don't even know who Bobby Knight is.

- They don't, most of them don't even know I was a student athlete at one time at Indiana.

All they're focused on is what can you do to help me get better as a person?

How can you help me in my sport?

How can you help support me academically?

How can you be there for me socially?

And so I see myself as support staff, I really do.

I'm here to serve and support our young people.

- I talk about mentorship all the time and I bring it up probably every show at least one time, but in a way you are a mentor to all of these young adults that are coming, I keep saying kids but- - Sure - You're a mentor.

You have now lived and seen so many different things.

Whether you think it or not, they're looking at you, they're watching your moves.

It's crazy.

- I know they are.

And it's important as adults, we have to be examples, we really do.

And so I talk a lot about education and the one thing I am grateful for is the education I've been able to obtain over the years.

Because when I talk to young people about the importance of education, I'm not just talking.

And it just lends a lot of credibility to the words.

And I can talk about what education can do for a young person.

And it's believable because it's sitting right in front of them.

- You've been selected by your peers to chair the 2022 and 23 NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament.

I knew you were on that committee anyway, but when you got selected, I sat there and jumped up for you.

I thought, you talk about an honor.

That is something you can hang your hat on for forever.

It's a pretty cool feat.

- It's something as I've mentioned last week, you don't even dream about it because it's just not on the radar.

- You don't know what it is.

- Right absolutely.

And what has really caught me unawares and I didn't expect is how others have reacted to it from the perspective, it's, "We did it."

It's, "This is awesome for Peoria."

And for me, that is so meaningful.

Because it's not really about Chris it's about our community and what it represents for our community and our institution, Bradley University.

And for me, that's like 10 times more special because of it.

- And actually knowing you, that's where I was going with this because you're not sitting there patting yourself on the back.

I think how many times Peoria and Bradley are gonna be talked about.

- Absolutely.

- And I've seen it on social media every day since it was announced, every day.

And that's special.

- It is.

- With the Bradley logo.

- Right, absolutely.

- One of the things that I was looking at is you played in a Final Four, you were part of the big...

I know you don't think about it, but what I was wondering is when you were part of winning teams in high school and then you transitioned to winning teams at Indiana and you played in the Final Four and I think you won the big 10 championship twice.

- Correct.

- What do you learn as you're growing into your positions from the game of basketball or any sport, but what did you learn to that you can actually apply it to the business that you did today?

- I couldn't imagine my life without being a student athlete and the things I learned in high school in college because I had an opportunity to play for the best of the best.

And you just learned the importance of toughness, being focused, being in the moment, the importance of having good teammates and team members and the importance of just doing it every single day.

And what I learned from my time at Peoria High with coach (indistinct) moving into my time with coach Knight at Indiana, I played on teams where, when we showed up in the gym, everybody was gunning for us.

We were everybody's big game.

And so you just couldn't take a night off.

And so I've taken that to the job, to my profession.

Once I graduated, there's no days off.

- That's right.

- And so every single day, you have to be prepared to bring your best.

And that's what it taught me.

And I had the privilege as a student athlete of being around Tony La Russa and Bo Schembechler and Johnny Bench and Bill Parcells.

I could go on and on.

They would come- - Leaders.

- Leaders, they would come and talk with us about the ingredients to success.

And you know what?

Matt, the messages were all the same.

It was just applied to baseball or football or a different sport.

A guy named D. Wayne Lukas who trained horses.

- Oh yeah.

- He came and talked with us about his profession and his role of getting up at four o'clock in the morning and just being in the grind with those horses and training them.

And I'm like, "I've heard this speech before but just in a different way."

- I mean that, I like to use the word grit.

And when you think about applying what you just said, that leadership, that focus, that is how Chris Reynolds got his bachelor's degree.

You got your law degree, you got your PhD because you have that competitive inside you at all times.

You said you don't take a day off, I get it.

Because what's interesting about student athletes and this applies to not every student athlete, but a lot of them.

And it doesn't matter whether you're a division two, one junior college is you have some drive in you that some people don't have because you grew up that way.

You play those sports and to apply that to business as you get older and as you get into the workplace, you do learn a lot.

And the one thing of being an athlete, a former athlete myself was, is I thought it was that competitiveness that you take that leadership role in certain things.

But actually it was more about honoring your community and appreciating and being empathetic and being that type of person.

I actually, the older I get, I put more of that into it than the actual piece of being a businessman.

- Somebody told me a long time ago, it's nice to be nice.

You need to just understand what it means to be a good human being.

And at the end of the day, it's not about what you obtained or achieved or received, it's what you gave.

At the end of the day, people remember you for what you gave.

And I'm coming back to Peoria, being a part of Bradley University and the surrounding community gave me an opportunity to give something back.

And that is what excites me, that's what gets me up every single morning, because I have an opportunity to thank people for what they did for me.

Now I can give it back in return.

