Practice character like you practice the game.

Hughes, Arkansas. The son of a coach.

I grew up in Hughes, Arkansas, the son of a coach and an educator. My dad didn’t just run practices - he built people. My mom didn’t just teach subjects - she built character. I watched them both do it my entire childhood, and then I played for my dad in high school. That experience shaped everything I believe about sports, character, and what it actually means to develop a young athlete.

Sport runs deep in my family. Sixteen family members played college athletics. Nine of them went on to become coaches - at the high school, college, and professional levels. Athletics was never just something we did - it was who we were and how we understood the world.

“Sport was never just something we did. It was who we were.”

Before any of that, there were the farms. My grandfather in Hughes had a farm I grew up on. My dad is from Mendenhall, Mississippi, and my grandfather down there had one too. From planting soybeans in Arkansas to hauling hay in Mississippi - that is where I learned what work ethic actually means. Not as a concept. As something you do before sunrise whether you feel like it or not. That is the foundation everything else was built on.

“From planting soybeans in Arkansas to hauling hay in Mississippi - that is where work ethic was built.”

I went on to play college basketball at the University of Arkansas-Monticello. Then I spent 21 years running a State Farm Insurance agency in Petal, Mississippi. Good career. Stable. Respectable. But it was never my why.

The whole time, I never left the gym. Coaches kept calling me - not about insurance - but about kids they were recruiting. “What’s his character like? How does he handle adversity? Is he coachable?” That question came up over and over, from coaches at every level, and nobody had a real answer for it. Not a ranking. Not a metric. Not anything verifiable.

“The coaches kept calling - not about insurance - about kids. That question never had a real answer. Until now.”

I built AthleteIQ because that question deserves one.

Not a snapshot. A complete record of an athlete’s entire playing career.

From the first practice at age 8 to the last game they ever play - no matter what level that ends on. Youth league. High school. College. Wherever their playing career takes them and wherever it ends, AthleteIQ follows them the whole way.

Their discipline. Their coachability. How they respond when things go wrong. How they show up for their teammates. Every check-in. Every season. Every level. The full picture of who an athlete was becoming - for their entire playing career.

I built it for the coaches who care about more than the scoreboard. For the college recruiter who has watched the film and needs to know what kind of person they are actually signing. For the college athlete navigating NIL, the transfer portal, and the pressure of performing at the highest level. For the parents who want to have better conversations on the car ride home. For the athletes - at every level - who deserve to be seen for who they are, not just what their stats say.