- Then you came from another great place, Northwestern.

- Yes.

- You were there too and a lot of the values are instilled in you there too because it's a good place to be.

- I've been at some special places- - You have.

- Special places- - That is cool.

- And what I learned is whether you're at an Indiana or Northwestern or Notre Dame, what I learned is that anywhere it can be special.

- Bradley is special.

- Right.

- And that is the one thing that I wanted to bring with me.

Having been all these other places, this is special too.

- Right.

- And I wanted people to understand that.

And I believe that if I've done anything, I've helped our student athletes and our coaches to understand, you know what?

We're special too.

- That's neat.

You mentioned earlier about volunteer hours and so on, but that community engagement piece, it's become a strength of what you've put into that department.

It really has because you're talking about students 3000 hours per school year, but here's an amazing stat.

And this is a stat you don't hear, 70 to 80 plus non-profits.

- Yes.

- In schools.

And I can name five or six teams that I know of that have helped different agencies in town.

- Absolutely.

- That is what's special about it.

I didn't know where this conversation today was gonna go, but I'm glad it's going this way because that empathy and that compassion piece is really what this world is about right now or should be about.

- It's life-changing not just for the young people or the agencies that our student athletes impact, but it impacts those student athletes.

I can remember back when I was in school, we were made to go to middle schools and taught the kids.

And as a college student, there's a zillion more things that you would prefer to do with your time than go to a middle school, but they made us go.

And I'm so glad they did, because I still have a picture at home of me going to a middle school in Bloomington, Indiana.

And it was interesting, man.

It was a room probably about 20 kids and the picture touches me because there are probably five black kids in the class and I didn't realize this till probably 10 years later when I looked at the picture.

All the black kids were hugged around me.

- Wow.

- I walked in there with a shirt and tie on and you know what?

Those kids may not have ever seen that before.

And you talk about the ability to impact people and you don't even realize it.

- Right.

- And that's what our student athletes have an opportunity to do.

It is special.

- It is special.

I'll tell you a story, I won't tell you the team, but we had somebody come to children's home pre COVID and the team came and I gave a 10-minute talk and I told a story.

And at the end of that story, there were two young student athletes and they were in tears.

And I'll never forget it because it tells you a story within a story.

It tells you a story, not only were they affected by the story and it could be how they grew up, don't know.

But more importantly it is, it was the look in their eye of, "I'm meant to be here."

Them being, "I meant I'm meant to be here and I've got to help make change.

I'm going to do this.

We are lucky we are on scholarship."

That was the look I got and it was changing.

I gave a lot of talks just like you do, but every once in a while something will happen and you'll sit there and you'll go, "That was a cool moment, I'm never gonna forget that."

- I've had some moments Matt.

Our student athletes at Bradley, we had a young man who's in medical school right now.

His senior year at Bradley, this was a couple of years ago.

He came back and he said, "You know what?

I just came back from Mississippi and I went to Mississippi to make a difference."

And he talked about how he was talking with some folks there just about race relations and he was telling his story and stories about his family, his grandparents and he came back to me and shared with me how that impacted him, but it impacted the people who he was talking with.

And this was a white young man.

And it really touched me in that we all have the ability to make a difference.

One person at a time, one conversation at a time.

And it so impacted me I shared it with staff and student athletes this past year, how whether that's your thing, that may not be your thing.

It may be cancer research or how to fight that disease or whatever it might be- - Whatever it might be.

- Homelessness, it could be anything, but find your thing and do your thing.

And over the past six years, I've seen our student athletes, coaches and staff find something that really affected them or touched them on a personal level and go out into this community and make a difference in that area.

- Yeah, and it's interesting you say that because I've said this to a lot of shows and I had a speech earlier today that I gave and I said, "It is our job no matter what anybody else thinks."

this is my opinion.

"It is our job to take care of our communities."

- Yes it is.

- And we have an obligation to do that.

Whether you like it or not or whether you think you're not a role model, somebody who's always got their eyes on you.

And in your position, there's a lot of people that have their eyes on you at all times.

And a lot of them are those 200 student athletes that you have and they look up to you and you appreciate that.

- Absolutely and the thing I get to do every single day, I get to love all these kids just the same- - That's awesome.

- All of them.

- That's cool.

Different backgrounds, socially, economically, some lived on one side of the tracks, some live on the other side of the tracks, some came from suburbia, some come from inner city, but you get the love them all the same.

- I agree with you and it's pretty cool.

This show went fast.

I think you and I could probably do about five different shows because you're making a difference.

I'm glad you're back in Peoria, you and your wife and kids.

You've got a great family.

I'd like to thank you for what you do for the community and all of the coaches and athletes.

Great stories, we appreciate it.

I'm Matt George and this is another episode of Business Forward.

(upbeat music) - Thank you for tuning in to Business Forward brought to you by PNC.